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Whew, after three hours of wandering through the labyrinthine corridors of my daughter’s high school, I am pooped. Straight out exhausted. So many decades of experiences, especially with the corporate world, have left me completely unprepared for three hours of such single-topic attention. I’m much more accustomed to focused work on multiple tasks and then maybe half hour or hour-long meetings.
But let’s step back a bit. The parent orientation is a yearly ritual we have all solemnly participated in at the start of each new school year. This year’s orientation was the same as previous year’s run throughs, but it also claimed to be not the same. It was the same in that school administrators spent an hour walking through slides designed with a variety of styles (and yes, some slides even used fonts that, while not exactly comic sans, had the same rounded clownish quality as comic sans). And then hundreds of parents walked the hallways from classroom to classroom to learn about the curriculum for each class.
This year was different, however, in that the same administrators stressed that freshman year is a year where your children are learning their independence. As much as we may want to keep constant tabs on their grades (and online systems have made this maddeningly easy to do frequently), we should focus more on monitoring their progress. Your children are responsible for their grades, not you. They should be talking to their teachers when they’re experiencing challenges, not you.
This is an especially hard message for me to learn. I don’t remember my parents being particularly helicoptery, mostly because they had long been outpaced by the academic demands of an honors-track curriculum. So, I wasn’t actually raised with that mentality. However, I was always a goody, goody student who was always especially hard on myself. I was a perfectionist who didn’t mind spending long hours working on my homework. Naturally, I thought, if I had a child, she would have those same qualities. But that is not the case. I’ve written previously about how my daughter is her own person. And that is absolutely true. She is much more athletic and social than I ever was. I ran as far away as I could from any and all after school sports. I was so much happier alone immersing myself in faraway worlds as I read through a library’s worth of fantasy novels. She gets energy from her strong network of friends. She is adaptive and adept at calmly taking on new challenges.
My own perfectionist nature makes me want to help her by having her follow the ways that I would have studied, the ways that I would have taken on my schoolwork. But I have had to work hard to ground my own helicopter thoughts so that I let her learn how to advocate for herself, how to feel safe in taking risks and making mistakes, how to have a growth mindset.
It hasn’t been easy, but I think that I’m getting the hang of this freshman orientation. I’m on a learning journey along with my daughter as she navigates the turning and twisting halls of high school. I’m sure I’ll be a master at this by the time she graduates!
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