How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  “I was a working parent, with three little kids,” says Scelfo. “I tried to sit with him. I tried to be patient, but I couldn’t always do it.” Then, when her son was in third grade, she found him struggling with an assignment that probably needed her help, “and he hit himself, and he said, ‘I’m so stupid,’ and something just snapped in me,” she says. “I thought, ‘What am I doing, trying to force him into this?’”

  At his new school, the expectations around homework are very different, and they fit the family’s lifestyle much better. “The school is really about giving responsibility to children,” she says. “They’re supposed to make the call if they will be absent or late. The school tells parents, stay out of the homework unless the child asks. Don’t say, ‘Did you do it?’ Don’t say, ‘When will you do it?’ Don’t ask if it’s done. They take all those lessons out of the sphere of the parent.”

  Your child’s school, and his homework, really do have a big impact on both your and your family’s happiness. If you’re able to put the resources into it—and that’s not a small consideration—finding a way to make a big change in the classroom or the school may be what it takes to make a difference in the homework itself.

  Who Should Do the Talking?

  So far, we’ve focused on how parents can advocate for our children around homework—but there does come a point when our children should advocate for themselves. They can use time-honored strategies—making an appointment, going to talk to the teacher—but there are also routes open to the young, naive, and enthusiastic that aren’t open to their elders. When my oldest son was in eighth grade, he and a group of friends entered the Verizon App Challenge, which invited students to develop a smartphone app that would help other students. Their app would have allowed teachers to evaluate how much homework was being assigned to a given student overall, rather than focusing on only a single class. As they said in their presentation, “If a teacher says you’ll have half an hour to an hour of homework a night, that sounds reasonable. But if you have six classes, that’s three to six hours of homework.”

  Their idea won the state and regional rounds, although it was not one of the two apps selected to be developed in the national competition. The effect on the school of having five of their students win national honors (and a check for the school’s science education department) for an app that attempted to make their homework more manageable, though, was dramatic. My son and his classmates, who graduated that year, only saw a slight benefit. His younger sister is now in the same middle school, with many of the same teachers. Although she’s a very different student, it’s clear that those teachers are making more of an effort to coordinate large assignments and even nightly work.

  The big play—creating a committee, doing a large data-gathering project, making a funny video about homework, or even engaging in protest—is an option for kids. But usually, you’re going to need to help them start exactly where you would start—in a meeting with the teacher—whether the problem is that they’re not understanding classroom lectures enough to do the homework, they want to talk about why the homework is what it is and what it’s for, or they just want to convey how challenged they’re feeling.

  Helping your child do this is a little different from getting ready to do it yourself. For starters, an email—the first recourse at nearly every age—is unlikely to be an effective tool for children and teens, for one simple reason: it’s too easy. It’s easy for a child to dash off and too easy for a teacher to disregard—or say no.

  It’s much harder to look a teacher right in the face, describe a problem, and wait for a response—and this is much more likely to lead to a positive result. Most children need pushing to do this, and some might even want to write down a few notes about what they want to say. If your child is open to it, talk to him about how the teacher might respond, and how he might feel and then respond himself. Children who are really frustrated in a class might fear tears, and that’s understandable. You can practice saying something like “It’s okay that I’m crying; it’s just because I care about this. But we can still talk and figure something out.”

  Finally: Sometimes You Will Do Things You Said You Would Not, and That’s Okay

  Six or seven years ago, I walked into my friend Suzy’s house to find her seated at her table, surrounded by scissors and construction paper, painstakingly gluing tiny squares onto a piece of poster board. Seated next to her was her nephew, Forrest. Forrest, a high school junior, had moved in with Suzy a few months before. He was a good kid, but he had been living alone with his dad and had struggled in his last high school. He was determined to make a fresh start and get himself into college, and Suzy was determined to help him.

  Suzy dotted glue on the back of a tiny square, carefully lowered it onto the paper, and whacked it into place with her palm.

  “It’s the stupidest assignment,” she said, dotting glue onto another square. “It’s a roman mosaic or something. He has to glue all these on tonight.” Whack.

  Forrest, next to her, was surrounded by books and probably four or five hours of academic work. It was early evening. “I’m just going to get him started, at least,” she said.

  Suzy is not particularly artsy. She was having no trouble, as far as I could see, in imitating the work of a teenaged boy. And her younger daughter had been all through elementary school with my oldest son. I knew that while Suzy might help build a set for the holiday concert, she certainly wasn’t sitting at home redesigning her daughter’s second-grade poster biography of Abraham Lincoln. This wasn’t like her, but looking at the books around Forrest, and knowing how hard he was working to succeed in his new, more academic environment, I didn’t have any trouble following one of my mental rules: never judge a parent (or an aunt) whose children are older than yours. Sometimes, you do what you swore you wouldn’t do.

  “Sometimes,” though, is an important word. If you’re stepping in on every project, if it worries you that that second-grade biography trifold board “looks like it was made by a seven-year-old,” if you’re stenciling or pasting on backgrounds or using scrapbooking scissors with wavy edges every time the word “project” comes up, then it might be time to begin following the steps for extracting oneself from homework involvement or going cold turkey on anything involving poster board.

  But sometimes you’ll do it. Sometimes, you’ll find your sixth grader, who decided the lettering on the traffic safety poster should be white and the entire poster colored around it, sitting there with a marker at eleven p.m., carefully filling in all that space, and you will get a second marker, and you will sit down, and you will help. Sometimes the phone will ring just as you’re sitting down with your laptop or leaving for work, and it will be your child, frantic, who has forgotten one page of the big Emily Dickinson folder she spent all weekend putting together, and it’s a required page, and it will be a slow day and you will have some time and you will drop it off.

  And sometimes you won’t. You won’t be home to help color, you’ll be in a meeting when the frantic text about the forgotten page comes through, or you’ll remind both of you that you told her to pack up her backpack last night, and while you are sorry that her rough draft of her Robinson Crusoe essay is on the kitchen counter and now she’s going to have to stay in at recess and rewrite it, these things happen. Sometimes you’ll be able to choose when you help, and sometimes circumstances will choose for you, and it will all work out fine in the end.

  Forrest graduated from a small college last spring and is working his first job running construction sites. He’s a lovely, independent young man who doesn’t run to Suzy with small problems or expect her to call his boss for him if he’s late for work, which he wouldn’t be, anyway, because jobs are scarce and this is a good one. Occasionally he brings home his laundry.

  As far as I know, he’s never again been asked to make a roman mosaic out of construction paper.

  six

  SCREENS ARE
FUN, LIMITING THEM IS NOT

  In your children’s eyes, screen time is already fun. Who are we kidding—adults like their screens, too. In this case, it’s not a question of making something fun. That’s covered. But making screens a part of a happy family life means finding a screen-use balance that leaves plenty of time for everything else, and ensuring that maintaining that balance doesn’t itself lead to unhappiness.

  Every year, a new set of data emerges alerting us to what we already know: we—parents, teenagers, children—spend a lot of time watching or interacting with screens. Some of the latest numbers show parents—parents—of children ages eight to eighteen reporting an average of more than 7.5 hours a day of personal screen media use outside of work, although it’s important to note that some media use is concurrent with doing other things, or even counts double—surfing the Internet on a tablet while watching television, for example. Teenagers (using the same standards) report a little under nine hours of non-school-related screen time, and tweens (eight- to twelve-year-olds) about six hours a day, again excluding screen time spent on work, school, or homework. Younger kids appear to watch and play less: parents report that children five to eight spend about 2.5 hours a day on media; two- to four-year-olds, 2 hours; and children under two, about an hour.

  So much of our conversation around screens and kids is about setting limits, but those numbers suggest that while we’re good at limiting the screen time of children whose time is easily controlled, the minute children become more able to access screens themselves, the game changes. If the goal of limiting young children’s media usage is to teach them to set reasonable limits for themselves later, it looks like we’re failing. In fact, it looks as if we can’t even limit ourselves. Yet, in that same survey in which parents reported a whopping seven-plus hours of daily personal screen time, the majority (78 percent) also cheerfully declared themselves to be “good role models” when it came to media and technology use.

  I think we can safely say that we’re serving as role models, yes. The “good” part of that, though, we might want to question.

  This is a large part of what makes the screen time piece of the parenting puzzle so very difficult. Ask a few hundred parents to name their top three worries about their children at any given moment (as I have), and complaints about some form of screens, media use, or “SnapFREAKINGchat!!!!” will pop up in the top five overall. We know we want to do something to manage the technology that has come so recently to surround us. We know that while some of what we do online is great—we learn, we connect, we read, we expand our thinking—some of it leaves us cranky and wondering where the last three hours went. Our kids face the same struggle, but figuring out what sites or gadgets or activities belong on which side of that line is hard and constantly evolving as screens, media, and our children themselves change. It’s hard to feel happy and comfortable with our choices when the ground is always shifting under our feet.

  What Goes Wrong

  What’s happening here? For starters, different is always scary, and in no single area are our children’s lives more different from our own collective childhoods than when it comes to screens. The amount of media that’s available for our consumption now is truly overwhelming, but it may be the change in the way we communicate that’s most disturbing to us. Where we hung out in person, passed notes in class, sent letters to pen pals, and spent hours on the phone, our children are hanging out online, posting, texting, messaging, and photo-chatting. The evolution of our civilization is reflected in changes in the way we interact and exchange information, and we are, as individuals, dependent on how we master those skills. It’s only to be expected that big changes in how we communicate, changes that make it hard for us to teach our children to do as we have learned, would be disturbing.

  When Common Sense Media asked more than one thousand parents to describe their concerns around screen time, most fell into two categories: worries about what the children aren’t doing (face-to-face conversations, reading, playing outside) and worries about what they are (spending too much time watching or playing, using social media, accessing pornography or violent content). Both of those mirror fears older generations have long had about their children: What are they doing that we didn’t do? What will they lose if they don’t do as we have always done?

  Add a bonus challenge similar to the one offered by junk food—much of this stuff is designed to be much more exciting and alluring than its real-world counterpart—and then factor in that final element of our own difficulty in handling technology, and you have a recipe for a problem that seems almost designed to suck the fun out of life.

  Finding a comfort level with that kind of uncertainty is hard. It means that we can’t focus on the apps, gadgets, or sites themselves, all of which can and will change without notice. Instead, we must make choices and set limits, based on deeper family values, and then teach our children to do the same, or admit we’re muddling along with them in the same struggle. We are trying to help our children master something that many of us have not mastered ourselves.

  Happier Tech for Grown-Ups

  It’s impossible to write about screen time and a joyful family life without first considering our own screen use. Often, we’re ambivalent about it. We set our own goals around our phone use: We’ll turn it off an hour before bedtime! We’ll take a walk in the woods without it! We struggle with when to return email, how to put our full attention on what we’re doing, how much time to spend on social media, and how we feel after a bout of Facebook or Instagram. When Manoush Zomorodi’s Note to Self podcast on NPR created a project designed to help us manage our information overload, more than twenty-five thousand people joined in.

  Some of us are perfectly happy with our screen time. Smartphones and the Internet have been game changers for parents. They’ve replaced the physical village with a virtual one, which may not be able to babysit, but can answer most questions far more quickly than we can reach a doctor, our own parents, or even a knowledgeable friend. Many of us do our work at least partly online, which enables us to be physically present in our children’s lives in ways our parents could not. If we struggle with a particular parenting challenge, we can connect with a community of similarly affected families no matter how rare the issue.

  But for many of us, there is a downside: because we can always be connected to a world outside our homes, it gets hard to disconnect. We appreciate the blurring of the line between work and home when it allows us to take a quick call in between innings; we resent it when we feel compelled to respond to a boss’s email rather than read bedtime stories. We love sharing our own photos, but when our house is chaos and we’re spending spring break snowed in with norovirus, other people’s beach pics don’t help.

  Deciding how we want our family to interact with that digital world means first deciding what we want from it ourselves. It means thinking about what comes first when your attention is being pulled in multiple directions, and why. We’re not likely to nail this on our first try. But if we keep the following things in mind when it comes to our own adult screen use, we can pave the way toward a happier family tech experience overall.

  GIVE YOURSELF REAL OFFLINE TIME

  Many of us carry our phone everywhere, toting it around the house, laying it on the table next to our plate at meals, balancing it on the toilet paper holder in the bathroom. Even if we feel like we’re not constantly looking at it, we probably are, and having it always at hand means it’s always the go-to in even the smallest moment of downtime.

  That is, as I like to tell my kids about some snacks, “not a healthy choice.” And it is a choice. Even if you have a job that requires you to be reasonably accessible, or if you have children with a caregiver who needs to be able to reach you, it’s okay if it takes a little while. If it’s possible for you to turn off your phone during a root canal, you can also do it during a yoga class, a half-hour walk through the park, or a deep-concentration work session. During t
he evening, and on the weekend, let yourself travel back in time to before your phone was a constant companion. Leave it at home to go to the beach or even the grocery store. Plug the phone in wherever it goes and sit down with a book for an hour.

  Make a conscious decision about whether you want the phone at every opportunity, and find ways to make it easier to leave it behind, or to use it only for the purpose you intend. I carry my phone in case of emergencies on horseback trail rides, but I keep it wedged in a strap around my waist that’s hard to access, and I put it in there hoping not to take it out until I’m back in the barn. When I run outdoors, I use a similar strap, and I turn on a podcast or music before I start—because I know that if messages pop up, and I can see them, I’ll be stumbling along trying to text at 4.4 miles per hour.

  The more often you set the phone aside, the more often you’ll want to. It’s wonderful to know you can reach a friend, entertain yourself, or get help in an emergency at the touch of a button, but it’s equally wonderful to know that your time and attention are your own, to give as you choose. What did you do for fun in 2006? Next time you have a few minutes, instead of picking up your smartphone, do that.

  ALL OR NOTHING IS BETTER

  Let’s say you’re going to have to work some at home this weekend—two hours on Saturday afternoon. You could do that in a couple of ways: you could shut yourself into your closet for two hours and emerge with the work done, or you could sit at the kitchen counter and work one minute, then answer a kid’s question another minute; work two minutes, spend two minutes getting the knot out of someone’s hair; work another minute, get up and make someone a sandwich; work five minutes . . . you get the picture. By dinnertime, you’re fried, and no one has had any fun.