As one who has taught in schools since 1992, I’ve had meaningful interaction with thousands of parents, and I am convinced that, over generations, the quality of parenting has deteriorated to the point where many parents are now actually undermining our children’s ability to do well in school and in life.
Of course, we never intend to harm our babies. Why go through the trouble of having children just to make their lives harder than they have to be? No parent in his/her right mind tries to do that.
But the result is the same; children come to school not just unprepared, but badly-prepared. They come with wrong information, unrealistic expectations and terrible habits that make their presence in school a waste of time.
What follows is the first of five ways we parents mistakenly teach our children to fail.
Example: “I don’t read well, so I can understand why s/he isn’t doing well.”
Explanation: We too often let our children slide by on learning important skills because we don’t understand it, nor can we check it to make sure it’s correct. Also, we want to be fair: “I can’t expect my child to do something I can’t do; that’s hypocritical.”
The problem is we are misusing heredity as a mask for low expectations rooted in low self-esteem, with a heaping helping of laziness thrown in. Yeah, I said it!
There are a few reasons why you personally may not be good at a thing (and many of them can be fixed, even now), but that has almost nothing to do with your child’s abilities.
Suggestion: Adopt our ancestors’ and elders’ way of handling this situation.
Those of us who are descended from enslaved Africans in this country have ancestors in each of our lineages who couldn’t read. However, they set the expectation to read for their children, made sure their children knew what was expected, and provided the environment for their children to meet the expectation.
For our ancestors, their own inability to read wasn’t an excuse; it was motivation: “I can’t read, but I’m gonna make sure you can.”
Check out the movie Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story. It has great lessons that are sure to spark our creativity about what we can do to set, and help our children meet, high expectations.
Many times, us communicating our high expectations in words and backing it up with supportive action are all the motivation our children need.
A. Bolanle Ambonisye, www.freematerials4parents.com, facilitates “Tapping Our Parental Power” parent empowerment workshops. She can be reached at bambonisye@yahoo.com.
