Authors: Beth J. Harpaz
So to have a son getting Cs and Ds— this was a terrible letdown. He was quiet and sad, shaking his head and sighing. I could see the question going through his head over and over again: “What are we going to do with this kid?” I had the same question, and no answer, so I couldn't think of anything to say to make him feel better.
But in addition to dealing with Elon's reaction, I had to deal with the adviser's reaction, which was, quite simply, to tell me that it was my responsibility to make sure Taz did his homework.
How was I to do this? Well, the school had a website, and most of the teachers put their assignments on it, so you could never say you lost the assignment or you were out sick as an excuse for not doing your work. The adviser told me that when a kid wasn't doing well, it was the parent's job to log on to the website every night and download the child's homework, then check each subject individually to make sure he had completed it.
I found this advice somewhat shocking. I had been under the impression that the trend now among educators is that they want parents to back off. I had read in
The Wall Street Journal
about how some students, when they get a bad grade, hand their cell phones to professors and ask them to explain it to their parents, and how college grads now bring their parents along to job interviews.
I just couldn't imagine myself fetching Taz's assignments each night, and I had incorrectly assumed that high school teachers wouldn't want me to. I had thought that they do not like so- called helicopter mommies, who hover over their darling's every misstep and try to fix it. I had naively been led to believe that it was better, at this age, to let your kid figure out how to solve his own problems, or allow him to suffer the consequences, rather than intervene and solve his problems for him.
OK, I did make a fuss when the middle school said Taz couldn't come in to pick up his report card. But hey, when he dropped his cell phone in the toilet, no way did I run out to buy him a new one. (Instead, I went out and celebrated with Elon, because we realized we were going to save so much money now that Taz wasn't racking up cell phone charges, we could now afford to go out to dinner!)
When confronted with the bad grades, it seemed to me that this, too, was Taz's problem to solve. I could, in fact, do as the adviser recommended, and check the high school website every night for his assignments, then demand to see them in order to confirm that they were done.
But really, I just didn't want to go there, and I didn't want to go there for all kinds of reasons, the most important of which is that I already went to ninth grade. And when I was in ninth grade, I did all my homework. And my mother didn't even have to check it for me. I really just don't feel like it's fair to make anyone on
this earth responsible for ninth grade more than once in a lifetime.
Besides, once you check for the homework, and demand to see that it's done, you are bound to follow through by screaming and yelling or devising some type of punishment if it's not done. And the problem with Taz and punishment is that it never works. He's like Steve McQueen in
The Great Escape.
You can take everything away from him, and throw him in a dark cell over and over, and it just doesn't matter. If he wants to break rules and get out from under your thumb, he'll find a way to do it.
There have been times in the past where it seemed like Taz really had nothing left to lose— I'd taken away his money, TV, movies, video games, computer games, and time with friends— and he still refused to reform. About the only thing I didn't do was throw the switch on the fuse box and leave him sitting in the dark. (I actually considered that, but the refrigerator is on the same circuit and I didn't want to deal with the spoiled food.)
So it seemed to me that not only was I not personally motivated to monitor this homework business intensely, but I also wasn't sure how to discipline him if he failed to do as I asked. Smacking him was definitely out, by the way— he was way too big by then, and I didn't want to hurt my hand.
But there was another reason, too, beyond my lack of interest in reliving ninth grade and my inability to dole out effective punishments. I didn't want Taz doing the
homework solely to avoid getting hassled by me. I wanted Taz to want to do well in school for reasons that had nothing to do with parental approval. I realized that was pie in the sky to some extent, but he had been a good student for most of middle school, at least until the dreaded thirteenth birthday. He knew how good it felt to get an A. I wanted him to want that feeling for himself again. I didn't want him to only get the A (though I would gladly settle for Bs) for me.
The thing is, I have lived long enough on this earth to know that when you do a good job, most of the time, no one is going to notice. No one is going to pat you on the back, or buy you a drink, or give you a raise, or arrange a parade. But if you did the best you could do, and if you are pleased with the result, that is something in and of itself that can give you a certain peace and satisfaction and happiness. It sounds trite to say, but a job well done is its own reward. And that's what I wanted Taz to feel. “Big Mother Is Watching You” did not hold much appeal to me as a slogan for child rearing.
Now, I didn't have the nerve to tell the adviser that I was not actually planning on getting all that involved in the homework checking, nor was I planning to devise some type of torture to compel Taz to do better in school. So I just nodded politely and promised to talk with Taz some more when we got home.
And talk I did. I basically told him there was no Plan B. I knew he loved this school, but I told him that I didn't
think I could leave him there if he couldn't get better grades, because he'd never get into college.
But if he wasn't going to stay at his mad fun school, I wasn't sure where he was going to go. There is a high school near our home, but it is a rather scary place, with a high dropout rate. Once, when Taz was little, still in a stroller, we were walking up the block past that school, and a chair came flying out the third- story window, glass breaking and everything. Luckily, no one was injured on the street, but it was a terrifying moment. I reminded Taz that he didn't want to end up at a place like that.
Nor, I casually mentioned, did he want to end up in military school. Taz didn't know what military school was, so I explained it. It was a concept that had been prominently featured in one of
The Sopranos
episodes that Elon and I greatly enjoyed watching together, the one where A.J. got expelled from school, and Tony said to Carmela: “No more fucking schools that coddle him.”
When they went to tour a military school, Carmela told a school official: “I do not agree with this hard-nosed discipline.”
“Mothers seldom do,” the official said.
At this point in our viewing of the episode, Elon turned to me and said, “See?”
“See what?” I said in an indignant tone of voice.
“Well, you're always making excuses for him!”
“OK,” I admitted, “I'm a wimp when it comes to
punishment. But I don't see you coming up with a magic solution!”
If you are married and have children, I'm sure I don't have to continue this conversation for you, because you've probably had one just like it at some point in your family life. Or maybe, as with us, every day is
Groundhog Day
and like in the movie, you keep having the conversation over and over again but never manage to solve the problem of how to discipline your children.
Meanwhile, back in
The Sopranos
episode, Carmela was questioning the official about the school's approach. “What about creativity? Independent thought?” she said.
“We've created too many options for our kids,” the official responded.
But options in my world were in short supply as I contemplated what to do with Taz if he couldn't hack it at this high school. One idea I mentioned to Taz was the possibility of going to live with his grandma, who has a perfectly nice high school in her town that anyone can go to as long as they live there.
Taz loves his grandma; they have a special bond. But leaving our neighborhood to live with her was not all that appealing as a solution to the high school crisis. I mean, maybe Taz wouldn't have minded leaving his parents and his brother, but there is no way he was leaving the dog. And his grandma definitely had no interest in adopting Buddy.
Although I had pretty much made up my mind that I couldn't get as involved in the homework as the adviser
had suggested, I still worried whether I had made the right decision. I talked to a lot of other mothers, but they were not always comforting. Some were far less involved than I was, and the results were scary— kids flunking classes, going to summer school, sometimes being sent away to alternative schools.
On the other side of the coin, some parents were way more involved than I was, keeping track of assignments the way Taz's adviser had suggested, and guiding their kids to activities in order to “build résumés” in anticipation of college applications that were still more than three years away.
When I talked to parents of younger kids, they nodded sympathetically, but I could tell they thought I was one of those Degenerate Moms with Matching Kid. They simply could not imagine their own darling nine-year- olds, whose homework assignments came home covered in smiley- face stickers from the third- grade teacher every day, getting a D in school.
But when I talked to parents of older teenagers, they practically laughed in my face, saying things like “Ha! Wait until he takes the car without your permission and you have no idea where he is!” or “You think it's bad now, in a few years you'll be up at three a.m. every night, just like you were when they were babies, only this time you'll be waiting up for him, thinking he's been murdered outside a dance club.”
The parents whose kids were in their early twenties also told scary stories. High school was ancient history
to them; they were more interested in college nightmares and postcollege horror stories.
There were the Kids Who Refused to Graduate, who just kept enrolling semester after semester at colleges around the country, generating tuition bills from New Hampshire to New Mexico.
And there were also the Kids Who Came Home After College, who couldn't— or wouldn't— get jobs to match their degree in obscure things like ceramic arts.
Even some of the success stories were hard to bear, like the twenty- three- year- olds who were already earning twice what I earn or more. Inevitably, they worked at Wall Street firms, in jobs with titles like “trader” and “consultant.” What exactly they did every day when they got to their offices, I had no idea.
There was one story of an older kid, though, that did make me feel better— enormously better— and I held his mother's words in my mind for months after Taz got the Bad Report Card. This mother's son was in many ways far more difficult than mine. He was a brilliant boy, but he couldn't cope with school. He eventually dropped out and got his GED. I had long admired the fact that rather than excoriating the kid, his parents had recognized how unique his situation was, supported his decisions, and never wavered in their love for him.
Both parents have advanced degrees from prestigious universities, so I could only imagine how hard it was for them to explain to friends and relatives that their son was not going to college. Their faith in their
child was eventually rewarded, however. He was a computer whiz, and at an age when most kids are still working on getting a degree, he got a job at a high- tech firm where what you know is far more important than how you did in school. In short order, he was earning a good salary, had a nice lifestyle, and loved his job. His parents were bursting with pride, and rightfully so.
I wondered if I'd have the mettle to stick up for Taz, the way they did with their son, if he didn't end up taking the conventional path through school.
But something the computer whiz's mother said stuck with me. She and her husband had sought help from a therapist in dealing with their unusual son, and she told me that the therapist had convinced her that it was not the parents’ job to serve as rules enforcer for the school.
Yes, you can help with homework if your son asks, and you can create a schedule that sets aside a reasonable amount of time each day to do homework, but you are not the homework policeman, this mother explained. Your job is not to check each night to see that it is done. If they don't do their schoolwork, they have to deal with the consequences, even if the consequences mean failure.
What
is
the parents’ job, she said, is to make sure that kids grow up to be decent, independent, fully functioning human beings.
So simple, and yet so overwhelming. It's actually easier to be the homework policeman than to play Pygmalion and shape a soulless lump of clay into a good
person. How had I done so far? I asked myself. Well, Taz was definitely independent— I had succeeded a little too well in that department— but was he a decent human being?
I thought so. I hoped so. I know that he gives his seat up on the subway to old people and little children. I know that he is kind to animals. I know that he would give his last dollar to a homeless person, but is that good or naive? He was sometimes mean to his brother, but on the other hand, if Sport was having a problem with a kid on the playground, I could always dispatch Taz to go down there and straighten out whatever it was. He did call that teacher in middle school a retard, and that wasn't very nice. But maybe that was an isolated incident? Maybe he'd matured a little since then?
Either way, I thought about that mother's advice for months after the Bad Report Card. I wasn't the Homework Policeman, I reminded myself. I was merely in charge of raising a good person. You could say it was an epiphany.
I could only hope Taz would have his own epiphany about his mad fun school. He might be a decent human being, and maybe I Am a Terrible Mother, but if he was going to stay at this school, he was going to have to start checking the homework assignments on his own.
One night, there was a meeting at his school about how parents could help new students adjust. I told him, quite innocently, that I was planning to go to it, only to see a look of utter panic on his face.