You always have expectations. I always say when you are pregnant, you have got this vision, ideal, of what this first child is going to be like. You know, brilliant and charming, you know, you are going to school and you are swelling with pride as the teacher says, “What a joy it is to have Margaret in my class.” And then a real child gets born, and the problem is that we are parenting on expectations, and that does not match the talents, the interests, the passion of the child.
As a parent, you need to be able to take out a piece of paper, and if you have three children, you have to be able to tell me five unusual, different things about each child. Because if you cannot differentiate that, then there is no way you celebrate that. You do not make each child in a family feel special if you are not looking at their special skills that they bring to the family. That is all about the expectations.
The most adaptive skill that children now are going to have to have going forward is loving to learn and being able to learn new things because the world is changing very quickly. So, instead of making learning pleasurable, there was yelling and screaming and pressuring and carrying on, and so learning was not becoming a very pleasurable experience.
The emphasis is not on A’s. I get hysterical if I hear someone paying for A’s. Because, you know, in your family, you may have a child that is genuinely gifted, not only gifted intellectually, but also a learner as the traditional classroom is, and then you may have a child that may be equally as bright but a different kind of learner, and that child is not going to be an A student. And yet, you want that child to feel equally as good.
Everyone is all caught up about private schools, and I am a big fan of public education because what happens is in your desire to do the best for your child, and you are a powerful, affluent, wealthy family, you can probably afford to apply some pressure and get your child into whatever “the name brand” school is. If your child is in “the name brand” school and at the bottom of it, where in another learning environment that child would be in the upper quartile, do you think you are doing your child a service to make that child always be hanging on, you know, with their finger tips? Not at all. You are better off putting your child in the environment where he or she feels good and thrives. That is your biggest responsibility during the, you know, K-12 because that is how we manage the expectations that are reasonable.