Parents who prioritize their children's grades

 

Parents who prioritize your children’s grades, you are being a piece of crap. What you should care most about is: are they happy and then, are they happy with you. You should see them as a life first, as your child second. A life of the present moment and all future years immanent. If you don’t have a good character, you will probably screw things up. So recognize that you don’t have a good character, apologize for it. And then try to enhance yourself through therapy.

Your thinking about what’s important is flawed. It’s not essentially a job or career. It’s your child’s interests and hopes. Turn those away at the beginning of her life and you will end up with an eighteen-year-old who has no idea what she wants to do with her life, who will have no sense of meaning. What matters is her delight. When I lived in Blacksburg, Virginia, late 1970s, working as a typographer at Southern Printing then at Virginia Tech, I met a man in our apartment complex who, when he was a little boy, loved to catch butterflies. Now in his late twenties, he was an Entomology doctoral student about to go on a world trip to catch insects.

Do you need to be my age (69) to have this deeper view of what being alive means? No. You can read it in a book. But you have to feel what you read. Parents are, plainly, the dumbest creatures on earth. Once, when younger, they lived in an extremely wide world, but now live in one constricted to the size of their defensive armor. Their ideas are their hurts.

I had a group teletherapy session with two parents and one stepparent. They were all concerned about their recently suicidal daughter’s failing grades, and wanted my input. I was discreet. “This is where therapy can be frustrating to parents,” I said. “While there are some situations where I’d be helping a teenager boost his academic priorities, that would not be important for your daughter now. Most important is her suicidal feeling, her life.” I think I may have changed their tune, or knocked them off track.

There are lessons in empathy, by which I mean consistent care unmoved by the child’s justified and dogged resistance, that can help a troubled parent-child relationship. The main lessons, you might learn by taking some long walks and looking inward at your history and its feelings, and ditching your stupid attitudes that have rewritten your history and soothed its feelings. Those walks were my best healing.