It was about this time of year, when our high school seniors had gotten their college acceptance letters. We had gathered to celebrate friendships, their accomplishments and their future.
“Where’s everyone going?” a parent asked.
There was a moment of awkward silence, then one by one, they spoke:
Princeton, NYU, UC Santa Barbara, Chapman, Cal …
When it was my son’s turn, he deadpanned, “MIT.”
Anyone who knew him got the joke.
School was a struggle for him, thanks to learning issues. But he was going to college nonetheless — the College of Marin to start.
Both my kids attended community colleges before graduating from universities. Now in their 20s, they are supporting themselves and doing fulfilling work for people whose values match their own.
If that isn’t the definition of success, well, I don’t know what is.
I was a bit of a slacker mom. I didn’t care about their grades; I just wanted them to learn, to be curious and to go to college — any college.
Here’s the thing — it rarely matters where you get your degree from. At least that’s what Julie Lythcott-Haims says in a recent TED Radio Hour episode, and I believe her. Lythcott-Haims was Stanford University’s dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising for more than a decade, and is the author of “How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.”
“The colleges want to see top scores and grades and accolades and awards,” she acknowledges. “But here’s the good news: You don’t have to go to one of the biggest brand-name schools to be happy and successful in life. Happy and successful people went to a state school, went to community college, went to a college over here and flunked out. And, more importantly, if their childhood has not been lived according to a tyrannical checklist then when they get to college, whichever one it is, well, they’ll have gone there on their own volition, capable and ready to thrive there.”
Yes!
As William Stixrud, co-author of “The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives,” writes in Time magazine, going to Harvard or Yale isn’t the only way to have a richly rewarding life:
“The problem with the stories we’re telling our kids is that they foster fear and competition. This false paradigm affects high-achieving kids, for whom a rigid view of the path to success creates unnecessary anxiety, and low-achieving kids, many of whom conclude at a young age that they will never be successful, and adopt a ‘why try at all?’ attitude.”
Lythcott-Haims and Stixrud are just preaching to my tiny choir, but I wish the Marin parents who are obsessed with grades and the “right” schools, sports and activities for their kids listened.
When my kids were at Tam, I heard so many parents freak out over grades, SAT and ACT scores, the overwhelming college admission process, the constant nagging they deemed necessary when their kids didn’t do what they needed to do by the deadlines.
It sounded so stressful.
But I think their poor kids were a lot more stressed.
That’s apparent from watching “Angst: Raising Awareness Around Anxiety,” a new documentary co-produced by Marin filmmaker Karin Gornick that has been screening around the county and the country.
It features numerous Marin kids who, like Gornick’s son and my own, are dealing with anxiety disorders.
Of course, it isn’t just the pressure to achieve that’s responsible for the rise in anxiety disorders among today’s youth. Social media, school shootings, the political rhetoric — kids are dealing with a lot. For five-time Olympian Michael Phelps, who shares his story in the film, being bullied helped trigger his severe anxiety.
Still, as one Marin teen says in “Angst,” there’s a lot of anxiety caused by trying to meet parents’ expectations.
At a Q&A after a recent screening in San Rafael, Gornick says, many teens in the audience said they wished their parents knew just how much pressure they feel to be “perfect.”
Hey, parents — it’s not your life; it’s theirs. The college, the major, the career — that’s on the kids, Lythcott-Haims says, hers and ours. “My job is not to make them become what I would have them become, but to support them in becoming their glorious selves.”
Don’t all kids deserve the same?
Vicki Larson’s So It Goes runs every other week. Contact her at vlarson@marinij.com and follow her on Twitter at OMG Chronicles
![When the Rev. Cecil Williams took over leadership of Glide Memorial Church in the 1960s and began transforming it into a national powerhouse for social justice and nonprofit services, he became an early ally of Tenderloin residents who were then among the city’s most marginalized: gay men, lesbians and transgender youth. In the 1960s, San Francisco was still “a pretty conservative town” and police, supported by City Hall, regularly targeted gathering spots for LGBTQ men and women, arresting them for merely being social. As part of Williams’ mission to welcome the poor and disenfranchised into his Tenderloin congregation, he began […]](https://www.marinij.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SJM-L-WILLIAMSOBIT-0424-5.jpg?w=514 "When the Rev. Cecil Williams took over leadership of Glide Memorial Church in the 1960s and began transforming it into a national powerhouse for social justice and nonprofit services, he became an early ally of Tenderloin residents who were then among the city’s most marginalized: gay men, lesbians and transgender youth. In the 1960s, San Francisco was still “a pretty conservative town” and police, supported by City Hall, regularly targeted gathering spots for LGBTQ men and women, arresting them for merely being social. As part of Williams’ mission to welcome the poor and disenfranchised into his Tenderloin congregation, he began […]")
