by Ron Fournier
Psychologist and bestselling author Madeline Levine upended conventional wisdom by showing that children from affluent families are experiencing depression, anxiety, psychosomatic disorders, and substance abuse at higher rates than kids from poor families. Privileged kids also are more likely to develop stress, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, an unhealthy reliance on others for support, and a poor sense of self. Their coping mechanisms often include substance abuse, self-mutilation, and sex. “The cost of this relentless drive to perform at unrealistically high levels is a generation of kids who resemble nothing so much as trauma victims,” she wrote in Teach Your Children Well.
You might think you’re avoiding this trap by praising your kids—telling them they’re the smartest, funniest, and best-looking of all children—or by shielding them from failure and responsibility. You would be wrong. Praise begets pressure. And it can be counterproductive.
In a typical experiment, researchers at Stanford University asked young children to solve a simple puzzle. Then they told some of the kids how smart and successful they are. The rest of the kids got no feedback. The children without praise were more motivated to solve increasingly difficult puzzles. They also exhibited higher levels of confidence and made significantly more progress on the puzzles than the group smothered in praise. “Praising children’s talents and abilities seems to rattle their confidence,” Levine wrote in a New York Times story summarizing the research by Carol Dweck. “Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one’s status as ‘smart’ and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes.”
The best approach, according to decades of studies, is to be what child development experts call an “authoritative parent.” These mothers and fathers are involved and responsive. They set high expectations but respect their kids’ autonomy. They are the Goldilocks of parenting—not too hard (clinically defined as “authoritarian”) or too soft (“permissive”)—and they tend to raise children who do better academically, psychologically, and socially than their peers.
The children of Goldilocks parents don’t get trophies just for showing up. They’re allowed to fail. A Goldilocks mother would never declare, “You’re going to an Ivy League school,” nor would she shrug and say, “I don’t care if you go to college.” A Goldilocks father doesn’t second-guess his daughter’s academic and career choices, doesn’t push his son into sports, and doesn’t fret over his daughter’s choice for a husband.
I was no Goldilocks parent.
—
Our eldest child, Holly, studied anthropology at James Madison University. Yes, anthropology—and it drove me nuts, because as I kept telling her, there are no jobs in anthropology. “Why do you want to be poor for a living?” I asked. This makes me fairly typical, according to Cynthia Edwards, the psychology professor in Raleigh, North Carolina. “This crowd of students is coming of age in a time of tremendous economic tumult. That would be bad enough for them,” she told me. “But they’re also dealing with hand-wringing parents.”
When Holly graduated, I urged her to enroll in City Year, a program that places young adults in big cities, where, for a small stipend and graduate-school tuition, they do public service. Born in Arkansas and raised in suburban Washington, Holly asked to serve in Detroit—a city she had visited three or four times a year while growing up, because Lori and I were determined to remain connected to our families and to the Midwest. Holly’s first apartment was above a bar in midtown Detroit, a gentrified neighborhood just north of downtown that had become a magnet for young idealists like Holly.
The bar was managed by Tom Flickinger. A bald, 40ish former construction worker from my old neighborhood, Tom was a politics and history junkie who loved Detroit’s sports teams. He was smart and opinionated, with a cup-is-half-empty take on current events. We had a lot in common. Whenever I was in Detroit, for work or for business, I would meet Holly in the bar, where she was a regular, and pass the time chatting with Tom. I liked the guy, but there was something I didn’t know about him.
He was dating my daughter.
“He’s what?” I said when Lori told me about the relationship. They had been dating for months but were afraid to tell us. An authoritative parent, Lori told Holly that we’d support whatever—and whoever—she wanted in life.
Separately, Lori told me to behave. She knew I wasn’t thrilled.
About a year later, Tom, Holly, Lori, and I sat around a small table in a quiet corner of a bar near our home. After dinner was ordered and the alcohol poured, Tom said, “I love Holly very much and she loves me. We’re talking a lot about our future together—about getting married. I’m sure you have a lot of questions about us. We thought it would be a good idea to talk about them.” Tom handled the situation perfectly, defusing our concerns with love and common sense. They married a year later.
I struggled similarly with Gabrielle’s decision to drop her education major halfway through her undergraduate work at James Madison. I loved the idea of being the father of a teacher—maybe it was the notion that somehow my daughter’s selfless aura would rub off on me. Instead, she wanted to be a lawyer, and I repeatedly told her the legal profession was in the midst of huge disruption. There were few decent jobs for young lawyers—and, like I had told her sister, I didn’t want Gabrielle to be poor for a living.
Gabrielle wanted to use a law degree to go into politics, specifically to work on Capitol Hill on education policy, where she thought she could help families like ours dealing with autism. “You want to go into politics?” I told Gabrielle, “Nothing gets done in this town.”
She laughed. “I know. I read your columns.”
I was worried enough to arrange for Gabrielle to meet several political and policy leaders in Washington, all primed with my arguments against law school. A year later, after completing an internship on Capitol Hill, Gabrielle entered law school at Michigan State University, where she’s thriving.
As for Tyler, our ambitions were adjusted by the autism diagnosis. Still, I assumed he would go to a four-year college, maybe even JMU. His teachers agreed. They had seen 99 percent of their graduates matriculate in college. Tyler’s grades were okay, mostly B’s and C’s, largely because Lori dedicated hours each week to helping Tyler where he struggled most: writing and organizing.
“You need to prepare yourself for the fact that he can’t do a four-year college,” Lori told me after a parent-teacher conference during Tyler’s sophomore year of high school. “He may need to start at a community college.”
That shouldn’t have surprised me. It shouldn’t have disappointed me. After all, 7.7 million students, 45 percent of all undergraduates, enrolled in public two-year colleges in the 2012–13 school year. Why did I expect more for my son? Probably for the same reason I wanted Holly to marry somebody her age and lobbied to keep Gabrielle out of law school.
Like many Americans, I tended to define success as accumulating enough money and autonomy to live comfortably. In her book Thrive, Arianna Huffington dismissed the traditional definition of success as money plus power, two things Huffington had accumulated in large quantities as an online publisher. “But I was not living a successful life by any sane definition of success.”
What she was missing was balance—a third leg of the stool, which Huffington said consists of well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving. It’s what our grandparents called “the good life.” Still in their 20s, both Holly and Gabrielle are living good lives, making their marks in all three metrics of Thrive. As borderline autistic, Tyler will lag behind his peers into his 20s, but his teachers and therapists agree he eventually will catch up. He will earn a living, live independently, and live happily. The good life.
Now don’t get me started about grandchildren.
—
Gelaco Hernandez is a 59-year-old native of Mexico who snuck into the United States 40 years ago, where he lived and worked in the shadows of the U.S. immigration system until a benevolent empl
oyer helped him secure citizenship. Then he moved from California to Arkansas and opened a Mexican store. He poured the profits into a Mexican restaurant, which did well enough for him to open a second restaurant. He’s married with three kids, ages 11 to 18.
“It’s the American dream, sir.” Hernandez punctuated almost every sentence with a “sir,” despite the fact that he is nearly a decade older than me and we were discussing his parental ambitions in a most informal setting: a minor league baseball park in North Little Rock. From a row of seats behind home plate, Hernandez positioned himself between me and his family—his wife, two daughters, and son—and whispered in my ear.
“I tell my kids, ‘When I come to this country I didn’t have no money, no father, no friends. I didn’t have no house. I didn’t have no papers; I was illegal. I didn’t have no job. I didn’t speak English. I was nothing.’ ” He paused to offer me a bag of unshelled peanuts, nodding toward his kids. “I consider myself a successful parent, a successful guy, because I worked all my life and saved money. But I won’t be a true success until they do better than me.”
That starts with a college education, Hernandez said, but his 18-year-old son doesn’t want to go. He wants to work in his father’s restaurants. “He’s not too good. He’s a lazy one,” Hernandez sniffed. “He’s a momma’s boy, so he gets away with a lot.” At home before the game, Hernandez and his son had had another fight over the boy’s future.
The father yelled, “I’m worried about you! You don’t want to be like me.”
“You’re not doing so badly,” the son replied. “You’re selling tacos. That’s not so bad.”
“You can do better,” Hernandez snapped. “You must do better. You need to go to college, marry a college girl, and become a professional.”
If the Hernandez family is at all typical, the son will be a success—if not precisely on his father’s terms. A study of more than 5,000 immigrants’ children led by sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut found that an overwhelming number of them felt “motivated to achieve” because of a gnawing need to redeem their parents’ sacrifices. The younger Hernandez likely will feel that tug.
Several related studies suggest that Asian immigrant parents impose pressure on their kids to uphold the “family honor.” In short, parental pressure is more overt among immigrant parents than among parents who are white and deeply rooted in this country. “White American parents have been found to be more focused on building children’s social skills and self-esteem,” wrote Yale Law School professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in a New York Times preview of their book, The Triple Package, about the rise and fall of cultural groups in America.
They say there’s an ocean of difference between “You’re amazing, Mommy and Daddy never want you to worry about a thing,” and “If you don’t do well at school, you’ll let down the family and end up a bum on the streets.” Neither approach is ideal. In a study of thousands of high school students, the authors noted, Asian American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they posted the highest grades.
Which brings me back to Megan Chung. She’s the 16-year-old prodigy I introduced you to in Chapter 2—the girl who told a group of Arkansas seventh-graders that her mother pushed her to excel. She smiled and giggled, calling her mother “my tiger mom.” After her speech, I introduced myself to Megan and told her I was writing about parental expectations.
“Oh,” she replied with a grin, “you could write a chapter on my mom. She’s always saying, ‘I want you to go to Harvard.’ All Korean moms want their kids to go to Harvard so they can say, ‘My daughter goes to Harvard.’ Not that I want to go to Harvard. It’s more for her than for me.” Assuming that Megan was exaggerating, I asked if I could meet her mother. Megan said yes, and we arranged to grab coffee the next day.
I was sitting in a coffee shop two blocks from the Bill Clinton Presidential Library when Megan walked in with her mother. Laurie Chung looked not much older than her daughter. She was wearing a tailored pantsuit and carried herself with the confident bearing of somebody successful in business. Mrs. Chung, a native of South Korea, told me that she owned two businesses—and yes, she expected Megan to attend Harvard.
“I have four kids,” she said. “I want them all to grow up and be successful so they will have a stable job, a good income, and some free time. I want them to be professionals,” she said. “You know, doctors and lawyers, like that.”
But why Harvard? “I want her to go to a top university. She has such great potential,” the mom said. “But I wouldn’t make her go if she doesn’t like it.”
Megan rolled her eyes and laughed. “I know this about Mom,” she said, gently rubbing her mother’s arm. “She can’t wait to tell her friends, ‘Oh, my daughter goes to Harvard. I’m such a great parent.’ ”
Mrs. Chung nodded. If Megan gets into Harvard, she said, “I’m going to Harvard, too.”
Megan balled her fists. “If I make a mistake, it’s not my mom’s fault. If I do well, it’s not her success. When I gave a speech recently, all kinds of people complimented me. She didn’t even come to the speech.” For a moment Megan spoke to me as if her mother wasn’t at the same table.
Mrs. Chung said flatly, “I didn’t know about the speech.”
“Why?” Megan said. “I told you about it.” Then she looked away from her mother and at me. “These are my accomplishments, the grades and the piano. They’re not hers,” Megan said. “I know my mom pays for the lessons, but I’m the one who does the practices.”
I was struck by the lack of anger in Megan’s tone and the lack of apology in her mother’s. Judging by their clinical approach to the conversation, this wasn’t their first conflict. Megan acknowledged that pressure has many sources. About half comes from within: “I’m wired competitively and would be type A, I think, under any circumstances.” Another quarter, she said, comes from teachers, peers, coaches, and other social pressures. Her mother accounts for the final quarter.
I asked Megan what she’s learned from her mother that she’ll carry into adulthood. Specifically, does she think it’s better to raise kids with too few expectations or too many? “Too few,” she quickly answered. “You might have the most brilliant, perfect child in the world, but if you overwhelm them with expectations, they’ll break.”
Mrs. Chung shook her head and smiled. “You’re not going to break, Megan.” She sipped her coffee. “And you’re going to Harvard to be a professional.”
HAPPY
“Dream Big, but Don’t Expect Too Much”
Charlottesville, Virginia—From 30 yards or 30 inches, the façade of Thomas Jefferson’s mansion, Monticello, appears to be constructed of sturdy beige bricks. On closer examination, it becomes clear that Jefferson actually built his home of sand-blown wood. Running his hand along a front wall, Tyler says, “Phony.”
We’re here for me to think through the question of what makes a happy child. What better place to begin than the home of the man who enshrined “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence? “We can’t leave here until you tell me what makes you happy, Tyler.”
He slaps me with a tour brochure and jokes, “That’s what makes me happy.”
The 33-room mansion sits atop a dark, narrow tunnel through which slaves would lug platters of food, ice, beer, wine, and tableware for Jefferson and his two or three dozen guests dining just above the secret channel. When the wine ran out, Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert the empty bottle, and then reach into a hidden dumbwaiter, where a slave had secreted a full bottle for Jefferson to grab with a flourish. Astonished guests also saw plates of hot food mysteriously appear on a revolving door fitted with shelves. Long after dinner, the slaves would walk to their cabins along Mulberry Row, a living hell so well hidden that visitors didn’t know of its existence, just a stone’s throw from their dining table.
In designing the mansion, Henry Wiencek wrote in Smithsonian magazine, Jefferson followed a princip
le conceived two centuries earlier by Palladio: “We must contrive a building in such a manner that the finest and most noble parts of it be the most exposed to public view, and the less agreeable disposed in by places, and removed from sight as much as possible.”
I’m overwhelmed by the thought of Monticello as a metaphor for parenthood. It is human nature for mothers and fathers to expose only the finest and most noble features of their children to public view—to remove from sight the less agreeable features. But we go further. We create and perpetuate myths about our children: They’re brilliant and gorgeous and popular and successful and damn near perfect, a reflection of their moms and dads. These stories are as deceptive as sand-blown wood and hidden dumbwaiters. Like historians’ portrayals of Jefferson as a “benevolent slaveholder,” parents’ images of their children can be gauzy contradictions in the service of lies.
In this house of paradox called Monticello lived the founding father who wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, and whose first draft excoriated the slave trade as an “assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself.” And yet, somewhere in the late 1780s and 1790s, Jefferson embraced the economics of slavery—actually calculating in a letter to George Washington that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. He ordered slaves whipped and sold farther south. Historians believe Jefferson was the father of the six children of Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello.
For the last few minutes of our tour, Tyler and I trace the steps of those slaves—in the tunnel below the mansion, along Mulberry Row, and on the wide lawn behind the back porch, where shortly after Jefferson’s death entire families were broken apart and sold like cattle. “I’m beginning to learn,” my boy says, “that things are never as they seem.”
