STEPPING TO THE BEAT OF A DIFFERENT DRUM

In an interview with the Boston Globe, actress Keira Knightly talked about being drawn to imperfect faces, remembering that her mum always said “Blessed imperfections.” I love that concept, especially when it comes to validating the uniqueness of children pressed by society and their peers to “fit in.” I’ve always tried to encourage my kids to step to their own beat, accepting that the attributes that make them  different are what also make them special. (This is especially helpful when you have offbeat, quirky kids, like I do.) It is tricky, helping children value qualities that set them apart, especially those that can be somewhat off-putting to kids their own age. But some of those “blessed imperfections” that are so challenging to parent (stubbornness, conviction, fierce loyalty…) are character traits that can, if properly tempered by balance and perspective, serve them brilliantly into adulthood. So I’ve tried to treasure them even as I’ve had to develop strategies to survive them…

With the beginning of each school year, kids have the opportunity to reinvent themselves

WHEN I HAVE KIDS I WILL NEVER...

Remember all those self-righteous pronouncements "we" were prone to make about parenthood and the things we would never do when we had kids -- until we actually had the squirts running underfoot and knew better? My sister just sent me a link to Amy Morrison's hilarious blog entry with a list of her best "aha" hypocrisy moments. Even though my sister and I are both empty nesters now, this little gem really hit home.

TARGETED RANDOMNESS

After Monday’s bombing at the Boston Marathon, my high school senior has been anxious about venturing out too far from home. Even though she hasn’t been pouring over newspaper accounts and video footage, she’s really taken this to heart with it having hit so close to home. It’s not just empathy for the victims and anger toward the cowards who perpetrated such violence, emotions we all surely share. For teens especially, who are too old not to be touched but too young to fully process, an event like this is especially confounding and troubling. This kind of terrorism reflects a unique combination of targeted malice and randomness. While one ponders the nature of evil and hate, there’s also the realization, “That could have been me.”

My own response is to carry on –  refuse to be cowed, “living well is the best revenge.” But for kids who might need some thoughtful parental intervention, “Psychology Today” offers some excellent thoughts.

Talking to your kids about tragedy...

BYSTANDER

I love this provocative new seven-minute video coming out of New Zealand that asks us to consider a disturbingly common scenario from a different viewpoint. It follows a young woman caught up in group of partiers becoming more and more drunk as the night goes on, while a young man bides his time until he thinks he can move in and take advantage of her incapacitation to get lucky. It ends back at her apartment as she is about to get sexually assaulted.

But then it rewinds and asks “Who Are You” in this picture? As it examines the various bystander roles in the scenario – friend, roommate, bartender, stranger – it urges us to think about the assault in a different way. It doesn’t focus on why it happened, but on how it could have been prevented at several points along the way. Instead of castigating the predatory man or the young woman who gets carried away and has way too much to drink, it asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of any of several people who could have stepped in and stopped what was happening, becoming someone who helped instead of someone who just stood by. Show this to your teens…. 

A NEEDED RESPONSE

Just the description in a Joanna Weiss’s Globe editorial today brought tears to my eyes. It’s a heartwarming 25-second video called “A Needed Response” by University of Oregon sophomore Samantha Stendahl that beautifully counteracts the “rape culture” of the Steubenville, Ohio tragedy, responding to the assumption that a young girl’s victimization was simply the unfortunate by-product of underage drinking and partying, as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrators. Stendahl’s video, now up to almost a million and a half views, shows a girl sprawled on a couch and a boy with a mischievous grin saying, “Hey, bros, check who passed out on the couch. Guess what I’m going to do to her?” He then puts a pillow under her head, covers her with a blanket, places a cup of tea next to her, and gently pulls her hair out of her face before turning back to the camera to say, “Real men treat women with respect.” This brief vignette with its pithy little tag line encapsulated what I’ve been telling my two daughters since early childhood – treat people with respect, and expect to be treated in kind. It seems so simple, so commonsensical that we instill in our children the basic values of human dignity and kindness. How has that gotten so lost along the way?

LEARNING FROM MISTAKES

When the top golfer in the world Rory McIlroy walked off the course in the middle of the Honda Classic not too long ago, he caused quite the kerfluffle. While he tried to excuse his surrender to the pain of a severe toothache, critics suspected he gave up due to his dismal early performance. In his Boston Globe column, “Etiquette at Work,” Peter Post makes the excellent point that McIlroy compounded the bad example of quitting mid-tournament by trying later to excuse it, rather than simply owning up to the unprofessional behavior (which, to his credit, McIlroy later did). Post suggests three steps for handling situations in which we have made a mistake, steps that can be invaluable advice to children as well, and to which I’ve added a some thoughts of my own:

1) Admit the mistake and apologize.

2) Take responsibility and try to address some kind of restitution, if possible.

3) Take a moment to consider what can be learned from the mistake.

4) Move on and commit to do better.

Reframing mistakes as opportunities from which to learn and grow can help kids – and adults – internalize the power of acceptance, resilience and fortitude. As James Joyce said, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”

EMPATHY...WITH THE DEVIL?

I just got back from a “Good Work Conference” on “Developing Responsible, Caring, & Balanced Youth,” where I sat on a panel exploring empathy. What is empathy and how do we foster it in our children? Moderator Richard Weissbourd noted that while one of the standard definitions of empathy is being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it might not be empathy unless some moral value is attached. For example, salesmen and con men are often quite adept at being able to see things from another’s perspective, but if that only leads to manipulation as opposed to a sense of genuine emotional kinship, it’s not necessarily what we are looking to foster. (He mentioned how kids persuade one another to have sexual activity by knowing the right buttons to push.)