Alice: “Will you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to go.”
Alice: “I don’t care.”
Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
—Lewis Carroll
’Tis the season for parents of Grade 6 students to angst about their child’s next steps in school. This can be a parenting watershed: Who gets to choose a school, the child or the parent?
Whatever your answer, try this: Fast forward 15 years. Your now adult child is in a serious conversation with his/her fiancé(e) about the children they plan to have. He or she says: “My parents didn’t listen to what school I wanted to go to. I don’t want us to parent that way.”
Let’s not parent like that. It deprives our children of a potentially useful learning experience, and it’s not so hot for fostering positive family relationships in the long term. This is especially pertinent as our kids go through adolescence because, during that developmental stage, they take their distance from us anyway, and pushing them away is too easy. It happens every time we play the authoritarian card.
Sometimes as parents (around safety, for example) we have no choice. But when using our authority is unnecessary, it’s all downside, no upside. It builds distance.
The second undesirable outcome of taking all the power is that we deprive our kids of an opportunity to learn to be strong decision makers.
A family is a team, for better or for worse. The classic question that interviewers use to scrutinize wannabe MBA students is “how many gas stations are there in the U.S.?” They could care less what the answer is. They’re looking for people who will build a team to collect info strategically. They’re looking for team leaders who will grow and empower their people. Another word for that is “parent.”
So be a great team leader. Ask your Grade 6 child what should matter about a school. Make written lists of pros and cons of each school together. If your child stonewalls and refuses to participate, try a role play. Switch roles. Say, “Let’s pretend you’re the parent and I’m the kid and let’s have the school conversation.” That may be more fun and open doors to communication.
Let it be funny: you can pretend to be the kid and have fun hamming it up. Encourage them to do the same in their pretend role as parent. That playfulness has a wondrously freeing effect on communication. It will give them some “emotional slack” to then get more serious.
When your kid says, “What school should I go to?” say, “I don’t know.” Cultivate not knowing because you can’t know what the best fit is and because this is, above all, a teachable moment.
Life is full of choices; learning how to make them is important. In making this decision, your child gets an important life skill, and that’s what you want. As well, adolescents take better care of that which they create, meaning their academic future.
If you and your child reach an impasse, because you want academic excellence and they only want to be with their friends, remember this: what do they call the last guy out of med school? “Doctor.” Remember also that there are good and bad ways to disagree. Bad ways put you 100 per cent in the driver’s seat and disempower your child.
Good ways involve many conversations that begin with, “You and I don’t agree about school. Let’s talk about what matters to both of us and why. I’ll try really hard to listen to your point of view.”
If you get quiet, sit on your hands and listen really hard, the issue of who gets to win may fade into the background, and you may find that consensus appears by magic, born of that high-tech tool called communication.
