This is a book that I am looking forward to reading!
Reviewed in the New York Times "Well" Blog
What American Parents Can Learn From Chinese Philosophy
Christine Gross-Loh is the co-author, with Michael Puett, of “The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life,” from which this essay is adapted.
Here’s the conventional wisdom about raising kids in modern-day America. Teach them to know who they are. Encourage them to think big and to aim high. Show them how to play to their strengths and plan a route to future success.
But there is a better way to turn a child into a flourishing adult, one based on just about the opposite of everything we think we should do. This “new” way is actually very old – over 2,000 years old — and is inspired by the wisdom of Chinese philosophers including Mencius, Confucius and Laotzu.
Consider what they might say if they were raising today’s children:
This is a book that I am looking forward to reading!
Reviewed in the New York Times "Well" Blog
What American Parents Can Learn From Chinese Philosophy
Christine Gross-Loh is the co-author, with Michael Puett, of “The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life,” from which this essay is adapted.
Here’s the conventional wisdom about raising kids in modern-day America. Teach them to know who they are. Encourage them to think big and to aim high. Show them how to play to their strengths and plan a route to future success.
But there is a better way to turn a child into a flourishing adult, one based on just about the opposite of everything we think we should do. This “new” way is actually very old – over 2,000 years old — and is inspired by the wisdom of Chinese philosophers including Mencius, Confucius and Laotzu.
Consider what they might say if they were raising today’s children:
In a wonderful article that he wrote in January, Adam Grant argues that for us to develop creative children, we need to back off - not the easiest thing these days, but an essential one to do. I think his discussion of "gifted" kids relates pretty well to those of us who teach and work at schools where there a large number of hard-working and driven kids. As great as the regimented educational process can be, Grant argues that we need creative and artistic young adults, and to encourage creativity, a different approach is needed.
How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off
THEY learn to read at age 2, play Bach at 4, breeze through calculus at 6, and speak foreign languages fluently by 8. Their classmates shudder with envy; their parents rejoice at winning the lottery. But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, their careers tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Consider the nation’s most prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of science by one American president. From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential.
Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.
What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.
The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to codified rules, rather than inventing their own.Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves. In the language of the critic William Deresiewicz, they become the excellent sheep.
PERSONALLY, I BLAME IT ALL ON BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA.
In the 1977 Newbery award-winning classic I read as a child, Jesse, a lonely boy heading to fifth grade, befriends new girl Leslie, and together they fabricate a fantastic imaginary kingdom in the woods near their homes. Then tragedy descends (spoiler alert): Swinging across a gulley, Leslie slips from a rope, bonks her head, and abruptly dies.
My take-aways from this tale — the woods are dangerous! life is fragile! — must have burrowed deep into my psyche. Thirty years later, the thought of letting my own two daughters, now 6 and 10, wander unsupervised in the woods behind our suburban South Shore home fills me with dread. Perhaps worse, I’ve imbued them with my fears about the dangers lurking there: ticks, poison ivy, the occasional coyote (to say nothing of the darker ones I don’t voice aloud: heroin addicts, vagrants, child molesters). Now I’ve quashed their natural impulse to explore. They hardly ask anymore.
Despite the eye-rolling of our elders and psychologists bemoaning that we are raising “a nation of wimps,” I belong to a cohort of parents ruled by fear. Every mother I ask can recall with pinpoint accuracy a moment of stomach-churning panic when her child went momentarily missing — at a mall, in a hotel lobby, up an elevator, in the Children’s Museum.
Rather than abating with time, the checklist of parental worries has only lengthened as our children have aged, like pencil marks ticking up their growth chart: from SIDS to chemicals in sippy cups, arsenic in apple juice to hormone-laden milk, Lyme disease and meningitis and measles outbreaks, vaccinating, not vaccinating, concussions and trampolines, whole grapes and popcorn, school shootings and cancer-causing sunscreen, overheated cars and negligent nannies, boogeymen kidnappers and friendly neighborhood molesters, and always, above all, the judgment of our fellow parents for failing to be as hypervigilant as they are.
(Of course, it must be noted that all this hand-wringing falls under the hashtag #middleclassproblems. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, Between the World and Me, he describes a West Baltimore upbringing where “everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns.” Many don’t have the luxury of obsessing whether their children’s bug repellent is DEET-free.)
Anyone who has spent the last decade of bedtimes revisiting classics in children’s literature can’t help but be struck by this evolution in parental oversight. In the Little House on the Prairie series, Laura and Mary trek miles to reach their one-room schoolhouse. In 1968’s Ramona the Pest, Ramona and her friend Howie walk themselves to kindergarten alone. A sequel, Ramona the Brave, begins with Ramona and her older sister Beezus, now 6 and 11, returning from a solo trip to the park — an act that earlier this year practically caused a national panic attack and got Maryland parents Danielle and Alexander Meitiv slapped with charges of neglect.
As Hanna Rosen wrote in her 2014 Atlantic story, “The Overprotected Kid”: “It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s — walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap — are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting.”
So what, I want to know, has caused this change? Has all our hovering made things any safer? And what is it doing to our kids?
I am spending the summer caring for my children each day while my wife is working on a Master's degree. I have traveled up and down the East Coast with them a few times, putting nearly 3000 miles on the car, and on us. My wife calls them (and me), "precious cargo" so she tells me to be careful; which I am. I love my kids deeply, and I strive to make my love and my caring for them active verbs and not just feelings in my heart.
The task of caring for them, watching them, feeding them, changing their diapers, playing with them, creating with them, disciplining them is a large task. Also, it is something that is, at times, a heavy weight to be "on" with them for many hours of the day (and night), but it is a glorious weight, a burden that is also light because of the love I feel for them.
It is the most difficult thing I have ever done, akin to triple session practices (that is, three practices in one day over the course of a week or more) when I played soccer and lacrosse in high school and college but even those practices did not extend into the nightime, and we didn't have to change any diapers! But this "toughest job I'll ever love" is a blessing!
This poem was on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac today, entitled "Having Children," by Barbara Tanner Angell; it spoke to me about the deeply emotional side of caring for, and about children.
