Sage Thinking: What Makes Kids Happy?

My wife and I both work in education. She is an English Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in English at a large University. I am Head of a small K-8 independent elementary school. The following are two stories to illustrate the trends we see in modern parenting. See if you can guess which institution these stories come from, minor details have been altered to protect anonymity.

1. A mother shows up at the main office and demands that a teacher allow her son to retake a test. Her son had received a failing grade on the test for which he had clearly not prepared. The mother claimed that her son was struggling with health and anxiety issues and, as a result, should be given another chance to improve his grade. Prior to the mother coming to the school office, the student had never talked to the teacher about this grade or mentioned anything about illness or anxiety.

2. A father shows up at the main office and demands that his daughter never—for as long as she attends the school—be placed in a class with a certain other student. This student had made unkind comments about his daughter’s shoes and the daughter had told her father that she could not possibly tolerate being in the same class with this other student because she was such a “bully.” The father said that if this demand were not met, he would have no other choice but to withdraw his daughter from the institution. The father declared loudly, “If you cannot make this happen, I am so done with this place.”

Perhaps you have guessed. In story #1 the mother was advocating for her 24-year-old graduate student and in story #2, the father was defending his 8-year-old 3rd grader. In both cases the parent was attempting to rescue the child from an unpleasant experience. Of course, all of us would like to make our kids’ lives as pleasant as possible, but is that always the right thing to do?

When I think back on my childhood, I cannot conclude that I would be a better person if my parents had not granted me the freedom to face and then overcome adversity. Granted, I had a pretty cushy childhood in upper middle class suburbia. There were those times, however, when things did not go my way, when I faced difficulties, when I failed. If my parents had rescued me every time, I wonder where I would be today. Would I be able to bounce back from a bad break? Would I be able to form long lasting relationships? Would I be overly sensitive to criticism?

I am by no means immune to the impulse to be a helicopter parent. As the father of an adolescent, I know I have “rescued” when I shouldn’t have and over-parented and over praised at times. I hope that I am getting better at letting go. It helps me to think back to times in my childhood or adulthood when I overcame an obstacle or faced a crisis. For me, these are the times I am proudest of and have given my life texture and definition. I do not want my son to grow up without ever having to fend for himself or having to face a situation that tests his mettle?

There have been lots of things written lately about this idea of overparenting. Lori Gottlieb’s recent article in “The Atlantic,” Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, and Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—And More Miserable Than Ever Before, by Jean Twenge, to name a few. But as an educator I have a front row seat to the consequences of this type of rescue parenting. It is clear to me (and Lori Gottlieb in her article) that children who are constantly rescued and never left alone to solve their own problems, are often the least happy people. Isn’t this the exact opposite result that we parents are looking for? Kids who do not develop the ability to solve their own problems (both big and small) can be anxious and uncomfortable. They do not build the self-confidence to walk into a new situation and know that it will be ok. They do not have the internal resources to feel comfortable with situations that are uncertain or ambiguous.

I want our kids to be safe, but I also want them to be happy. For this reason, we need to stand back and allow them to face some tough times on their own. It is my strong belief that happiness doesn’t come from being sheltered from distress. It comes from facing it, managing it, and overcoming it. Happiness cannot be given, it must be earned.