rhaps you saw the article on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times by Frank Bruni lamenting the general decline in the ability of parents to actually say ‘No' to their kids. He had a few colorful examples of the phenomenon that we've all seen on the playgrounds in Manhattan where little Lawrence wants some goldfish. But it is just before dinner and Dad tells him he can't have them. Little Lawrence jumps up and down with a mini-tantrum, threatening more to follow, and Dad tries to reason with him… In the end, Dad shuttles him off to the side, whispers something ominous and little Lawrence walks away with a handful of… Goldfish. Right!
Not that we want
to go back to ye olden days, but these episodes remind me of our block in the deep South. Mrs. Doremus not only felt a complete freedom to
tell us “No”, if she saw us doing something she didn't like, she had no problem
disciplining us like we were her own kids and did it regularly. These days, we
live in a wider culture of “more, fast, easy, fun, and immediately accessible”.
It has the virtue of motivating us more positively but it is not surprising
that relatives without kids, like Frank Bruni, watch
too much parenting that looks like appeasement.
One way or the
other, what we are finding out is that personal will power and moral fortitude
are far more central to our ability to thrive in life than we imagined they
might be a couple decades ago. And when you consider that we live in a world
with an ever expanded set of choices and the freedom to do more things than
ever in human history, having the will to be self-directed is going to be more
important in the future than ever.
Back in the
60's, researchers at Stanford almost stumbled over this very important
discovery. They set up the simplest experiments with 4 year olds. (Roll the
YouTube Video “Very Tempting Marshmallow Test”).
I love the way
that kids use the time honored techniques of distraction to make the time go
by. Don't look at it. Slap my face. Too cute.
Here is what was
interesting about that original experiment. Only about 30% of the kids that
were offered this test were able to hold on for the full 15 minutes and earn a
second marshmallow. Interesting study, but then it was shelved.
But some
graduate student read about this many years later and decided to look these
kids up and see how they turned out. So they tracked them all down, now out of
High School, and they interviewed them and tried to draw some correlations.
They discovered
that the kids that exhibited more self-discipline in the marshmallow experiment
made better grades in school, scored a couple hundred points higher on the SAT
exam on average, had more friends and deeper friendships and were much less
likely to be involved with drugs.[i]
“Highly
self-disciplined adolescents”, the researchers noted, “outperformed their more
impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable. Self-discipline
predicted academic performance more robustly than IQ. Self-discipline also
predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the
school year, whereas IQ did not… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on
academic performance than does intellectual talent.”[ii]
Character counts
and it counts enough that it is going to become a much more integral part of our
educational process in the near future. Up til now,
we've treated it as optional, unless you go to private schools who have done a
much better job of incorporating it into all aspects of education, and that is
largely because almost all private schools started off as Christian
institutions and the Christians have made this part of the ethic of how we live
from the beginning.
Now that the
research is in, you will see it mainstreamed in the next generation.
Here is the
irony of our present divide in New York. On the one hand, our high standard of
living allows a really good number of New Yorkers to provide their children
with an incredible array of activities. Sports, camping, language studies with
immersion trips abroad, tutors, not to mention all the cultural enrichment that
we routinely take advantage of from the earliest years.
At the same
time, we ask of our kids fewer and fewer things outside of making grades and
doing the things one needs to do to get into a good school. I can't actually
remember the last time I saw a teenager pushing a lawnmower, not just here in
Summit, but anywhere in New York. A short generation ago, the majority of New
Yorkers cut their own grass. Likewise, I suspect that all of us would be
embarrassed to actually list the chores that our children have to do. A short
generation ago, the majority of New Yorkers also cleaned their own home and did
their own laundry. Nowadays, children almost never have a chance to cook.
Precious few of them do the dishes. Picking up their room for the cleaning
ladies every other week or once a week, is about it on the domestic front. No
one has time. Parents don't want a protracted fight over these things. We know
the drill.
And we give them
more choice and more power to choose with each generation, to the point that
Frank Bruni complains that all the Uncles and Aunts
in his Manhattan family run their own families like little democracies, except
that in real democracies you have to be 18 to vote. These families are giving
short people a veto or a vote on way too many issues. Typically, the kids
become very proficient and comfortable with what they want to do but not very
rounded because they only rarely find themselves outside their comfort zone.
So as these
children evolve into teens and college graduates, parents are increasingly
worried about their ability to live independently. Every summer experience,
every job, has been some enrichment experience of their own
choosing which is wonderful. But if you actually have to get a job where 25% of
the job description is uninteresting or your boss is a jerk, you haven't really
developed any skills yet to incorporate boredom or work around difficult people
to get where you need to be. I had a conversation with a friend whose daughter
him she was asking for a raise after 6 months on the job right out of college.
He says to her, ‘sweetie, have you contributed to the firm in these 25 weeks
that has so increased their bottom line that they would take this request
seriously?' She was blank faced. “Daddy, do you know how hard it is to live on
this salary?” Actually, Daddy does because Daddy did. But, “Little Precious”
has been supplemented her whole life and the non-supplemented life has a lot
fewer perq's.
And the other
piece of it is that our children grow up, at least in our own homes, with
precious few opportunities to actually fail and learn from it. We are so good
at guiding them and incentivizing them in our homes that frustration, set back,
and delayed gratification they are hardly acquainted with. So deep in the
recesses of most parents minds is this anxiety that should they ever have to
encounter real inconvenience, like when the job market really dries up for an
extended period and they have to change their original career track, parent
worry that they won't be able to do it.
Then there are
the students with way too much responsibility. I read their applications for
scholarships. I taught them at Rutgers. They are not all immigrants but the
immigrant story is typical. They move here at 5 and by the age of 8, they are
the main interpreter for their family because their parents are not educated
and don't really know how to get educated (one of the real limitations of not
being educated). I read a line that one kid wrote, “I interpreted the Western
World for my parents”. He probably chose the wrong word but I was thinking
about how it must have felt to be that kid, to grow up being responsible to
translate, understand, and help your parents follow through on all of the
things that parents have to do, paying tickets, filing taxes, signing forms for
school…(Adult things that he did as a child)
They finish
their studies every night with absolutely no one to help them with their
homework one single night, not because they don't want to, but they can't-
either they aren't educated or their language is simply not proficient enough.
My wife has these parents of 4 year olds in Elizabeth. They beam with pride
because their children can learn English.
These kids spend
their summers working as their enrichment program. They apply to college all on
their own with no one to edit their essays or help them prepare for the SAT.
They find the applications with the help of their guidance counselor,
fill out the financial aid applications all
by themselves.
I remember one
kid I had at Rutgers that was failing. I called her to my office to find out
what the story was. Long story short, she was working two jobs, nothing wrong
with that. Her parents were divorced and her Dad had returned to their native
country and she was supplementing
what her mother made to provide for her little brother and sister. That is just
way too much responsibility for a college kid.
It was amazing
that this kid got into Rutgers and I don't think she graduated while I was
teaching. There is just no way these kids can compete
with the support that other half gets.
But nowadays,
knowing what I know about character, about its importance in our lives, I
believe that they are going to make it. They have been forced to take
responsibility for their own lives. There is no safety net and they are
learning self-discipline and self-control because that is hard-wired in their
environment. They have learned to pray, along with St. Paul, when he says, “I
can do all things through God who strengthens me.”
They may not
know the material success of the American life but they will know spiritual
success in life because profound spiritual success means actualizing what it is
inside you and developing the character to accessing what is inside you is the
spiritual point of our lives.
Finding that key
to unlock all that is inside has helped some people become fantastic athletes,
which we see on TV all the time. It has helped other focus to build great
companies, like Michael Dell or Mayor Bloomberg. But it has also helped people
find their focus and fix things in our world that need an insightful breakthrough like Karen Olson at
Family Promise, right here in town, who put all our churches together to
seriously address homelessness. Or Kathleen DiChiara,
right here in town, who put all of our communities together to create the
“Community Foodbank” that gets wasted food
coordinated to help people in need.
Of course, moral
fortitude, unfortunately is much more important that starting and developing
important projects. It becomes ever more important in our life because we have
to deal with setbacks, with loss, with tragedy.
When you have
divorce going on in your extended family and things are falling apart, people
around you need you to step up and shoulder more responsibility and be a
constructive presence in the midst of difficulty. When your loved ones and
friends are dealing with tragedy and death, like all those people in Boston
last weekend, they need you- and you need you- to show up and go the extra mile
and be a helping, comforting presence. And when your spouse gets ill and their life is
now changed, they need you- and you need you- to show up and become a bigger,
different person now. And you can. You don't want to. But you can. “I can do
all things through Him who strengthens me.”
No, we want our
children to take responsibility for their lives, not to be overwhelmed with
responsibility, but we do want them to fail, to learn from their failures, to
become stronger boys and girls. It is more important than having a perfect
record or a near perfect image to project to the world, even if we can afford
to create that perfect image.
And the good
news is that character is a muscle that we can flex and make stronger. We need
to give them opportunities to do it. Trust me, this is
going to become a much more central theme in raising the next generation in the
near future.
Some of it is
not rocket science. I was reading a story about a guy that grew up in a
terrible environment as a child but became a very accomplished adult, taking
control of his life. He was surrounded as a child by drug addiction, that
terrible miasma of adults all around you high, manipulative, not trustworthy
and full of deceit. Naturally, people want to know how he turned it around, how
he became the exception to get out and break the cycle.
Turns out his
answer to that question is pretty instructive for what we now know makes for a
vital contribution that parents can make, no matter what circumstances you have
to live in. He said that from the time he was a little kid, his mother used to
tuck him into bed at night, stroke his head and tell him, “You are going to be
the first person to go to college. You are going to be a professional. You are
going to make us all proud.”[iii]
That piece is key and a lot of us are already doing
it. Bless them. I believe in you. God believes in you. Your family
believe in you. You are a child of mine. You are a child of God. Unconditional love.
And the other
thing she did, a simple woman, but she was on the right track. She was always
asking him these little questions. “What are you going to do today? What are
you going to study today? When will you be ready for your test?” Questions posed creatively and with the right timing, helps
them to take responsibility for their lives. It helps them to set short-term
goals that will become the foundation blocks for setting bigger goals. With
baby steps, we are always helping them take control of their lives.
Or our track
coach in college. He had these sessions where he took the long distance runners
through this mental meditation exercise. He would create an atmosphere in for a
guided meditation and he would have them envision ‘the perfect race' from
beginning to end, going over details during the race as to how they would feel,
how they would respond to adversity and challenge. Trust me,
Wake Forest was never the NCAA leader in long distance running. But my
fraternity brothers used that exercise for all kinds of things in life,
imagining the perfect way to take a test, imagining the perfect interview. The
bible says that when the Holy Spirit fills us, “your young men will dream
dreams and your young women will have visions” (Joel). Likewise, the bible tells us that “without a
vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). And our research is bearing out the earlier wisdom contained in the
scriptures that one of the elemental ways we can teach our children the meaning
of moral fortitude is for them to literally ‘see' where it is they need to head
next. We can help them to develop vision for themselves and they are much more likely to take
responsibility and develop the personal character to make that vision a
reality.
May you form your people with character in things small that they
might be ready when great challenges confront them. May
you call upon the Spirit of God to fill your life that you might be able to do
‘all things through God who strengthens you.' May you live
to pass the test of integrity that you can depend on yourself and become the
broad shoulders that others can lean on. In the meantime, “Don't eat the
Marshmallow”.
[i]
This comes from a book by Charles Duhigg entitled The
Power of Habit (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 131. Duhigg
went to Yale and Harvard Business School. His interest is more in the corporate
implications of the research on habit but he does an admirable job of
summarizing the consensus of the literature on the subject, making it easily
accessible without the pie charts and bar graphs. I recommend the book for
parents and teachers.
