Classic vs. Modern Parenting
How would each handle this award snub?
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
My child didn’t get the Soar Like an Eagle Award, which is given to almost every child for overall good behavior. He’s a great kid and I’m sure he felt terrible about being left out. It was probably a mistake. What should I do?
It depends. Do you want to be a Modern Parent or a Classic Parent?
Classic Parents believe their role is to shepherd children through highs and lows, helping them build critical life skills in the process. Modern Parents believe they must shower their children with the highs while shielding them from the lows.
The scenario here is Parenting 101: the school gives an award for good behavior or some other desirable but subjective quality. The child doesn’t get it. What does the parent do now?
The Classic Parent only turns it into an issue if the child does. Most kids shrug off such snubs (if it was indeed a snub). If the child says nothing, the Classic Parent may take it as a tacit admission that perhaps the child knows he didn’t meet the criteria. The child learns from the natural consequence and grows from it.
What if the child is truly upset and honestly thinks it was a mistake? The Classic Parent might encourage the child to ask the teacher about it on his own or might approach the teacher this way: “My son thinks he deserved the award, but I told him it’s a very high standard and he’s probably forgotten about all his lapses. What are the most important improvements he could make so that next year he might get the award and be a better part of his Eagle school community?”
Classic Parents assume their child’s fallibility. No kid is perfect. Of course, if the teacher made a mistake, it will now come to light. Either way, the child will end up better off.
Modern Parents are less reactors and more projectors. They take cues not from what the child truthfully communicates but from what they perceive the child feels. Since the parents feel deeply wounded by the snub (especially since “almost every child” soared like eagles), they assume the child must feel the pain, too.
The Modern Parent generally assumes — even when there’s considerable contrary evidence — that any flaws have originated somewhere beyond the child. So they will likely approach the teacher with something like: “My child is always so well-behaved. You must have made a mistake.”
It’s certainly possible, and maybe it will come out here. But it’s also likely that the child isn’t as perfect as Modern Parent perceives. This will result in a parent-teacher dialogue tinged with more negativity than the Classic Parent’s student-centered question will elicit.
Given the circumstances, it’s doubtful that Modern Parent will accept the teacher’s explanation unless it was a true mistake. And this is where Modern Parents earn their reputation for being difficult to deal with. Instead of taking the Classic route of shepherding their child, they turn their attention to amending the world. In this case, that would probably entail urging the teacher to change the award criteria so that it encompasses their child’s behavior.
This is why the state of a healthy society depends so much on parenting. The Classic Parent creates cultural solutions by making their child better suited to overcome the world’s disappointments. The Modern Parent causes problems by trying to bully or gaslight the world into accepting flaws as assets.
Surprisingly, they’ve been a lot more successful than one would think, but there is a silver lining: it’s now a lot easier for Classic Parents to help their children rise to the top by instilling just a few increasingly rare qualities like resilience, integrity, and dependability.
In other words, there’s more than one way to soar like an eagle.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.