When Someone Else’s Story Becomes a Prophecy for Your Child
Another day, I was getting a call from my son’s school, where metrics are everything. And when I mean everything, I literally mean everything. The teacher was concerned that my son was not always listening, following directions, or putting in enough effort. Those concerns themselves were understandable. But then the conversation moved somewhere else.
“If he doesn’t learn to listen now, he won’t listen to his professors in college. He won’t make enough effort. He’ll fail. And then, when he gets a job, he won’t meet expectations, and he’ll be fired.”
In a matter of seconds, we had traveled from middle school to college to unemployment.
As a mom of two kids, with my older child in college now, and also as someone who was not an A student in school, I said to myself, Wait a second.
I asked, “Where do you get this story?” He said, “Because it happened to me.” I said, “So you insert your story, and I believe it was true for you, but we do not know about the future.” I did not want to be engaged in his anxious worldview: one mistake will cause a life failure. Rather, failures are important, but letting kids have a bad day at school gives them a space to tolerate disappointment, build resilience, and understand that life is not about perfection.
Another evening, I decided I would do my parenting duties. I asked my son about his history class; he said there is no textbook for it, which, for a post-Soviet parent, is so hard to understand, lol. My son said, “We just have to listen to the teacher to try to remember. We are not allowed to take notes.” First, my urge was, “Let’s open another textbook, let’s find another textbook, let’s try to figure out the teacher’s system.” But then I caught myself. I slowed down. I recalled my boring lessons of history, especially medieval history, at my school that I did not feel motivated to really study. Or I recalled having a history teacher in the 5th grade in the ’90s, and we did not have a textbook either, and it was hard to study just relying on the teacher’s lecture. I realized, wow, I am fine without this knowledge, and the world changes so much in just a few years. My son will be fine. He will get motivated when it’s time. I noticed a relief in the body.
As an anxious generation of parents, we are bombarded with perfection expectations: school scores, SAT, college, college of the dream—.blah blah blah. What if we first allow ourselves not to engage in this perfection race or this story: if you don't do that, you will miss that, and other scary stories another college coach will tell, or parent chats. Let common sense talk to us. Let’s recall that we are fine even if we did not figure out physics or chemistry, or figure out that science is not our path, or figure out how to study because it’s important to us. Let’s not let someone else’s story become the prophecy of our kids.
