Yep, this is happening!
I was in a room not too long ago when the question was asked to some parents about a break from school and how it feels now that their kids are back in school.
One replied “it was so great having them home”. The other responded, “it was such a relief once they went back.”
For many of us, both sets of these emotions may well be true. I also assume that if both of these respective mother’s would have thought about it they would have said both emotions are real.
So now that our (grand)kid(s) are headed back to school and of course we all know the most important job other than buying supplies and shoes is pressuring them to excel to be straight A students, especially if they are 2 years old.
Of course there needs to be a balance to encourage our kids to work hard and succeed, but the question remains how much pressure should we be putting on them.
It’s a tough balance, they absolutely need our love and to have a safe space to come home in the evenings. Yet, we need to be there to help them develop themselves.
It gets even more complicated as the school world isn’t necessarily in line with what is “success”. Take this for starters, as we learn in Pirkei Avot – Ethics of the Fathers – “the job isn’t to finish”. This needs commentary, as we need to do our utmost in life to follow things through to completion. That’s how life is.
Yet, if we have honestly given it our all in a particular task, objectively tried our best, we are being taught, “it’s ok, you have done what you were supposed to”. Not everything is within our control to conclude and bring to fruition with all the best plans, resources, support and advice. It can lead to mental health issues for people to feel they are failures, when they did all they could in whatever it is they are working on and the result they creved was “impossible”.
School may be an imperfect model, it certainly has many pros to it too, other than breathing that sigh of relief as the kids are finally on their way back to school, but let us try to remember that part of our job is to have a safe place for them to be loved and to be nurtured to genuinely try their best whilst being allowed to be themselves and to feel they are successes even if a particular task doesn’t turn out how they or we would wish.
