It’s increasingly mystifying to me that so many of us in the Boomer generation — the one that rebelled so loudly against adult interference — have become competitively driven to micromanage our children on perceived paths to success. Already those of us exhibiting this fear of raising a merely ordinary son or daughter have been labeled in the mass media as "helicopter parents," and I think this moniker perfectly captures the unnecessary noise, swooping surveillance and huge shadow cast by us on our offspring as we try to airlift them to prosperity.
As someone whose stage-direction days are coming to a close, I’m pleased to report that generally the children find their own way, as they were meant to in the first place. My wife Grace and I have two sons, and while the standard reaction by those who meet them simultaneously is that they closely resemble each other, we view them as amazingly different. Number-one son Neal somehow seized on the idea of going to private St. Xavier High School while an eighth-grader across the Ohio in the Floyd County public school system. This generated some interesting discussions between his parents, an enthusiastic mother who went through parochial schools in St. Louis and a doubting dad who was public-schooled in Minneapolis. Our orientations swung 180 degrees when younger brother Daniel came to the same decision point and elected to stay put and enroll at Floyd Central High School, the catchall public institution in our community.
Those conversations about the best secondary schools for our sons mirrored the ongoing debate we have about automobiles. My wife makes synonyms of the words "Toyota" and "car"; you can’t go wrong if you cast your lot with this highly rated automaker and she will buy nothing else. I’m open to other models — even some from those erratic American car companies — if they’re chosen wisely. That we currently own a Dodge Caravan and a Toyota Camry, both with over 160,000 miles on them, does little to settle the dispute. I guess we could dig out maintenance records and document which vehicle has caused the most financial pain, but then we wouldn’t have anything to argue about. In the end, Grace’s Toyota and my Dodge have made it down the highway admirably. We’ve been left to bicker over minor details.
Neal had a tremendous experience at St. X. We still remember his freshman-year geography class and the impressive final-exam exercise in drawing from memory a world map complete with continents, nations, major rivers, mountain ranges, oceans and other features. (See page 84 in this issue’s School Guide for comments from his former teacher, Rick Sorrels, and other educators on the current state of geography instruction.) That emphasis on academic rigor served Neal well; he’s moved on to a small, private liberal-arts college and he enjoys being a student. We don’t think we could have helicoptered him to a better place.
The quip we’ve come up with to describe the difference between St. X and Floyd Central is that at the former boys put on ties for class and at the latter they do so for sports. Most times Daniel has tightened a knot it’s been on the day one of the teams he plays for has a big game, but that doesn’t mean there’s less learning taking place. Private preps like St. X will reliably push students in appropriate college-bound directions; at Floyd Central, a student must navigate his or her way toward the best preparation — and this year in particular, our son, a senior, has a group of first-rate teachers who are demanding sharp thinking from him. He’s in a different melting pot, but one just as stimulating. Like Neal did before him, he’s having a great high school experience.
Now, finally, on his timeline rather than ours, this second son is beginning to project himself at the next level. He’s rejected the near-hysterical chase for the "hot" colleges from the U.S. News & World Report and other rankings. No amount of helicopter piloting would get him thinking about "reach" schools or "safety" schools. He’s considering where he’ll fit in — an appealing campus, a comfortable student body size and, higher on his list than we experts would recommend, how much fun it would be to either play sports or att/files/storyimages/them with his classmates.
The reams of literature on who has the highest-rated programs and the best pipelines to opportunities for graduates have their place, and for Daniel that place is on someone else’s desk. At least for now.
And if Grace and I have learned one thing in all of our schooling on this issue, it would be to realize that he’s fully capable of making that choice on his own.
