by Ron Fournier
“Is this actually the real house?” Tyler’s right hand is in the air. He’s the only child in a clutch of 13 tourists.
“Good question.” The ranger raises an eyebrow, impressed. “I don’t get that one asked often.”
Tyler pushes. “If I had been here when Adams was 13, I would have seen these same things?”
“Actually, the main skeleton—the beams and foundation—is original,” the ranger replies, “but much of the rest is an authentic reproduction.”
Tyler grimaces. “Authentic? Reproduction? Those words don’t match.”
“Guilty,” the ranger chuckles.
I cringe. “Give somebody else a chance to speak, son.” I’m worried that he’s dominating the tour and irritating the adults.
“Okay, Dad.”
We file onto a bus and drive to the Old House, also called Peacefield, where I slip my arm around Tyler’s shoulders, something he hasn’t allowed me to do since he was a toddler. He lets it linger while we walk from a large second-floor study to a long hallway and parlor on the ground floor, and then outside to the Stone Library.
The Gothic Revival library has two rings of books: One wraps around a magnificent black-and-white checkerboard floor, and the other towers above and is rimmed by a gated wood walkway. The library holds personal papers and 12,000 books that belonged to John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and other family members. Not among the papers, but housed at the nearby Massachusetts Historical Society, is the April 23, 1794, letter John Adams once wrote to his young son, who had expressed a wish to lead the simple life of an attorney. “You come into life with advantages which disgrace you, if your success is mediocre,” the elder Adams wrote.
Outside the library, everybody introduces themselves. A white-haired lady, a retired teacher who stands five feet tall in heels, says to nobody in particular, “What happened to that nice young fellow with all the smart questions?” I don’t know whom she’s talking about. “Oh, there he is!” She points to Tyler. “When I didn’t hear you ask any more questions, I assumed you had left.” Her eyes narrow at me. “You didn’t tell him to shush, did you?”
I nod, and feel blood rushing to my face.
She said, “Why did you shush your boy?”
I shrug as she slowly turns to Tyler. Her shoulders are coiled, and it looks like it hurts her to stand; she winces in the pivot from me to Tyler. “I love your curious mind,” she says to him. “What’s your name?”
“Tyler.” He looks into the lady’s eyes and shakes her hand—two unnatural acts for somebody with Asperger’s. More progress.
Since his diagnosis less than a year ago, Tyler has begun taking social skills classes to learn, among other things, how to introduce himself, and also to understand how he’s perceived by other people. I’m learning, too—specifically, to see Tyler through the eyes of others. That nice young fellow with all the smart questions? That’s my boy. He’s funny and charming and sweet and blessed with extraordinary intellect that he’ll learn to harness—even if he does so in ways that defy my dreams for him. I need to learn to deal with those expectations. I don’t want Tyler to be like the younger Adams—stalked for life by the charge to “grow into a better boy.”
I love the first day of school. It’s a time of possibility and hope—a milestone, not unlike a child’s birthday, that gives parents an opportunity to mark progress. I never missed a first day of school. A particularly memorable one was September 2, 2003, when Gabrielle entered middle school and Tyler began kindergarten.
Gabrielle wore her hair in a braid and walked into her new school shoulder to shoulder with Holly, who wanted to show her sister around before starting her second year of high school. Then Lori and I took Tyler to kindergarten.
“See ya, Dad!” he said, walking into his classroom.
Lori showed Tyler where to hang his backpack and store his SpongeBob SquarePants lunchbox. “Love you, son.”
“Love you, too, Mom.”
Lori and I shuffled our feet and smiled. We didn’t want to leave. Surely he needed more help, or hugs and kisses. In a flat baritone that belied his age, Tyler told us, “You can go now.”
That evening I rushed home from work in time for dinner, and Gabrielle greeted me at the door. “I had a great day!” she squealed, throwing her arms around my neck. The five of us gathered to eat while Gabrielle gossiped about the girl in school with green hair (“Stay away from her,” Lori said) and another with a nose ring (“Stay away from her, too!”).
Tyler said he had a “great day” and told us about a blond girl in his class. “She’s cute,” he said. “I’m going to marry her.” He said he’d sat next to a boy with the same SpongeBob lunchbox. “He’s going to be my best friend.” Listening to her younger siblings, Holly smiled and nodded. She was a straight-A student, a good athlete, and a pretty, blue-eyed blonde. From all appearances, she was the ideal, trouble-free teen—so strong and confident, immune to typical teenage pressures. “I had a great day, too.”
Lori and I caught each other’s eye and smiled. Everything was perfect.
—
Of all Google searches starting “Is my 2-year-old…,” the most common next word is “gifted,” according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a writer and economist who studied aggregate data from Google searches. “It’s hardly surprising,” he wrote in the New York Times, “that parents of young children are often excited at the thought that their child may be gifted.”
Excited, sure. But, mostly, anxious. “They gave my 4-year-old an IQ test the other day,” said Laura M., a friend of mine whose son had just been diagnosed with dyspraxia, a developmental coordination disorder that makes it difficult for him to stay on task at school. Laura had invited me to lunch to get my advice. “He scored 95,” she said, dragging her salad around her plate.
I said, “That’s probably about where I scored on my IQ.”
“But that’s average.” Laura spat out the last word like a curse.
Intellect is no longer a gift to parents like Laura. It’s a commodity. If moms and dads had their way, genius would be a standard accessory; every kid would be one. We look at the global competition for jobs and pray that our kid gets an intellectual leg up. We’re influenced by pop culture’s celebration of prodigies, and we think, My little one is just as smart. And as much as we hate to admit it, most of us moms and dads still are tangled in our educational histories. If you’re an Ivy League graduate, you probably expect the same gilded path for your child. Universities play to that conceit by offering the children of its graduates “legacy admission” advantages. For the rest of us—parents like Lori and me, who graduated from second-tier colleges, or those parents who didn’t go to college at all—there’s a temptation to push our kids farther than we could go.
Part of the appeal of raising brainy sophisticates comes from Hollywood, where smart is the new sexy. Shows such as The Big Bang Theory, Community, Futurama, and The IT Crowd mock ignorance and celebrate genius. The Big Bang Theory revolves around Sheldon Cooper, a physicist whose arrogant genius is a running punch line. In one episode, Sheldon’s roommate, the marginally less geeky Leonard, wears an Apple store T-shirt for hot nerd cred. A friend says, “You were pretending to work at the Genius Bar to pick up women, weren’t you?”
Schools are where we house our hefty intellectual expectations. From preschool to graduate school, the American education system is an assembly line of angst—pressure on parents to prepare their kids for global combat, pressure on kids to achieve, and pressure on educators squeezed between competing demands: Drive our kids to excel, parents tell them, but don’t drive them too hard or, heaven forbid, allow them to fail. The result is a generation of kids who are both pushed and protected.
Push: The class of 2013 took 3.2 million Advanced Placement exams, according to a College Board survey of U.S. public schools, nearly double the 2003 total. Parents seek a tuition-free head start on college for their kids.
Protect: Parents lobby teachers to reduce homework w
orkloads, even for AP students.
Push: Parents demand higher education standards.
Protect: Parents punish educators for their kids’ poor grades, and schools react by artificially inflating grades and promoting kids who should be held back.
Push: Parents pay for expensive SAT prep courses, hire college-admission counselors, and strategically contribute to college endowments.
Protect: Helicopter parents hover at college, decorating dorms, wiring cash, and nagging professors.
—
Not that long ago, school was a luxury. Now it’s a necessity, which creates certain pressures. In the early 19th century, less than half of all 5-to-19-year-olds enrolled in school, rising to 51 percent in 1900 and to 75 percent in 1940 as child labor laws chased young minds out of the workplace. By 2014, some 21 million students attended U.S. colleges and universities, an increase of about 5.7 million since 2000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Meanwhile, the dropout rate among 16-through-24-year-olds had declined from 10.9 percent in 2000 to 6.6 percent a dozen years later.
My niece Anna was in seventh grade when she took her first ACT test for college, scoring a point higher than I did 30 years ago as a high school senior. Through the Duke University Talent Identification Program (TIP), Anna won a gold medal and a small scholarship to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, in her hometown. She and a couple dozen other young Einsteins were honored at a campus ceremony where the keynote speaker, Megan Chung, a 16-year-old alum of the TIP program, revealed how her “tiger mom” had pushed her to excel in school and at the piano.
“Parents,” Megan giggled. “I’m not saying you should force activities and grades on your children. Students, I am saying you should force your parents to let you do this program.” She told the seventh-graders to aim high. “It is never too early to start thinking about college. Remember, time is ticking away.”
Parents don’t need a reminder. They hear the clock ticking. I know a single father in Alabama who adopted a boy from Guatemala, now a seventh-grade student pulling down straight A’s. The dad joined the PTA, lavished the boy’s teachers with gifts, and equipped his son with thousands of dollars in education-related technology. Four years before he would take an actual college entrance exam, the boy sat for an SAT prep test.
“You’re going to get a college scholarship,” the father told the boy at dinner. “You’ve got to get a college scholarship.”
The boy excused himself from the table. “I’ve got a stomachache again.”
In our neighborhood, parents pay tutors $50 an hour to keep their kids in Advanced Placement classes. “If you have to pay a tutor to load up Andy’s plate,” Lori gently suggested to a fellow mom, “maybe he doesn’t belong in an AP class.”
At one elite high school in nearby Fairfax, Virginia, according to the Washington Post, a Korean math prodigy forged communications from Harvard and Princeton to convince her parents, teachers, and eventually the world media that she had earned duel admission to both Ivies. “We celebrate the accomplishments of students who get into all eight Ivies,” said Brandon Kosatka, director of student services at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where the young woman dubbed “Genius Girl” concocted her hoax. “If that’s the bar, then, yes, that creates anxiety for them.”
In Silicon Valley, the students are so hyped-up and stressed-out over grades that one high school has created a sleep curriculum, hiring sleep experts and training students as “sleep ambassadors.” Drowsy school children are a national epidemic: 55 percent of American teenagers from the ages 14 to 17 reported they were getting fewer than seven hours of sleep a night, according to a study in the Medical Journal of Pediatrics. “I’ve got kids on a regular basis telling me that they’re getting five hours,” Denise Pope, co-author of Overloaded and Underprepared, told columnist Frank Bruni of the New York Times. That endangers their mental and physical health.
John S., the Michigan dad I met in Lansing for tacos and beer, told me that his son recently had been expelled from a suburban elementary school for disruptive behavior. John suspected it was a ruse. His son has learning disabilities, and John believed that school administrators acted to eliminate a threat to their academic ratings. “This was real emotional for me, because I was a huge failure,” John said. “How…” He paused. “How is it that I send my kid to what I thought was the best school and they’re rejecting him?” His voice trembled to a whisper. “Dammit.”
What John said next was a testament to our era of not-so-great expectations. “If he falls behind now, he won’t get in the right middle school, which means he won’t get in the right high school, which means he won’t get in the right college,” he said. “He needs to be succeeding—now.”
—
The raw intensity of parental aspirations reverberates beyond the classrooms. Bowing to demands for better schools, Democratic and Republican political leaders in the 1980s embraced the idea of national standards and accountability in public education. Decades later, the nation’s governors and corporate leaders joined forces to develop what came to be known as Common Core State Standards, a package of goals, curriculum, and testing that would be internationally competitive.
The Common Core was popular at first, adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, but parents hadn’t read the fine print. For one thing, when schools shift to standardized tests based on a common curriculum, scores generally fall. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had warned that this would happen—lower scores are a price parents must pay for tougher, better schools.
Predictably, the first whiff of declining scores stirred howls of protest, and the once popular reforms faced an uncertain future. Duncan lashed out. “It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who—all of a sudden—their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” Duncan said. “You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.”
The terror of expectations—“My child’s going to be prepared!”—exposes parents to exploitation. Entire industries prey upon mothers and fathers desperately dodging what Duncan called a “gut punch”—the sudden realization that a child isn’t perfect, or perfectly prepared for the world.
For instance, the market for education software exploded in 2012, with nearly 50,000 developers cranking out computer apps that sing nursery rhymes to children, coach them to say words, and teach them foreign languages. Consumer groups have accused the multibillion-dollar industry of feasting on the fears and hopes of parents by peddling technology that often doesn’t work.
Elite day care centers and preschools boast of waiting lists that are months if not years long. Jockeying for admission often begins before pregnancy. Intensive student tests, family background checks, and high tuition fees all give certain day cares a patina of elitism that tempts lower- and middle-class parents to bolt from their no-frills day cares. Doing so will assuredly bust their budgets, with no guarantee of significantly better services.
The college-admission process is a “great, brutal culling,” according to author Frank Bruni, who exposes a consort of deceit perpetrated by colleges and college-ranking systems. In Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admission Mania, the New York Times columnist argues that the nature of a student’s college experience—“the work that he or she puts into it, the skills that he or she picks up, the self-examination that’s undertaken, the resourcefulness that’s honed”—matters more than the reputation of the institution he or she attends.
Even the journalism business—my profession—exploits prodding parents through stories that author Amanda Hess calls “parental hate-reads,” clickbait aimed at competitive mothers and fathers: stories about parents who hire $2,500 nanny consulting services, who enlist artist-babysitters at $5 to $15 more an
hour than the average sitter, who shift from high school PTA leadership posts to volunteering at the admissions office at the college their kid attends. “We hold up a new set of moms and dads for a round of public shaming (or, in the case of the first-person diatribe, self-flagellation),” Hess wrote for Slate.
Finally, the makers and sellers of attention-deficit medication may be benefiting from the academic expectations boom. The National Health Interview Survey reported in 2010 that 8.4 percent of children, or 5.2 million, had been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Those are huge numbers compared to 1980, when just 3 percent of children were thought to suffer from ADHD. Ritalin production soared 500 percent between 1990 and 1996, according to Peter N. Stearns’ Anxious Parents, which also catalogued the rise in academic expectations.
While it’s a stretch to say parents are doping their kids solely to achieve academic success, a combination of scientific advances and social pressures have created a convenient cocktail for indirect and unintended abuses. In a New York Times essay titled “Raising the Ritalin Generation,” author Bronwen Hruska quoted one of her son’s teachers suggesting, “Just a little medication could really turn things around for Will.” The final paragraphs of her August 2012 essay drew a direct link between academic expectations and drugs.
If “accelerated” has become the new normal, there’s no choice but to diagnose the kids developing at a normal rate with a disorder. Instead of leveling the playing field for kids who really do suffer from a deficit, we’re ratcheting up the level of competition with performance-enhancing drugs. We’re juicing our kids for school.
We’re also ensuring that down the road, when faced with other challenges that high school, college, and adult life are sure to bring, our children will use the coping skills we’ve taught them. They’ll reach for a pill.
