What Not to Expect: A Meditation on the Spirituality of Parenting Named Best Parenting Book of 2006 by the Catholic Press Association

The Catholic Press Association looks for excellence in religious and spiritual publishing and I am delighted that they chose my first book with Crossroad for this honor. I am particularly proud because What Not to Expect speaks to parents of all faith traditions as it seeks a universal and common ground of being for parenting. I hope that my new book How's My Kid Doing will bring more attention to this first book. As my two sons get older, I realize the more the parenting path varies, twists and winds, the more my previously trusty navigational devices fail me, and the more I must embrace with humility the grand mystery of it all. I go back to What Not to Expect more and more often to remind myself that I will never have the answer or the one right technique as a parent. It is about relating to my kids as authentic, free human beings. Parenting is an exercise in plumbing the depths of love that challenges--each day--my stamina, my ego, my intelligence, my past, my emotions, and my character. In this way, parenting is a religious awakening. Most times I am not up to it; most days I stumble; you can't go on-but you go on. And then a smile, a moment of shared silence, a hug, a gleam in the eye breaks through the confusion and you know you are connected. These are moments of revelation.

How's My Kid Doing?

My new book How's My Kid Doing? will be published in September 2008 by Crossroad Publishing Company. It is available for pre-sale on Amazon.com and BN.com. The book documents 69 basic questions I've been asked over the years about sending kids to school. The questions were asked of me as a headmaster but also by fellow parents as we watched our boys and girls play in sports games and on playgrounds and on the beach. Some of the questions I have included in this blog. They range from learning how to read to the new math to getting into college. Please spread the word; I'm not sure that there is another book quite like it on the market right now.

Homework-How Much Should I Help?

My husband says that if I help my 4th-grader with his homework he’ll never learn to do it on his own and he’ll never learn from mistakes because I automatically correct them for him. So should I help with homework at all?

This is not an all-or-nothing issue. You and your husband just need to redefine what you mean by “helping.” The first place to start is with your son’s teacher. Ask him how he would like you to support your son academically at home. In general, you should follow the teacher’s lead because homework should reinforce the skills and concepts and habits that are taught in the classroom. If you deviate from your teacher’s intentions, you will only confuse your child and inhibit his ability to learn and navigate the requirements of the classroom. Once again, the answer to most questions about school and schooling is to forge a partnership with the teacher.

Why do teachers give homework? There are a number of reasons and for each reason there are several appropriate ways for a parent to help. Teachers give homework in order to:

1. Create good work habits: Completing a nightly homework assignment enables children and adolescents to develop habits of responsibility and accountability. A homework routine engenders the expectation that work does not end when the workday ends or the final bell rings. Successful professionals take their work home and put in thought and effort beyond 9-5 office hours. By just having a “home-and-back folder” in kindergarten, young children get used to the choreography and responsibility of bringing work with them. As the tasks and expectations of homework get more complex, students are prepared not only for the rigors of college but also for the professional lifestyle.

You as a parent can reinforce this goal by:

a. Establishing a daily homework time and place that includes a nutritious snack and check-in about what homework needs to be done and what the expectations are;
b. Postponing media time (television, computer, music) and extended playtime until homework is completed. Your child may need a break when she returns from school, but she should get to work soon thereafter.
c. Establishing a check-out routine, where a caregiver makes sure that the work is done before the child moves on to another activity;
d. Establishing a packaging procedure in which the completed homework is neatly filed in a backpack so that it will not be forgotten the next morning;
e. Doing your own homework alongside your child. Working together not only models good homework habits but it also mitigates against the loneliness and tedium often associated with homework.

2. Reinforce previously taught concepts and skills: Repetition is the key to learning. Many textbooks now use the “spiraling” technique where skills are continually revisited. In my day, a subject was organized like a stairway-once you “covered” one chapter you stepped up to the next. This purely linear approach did not allow for review and did not allow students who did not understand something the first time to ever master it. Homework assists teachers and students by giving kids the chance to practice what they know or to understand what they don’t quite get. Homework allows kids to “spiral” back over the day’s work.

You can reinforce this homework goal by:

a. Checking for understanding before and after your child completes the assignment. You can do this by creating some of your own questions based on the skills and concepts she is learning. You can also check the homework itself. When your daughter gets one wrong, don’t give her the answer. Just circle it and have her do it again on her own.
b. Teaching for understanding. If your child is having a difficult time with a skill, try to teach her on your own and then have her attempt the homework.
c. Incorporating the lesson into family activities. This is harder to do than it is to suggest. But, say your son is studying his addition facts. When he helps you set the table, have him add up the number of forks and knives. If he is studying the American Civil War, try to relate some of the historical lessons to current events when you are having a conversation driving him to school.

3. Introduce new concepts before they are taught: Sometimes teachers will preview new material by assigning it for homework. This technique is the opposite of spiraling and repetition, but it can be just as effective. It may be frustrating to the student, though, because he will have to struggle through an assignment for which he is unprepared. Remember that struggling is the point; sometimes we learn best when we have to wrestle with a concept or idea.

You can help with this homework goal by:

a. Letting your child struggle. I know it is hard to watch your kid get frustrated, but sometimes you need a little pain to break through to a new understanding. Under no circumstances should you break down and do the assignment for him.
b. Intervening with hints and tips, just don’t give the answer.
c. Stopping the process when the frustration level gets too overwhelming. Communicate what happened to the teacher the next day.

4. Teach how to organize and execute long-term projects: As your children get older, they will be given more assignments that are due over a period of time. Projects are assignments like term papers or science fair exhibits or poetry anthology compilations or class presentations. A project is not due the next day, but work must be done on it on a daily basis.

You can help with projects by:

a. Creating a timeline with your child and reducing the project into discrete chunks to be completed in an orderly process;
b. Checking in on a daily basis that your child is methodically working through the timeline;
c. Providing necessary materials for the project;
d. Brainstorming ideas;
e. Questioning the child about decisions he’s made concerning the project or his line of argumentation;
f. Resisting making or writing the project on your own.

I hope that this outline describes the difference between helping your child with his homework and actually doing it for him. Perhaps, we should abandon the phrase “homework help” and replace it with “homework support or management.” If your kids screamed “Mom, I need support with my homework!”” instead of “Mom, will you help me with my homework?” the whole issue of homework would be a little clearer.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book "Whatever Happened to Recess?" published by Crossroad Publishing.

Raising Children and Training Horses: Are They The Same?

I recently attended a meeting of independent elementary school headmasters in out west. One evening, we were bused to a ranch for a demonstration by a horse whisperer, an old cowboy who explained the “humane” methods he used to break horses. The goal is to create a trusting relationship with the horse so that you can saddle and ride him and he will never turn on you or kick you when you fall. He declared that this is also the right way to teach children: just as he was doing with the frightened, bucking steed, we should also give children choices, provide boundaries, and, above all, create trust so that they will submit to you.
Fifty-nine headmasters nodded their heads in agreement and muttered things like “so true, so true.” I feared that my colleagues were not taking the demonstration as a simile, understanding that training horses and teaching children are two separate paradigms with some things—but not every thing—in common. I saw them appreciating the event as a full metaphor, that is, as an absolute comparison. We should be cautious of educational metaphors, for metaphors can be powerful. The really apt ones break our habits and neat categories of thought.
I realized that this horse-whisperer metaphor is how most “good” schools tend to deal with their students. Having choices implies freedom, yet despite the soothing words of the cowboy, the horse did not have a real choice, but a false one between isolation or surrender. Coercion is still coercion no matter how nice the coercer. Is this what headmasters thought they were doing as good, enlightened school leaders? Are they just the good cops with the same goals as the bad cops, namely conformity and cooperation, obedience and submission? Whatever happened to education as a mode of liberation, true to the etymology of the word—to be lead out, into the light?
On the bus ride home, as the others gushed, I asked if they saw danger in making such a complete identification between training a horse and teaching a child. Beware the metaphors you choose, I said, for they will dictate how you operate. If you must find a metaphor for education in the culture of a ranch, wouldn’t it be more interesting to ruminate on the rancher-writer Gretel Ehrlich’s reverential thoughts on work animals. I happened to have one of her books in my backpack and began to read: “Living with animals makes us redefine our ideas about intelligence. Horses are as mischievous as they are dependable. Stupid enough to let us use them, they are cunning enough to catch us off guard. We pay for their loyalty: they can be willful, hard to catch, dangerous to shoe, and buck on frosty mornings. In turn, they’ll work themselves into a lather cutting cows, not for the praise they’ll get but for the simple glory of out dodging a calf or catching up with an errant steer.” Now, isn’t that, I concluded, a less reductive, more complex and respectful picture of horses, and maybe children too?
The next morning, the president of the headmasters’ organization, in her opening remarks, reflected on the previous evening, stating that she was training a new puppy at home, which was really the same process, she now realized, as raising her children. I groaned, and later that afternoon, decided to resign my membership with the organization.
I left the conference early and roamed around the state for a while, thinking about how the crisis in school leadership is really about locating critical thinkers who are willing to eschew more lucrative careers in favor of challenging our society’s past solutions to educational problems. As I drove, I glimpsed a family of moose, grazing and nuzzling, and I just watched them in the early evening until they moved on to higher ground.

Supernanny Sarcastic Advice Not So Super

It saddens me how easy it is to find examples of the popular parent advice industry treating kids like puppies who need to learn how to heel (instead of heal.) Consider the bestselling book ASK SUPERNANNY: WHAT EVERY PARENT WANTS TO KNOW by Jo Frost (Hyperion, 2006). In the December, 2006 edition of PEOPLE, Ms. Frost publishes an excerpt from her book with the headline: "How To Stop Your Child From Whining: Toddler-taming tips from TV's whip-'em-into-shape Supernanny."
I almost do not have to comment on the degrading tone of the headline. Its violent and unloving language speaks for itself. Our children do not need to be tamed; they need to be educated, which literally means "to lead out." They do not need to be whipped into shape, they need to be molded and guided with consistent and loving discipline.

Ms. Frost's advice about how to stop whining is to make fun of your child. She says, "Copy her whining tone of voice. Kids often collapse in giggles if you play their behavior back to them in an animated way." So the Supernanny's advice is to mock and ridicule. In my years as headmaster, if a teacher ever used this technique, he or she would be instantly let go. All children are sensitive, and they lack a sense of irony until they get much older. Sarcasm never, ever works; indeed, I feel it is a form of abuse until they develop a cognitive maturity, which usually doesn't happen until their teenage years. When I met with my faculty at the start of the school year, we would have a "spring training" of sorts where we practiced the fundamentals of sound teaching and child care. One of these fundamentals was "No sarcasm, ever!"

Again, if you meet a parenting expert on the road of life, avoid him or her. Please do not follow the supernanny's advice when it comes to whining. Instead, relate to your child as a fellow human being. Tell her what effect the whining has on you. Appeal to her innate compassion. Set up parameters of what you will and will not respond to and strictly follow them. Just don't make fun of your kids. Treat them as you would wish to be treated.

The resident parenting expert on the Today Show, Dr. Ruth Peters, suggests that bribery is the most effective way to motivate your academically unmotivated student. Says Dr. Peters, "If your child is not internally motivated to complete homework and to study for tests, don't fret--that's normal . . . What to do? Well, I suggest bribing them to complete their responsibilities." Dr. Peters lists four types of acceptable bribes: money, special privileges, clothing, and outside or electronic play.

See below for a full account about why this advice is morally offensive. Once again, we witness a parenting "expert" reducing a child to a means rather than an end and once again we witness the modern parenting advice industry treating the parent-child interaction as a transaction rather than a relationship.

If you have taken the time to develop a full and deep and loving relationship with your child, you will be able to wrestle with the problem of lack of scholastic motivation in a more sophisticated way. You will already have achieved an emotional foothold from which to explore the best way to help him. Lack of motivation may be a sign of a learning difference or disability, social issues at school, poor teaching, anxiety, a lackluster curriculum, or, yes, sheer laziness. Don't start with a reward system as Dr. Peters suggests. Start with your child. Talk to him. Study your gut too. You are connected to him in the most mystical and profound of ways. Talk with his teachers, his coaches, his pediatrician and other adults in his life. Get as much information as you can, develop a hypothesis, get more information from a specialist as needed, and develop a remediation plan. Sometimes, it is best to let your child fail for a little while and stew in the consequences of his own making, as long as you monitor the situation and keep him safe and intervene immediately when needed.

In other words, there are no simple answers to this question, so you must begin by authentically relating to your child rather than sweeping the problem off the table with simple-minded techniques. If you blindly follow Dr. Peters and other parenting advice specialists, you will miss so much about your child, some of which will be critical for his future.

Shrink-Wrapping Your Children: Parent Advice, Spa-Parenting, Recipes and Circus Horses Part I

The parent advice industry reduces children to the status of recipes or trick ponies or both. We parents are either told to add this and add that to produce a certain kind of child or to follow a set of steps to modify our child's behavior. Either way, the parent advice industry employs reductive reasoning, treats your child as a mechanism not as a free, unique human being, and never acknowledges that all children and parents are yearning for unique, authentic and meaningful relationships with each other. The industry completely ignores the spirits of children and parents. I argue in my book What Not to Expect: A Meditation on the Spirituality of Parenting, that when we use reductive logic on a child we have treated him immorally because we have reduced him to a means to our end rather than as an end in and for himself. The media does this all the time with children, and I urge my fellow parents to be aware of this and to point this out when they witness it. You can tell when your child is being reduced, literally shrunk into a bite-size package, when the parent pundit startes to enumerate. When parent advice is dispensed in list form or with bullet points, your child is being shrink-wrapped. Any segment of the Today Show on parenting and children does this. Look for it and when you see it, turn the show off. The producers have disrespected you, your child, and the relationship you have with your child.

Let's look at the latest issue of the glossy magazine, Parents (parents.com). The front cover of the November issue includes the headline TACKLE TANTRUMS: THE EASY WAY. Of course the word "easy" immediately suggests that the editors of Parents know how busy you are and how much tantrums are a pain and a distraction and they want to make parents' lives as stress-free and as care-free as possible. You could call this "spa-parenting" or "sparenting". The article is entitled "The Ultimate Good-Behavior Guide: Everything You Need to Know about Tackling Tantrums, Enforcing Time-Outs, and Raising Really Nice Kids." The title alone ought to make us morally sick to our stomachs. The child's moral soul has been reduced to a set of behaviors that can be programmed and the parent's role in moral education has been neatly outlined in 10 magazine pages. Written by someone named Donna Christiano, who appears with no credentials, we know we are in the hands of a child shrink-wrapper when we read her first section entitled "Taming Your Toddler." I shudder when I hear parenting experts use animal training metaphors to talk about parenting and teaching. It happens more than you think; be on the lookout for it. The whole parenting advice industry treats children like puppies. At least Ms. Christiano skips metaphors and just flat-out states that parenting is akin to taming a dog or an evil spirit--the accompanying photograph shows a little boy with devil's horns.

Turn the page and you get the requisite parent advice list. In this edition of Parents, Ms. Chrsitiano gives you a chart complete with a list of "solutions." Can't the editors of Parents see that to treat children as solutions is to see them as either broken machines or chemical mixes or subhuman problems. Human beings do not have solutions. They have spirits. They are mysteries. They are infinite complexes.

Once we forget this, we become cruel and inhuman ourselves. Look at what Ms. Christiano lists as one of her "Tricks to Keep up Your Sleeve." She suggests that when your child acts out you should take away the object that he loves the most, like his Teddy. First of all, whenever you see the word "tricks" in conjunction with parent advice, you know that your child is getting shrink-wrapped. Avoid that parent expert. As for this particular piece of advice, it is as if the editors of Parents never read D.W. Winnicot. Your child's special Teddy is a "transitional object" and it is her bridge to independence, love, compassion and connection. To even threaten to take away the transitional object only makes your child that much more anxious and distrustful and disconnected. Parents, tt is connection that makes us moral not by having our behaviors conditioned.

Parents be very careful and critical of Parents (the magazine that is). They do not treat your children as you would want to be treated; they see them as devils, as one-trick ponies, as pets who need training and taming. The metaphors we choose determine the way we see the world. The metaphors we choose for our children determine the kind of relationship we have with them. The kind of relationship we have with them determines who they will become. If everyone followed the advice of Parents, I fear for the society of angry citizens we will have the 20 years.

Speak Now - New Radio Show on Sirius

I was lucky enough to be a guest on the new Sirius Catholic Channel (Sirius 159) show "Speak Now!" with hosts Dave and Susan Konig. The new show and channel launch next month. I highly recommend "Speak Now!" to people of all faiths and/or no faith who are concerned about children and spirituality and morality and authenticity in an increasingly divided and chaotic world. Dave and Susan Konig are funny and down-to-earth but, at the same time, intelligent, serious, sincere seekers. I can tell that "Speak Now!" will become a national and international parkbench for parents to visit with each other, share stories and insights, and deepen their commitments to making the most meaning out of their relationships with the children.