Piggy Backing on a Previous Post

I posted before about letting our children be their own people. Craftymama has been reading this book about What every parent should know about schools - and I read a chapter of it last night, and was not surprised, but reaffirmed in a lot of things that were mentioned.

One of the quotes that stood out to me was:

"Our lack of trust in our children points to something even deeper - our over-identification with them. "My child is an extension of myself. If they look bad, I look bad. Their performance is a reflection of my parenting""

We don't trust our children, as a society, to pick their own direction, their own educational paths, their own activities - if any. Instead, we thrust them into a building for 8 hours a day for forced education on facts that don't really matter to them, that they will never use, and will forget as soon as it's not needed anymore.

When they do poorly at school, we are embarrassed to tell our family, we shame our children, we may even blame ourselves for not pushing them hard enough, not spending enough time on homework or goodness knows what other reason we, as parents, will find to blame ourselves for. When they do well, we sing their praises - we tell people, we congratulate them - whether or not their good performance was indicative of actual effort or merely luck. We teach them, by our own reactions, that their value as both a student and as a person comes when they perform to a certain set of standards and give the answers that are expected. Their worth as individuals should not come down to whether or not they can regurgitate information onto a sheet of paper, their worth as a person should come down to more intrinsic values (kindness, empathy, compassion, honesty etc) and children cannot and will not learn that if they are not given the opportunity to.

I trust my children to learn these values. I also trust them to fail - which is something very personal I hope to touch on soon here. I trust them to learn the things they need to learn to succeed in life. They are their own people, they are not extensions of me. I may guide them, I may assist them, I may nurture them - but at the end of the day they have to be able to stand on their own two feet.