泡网俱乐部

• Glenn Donovan wrote:

I hope it goes without saying that American's shouldn't feel threatened at all by this. In fact, what is revealed in the article is how far behind the Chinese are behind us. A quick anecdote about my own childrearing and how it turned out.

I was always "narrowly strict" with my daughter. What I mean by this is that I had few rules (you can jump on the bed all you want, but you'd better look me in the eye when we speak, for example) but if you break one of the rules, you get punished. I also told my daughter that when it came to deciding how to spend her own time, that was her choice. No instrument was forced on her - she tried, hated it and quit. Same with basketball after a few years. What I did tell her was that as long as she got reasonably good grades (B or better) and didn't get in trouble, that her life was her own.

At the age of 15, my daughter had fallen in with a bad crowd. Now divorced, my ex hid her various transgressions from me, but it all came to a head one night and I was summoned to the house. I simply punished her until she began listening again. Losing the computer and the cell phone were not enough, so I took away her favorite clothes and that got her attention. Once she was listening, I then told her that she should think about how she wanted her life to go and what the consequences of her behavior would be for her, not for me. I got her out of thinking of us as the enemy by telling her that no matter what she did, her mom and I would be fine. That we would simply punish her until she was 18 and then throw her out. And that if she didn't start doing what she was told, I would go to Child and Family Services the next morning to get a Person in Need of Supervision petition, because if we couldn't control her, that since I couldn't physically restrain her, I would use the court and police to do so.

And I meant it. She woke up, and within 6 weeks dropped the dirtbag boyfriend and some troublesome friends and started working on her life. She began to open up to me about the hypocrisy she observed in adults and how messed up the entire situation was in her high school. Much of what she observed was accurate and I told her so. I then asked her who she wanted to be in the face of the worlds awfulness? Did she want to give up to cynicism or try and stand for something good and righteous? And that it was her choice to do so.

When time for college came, she was a solid B minus student. I had another conversation with her about what going to college was all about, something that apparently nobody in her world had said to her. First, I told her that nobody was ever again in her life spend 150-200k on her so she could educate herself and that this was a tremendous privilege. I told her that her job was to go there and find out what she wanted to do with her life. I also told her that if she didn't maintain a 3.0, she could move home and go to community college. I did sympathize with her that it was unfair for her to have to make such a big decision at a young age but that she should set that aside because there was nothing she could do about it. I told her I would support any choice she made as long as it was somewhat sensible.

So of course some college advisor tells her to major in Communications. When she told me this, I told her it was a BS major and that when I interviewed someone who had majored in communications, I assumed they were lazy and partied her way through college and that I wasn't the only one who thought so. She didn't like this but continued to search. In her sophomore year, she found a field that she actually loved. Btw, I should add that after about 6 weeks in school, my daughter realized that she wanted to do well in university for her own purposes and to open as many doors to potential fields of study and made the deans list the first and every semester since. Not to please me or her Mom, but because she started to see how good performance was connected to good outcomes in her life.

When my daughter called me with the news that she had found a field she loved, called landscape architecture, I was so excited. She was barely able to contain herself and went on and on about. Fast forward to 3 + years later. She is graduating with honors in May, holds several positions of leadership in student organizations about landscape architecture. She's just started her third paid internship and has a job sealed up after graduation with the same firm. She's top in her program and is so ambitious and focused that on winter break, she took a 12 day intensive design/drawing course that packed a semester of work into the 12 hour days with no break. On her own, with no encouragement or input from her parents.

Why do I lay all this out? Because I believe the point of parenting is to get kids to be responsible and intentional about how they live their lives. I rarely had to be mean to make my point - but was so every once ...