The Pressured Child: Helping Your Child Find Success in School and Life - Hardcover

Thompson Ph.D., Michael; Barker, Teresa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345450124 ISBN 13: 9780345450128

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2004

Synopsis

The push for students to excel at school and get into the best colleges has never been more intense. In this invaluable new book, the bestselling co-author of Raising Cain addresses America’s performance-driven obsession with the accomplishments of its kids–and provides a deeply humane response.
“How was school?” These three words contain a world of desire on the part of parents to know what their children are learning and experiencing in school each day. Children may not divulge much, but psychologist Michael Thompson suggests that the answers are there if we know how to read the clues and–equally important–if we remember our own school days.
School, Thompson reminds us, occupies more waking hours than kids spend at home; and school is full not just of studies but of human emotion–excitement, fear, envy, love, anger, sexuality, boredom, competitiveness. Through richly detailed interviews, case histories, and student e-mail journals, including those of his own children, Thompson illuminates the deeper psychological journey that school demands, a journey that all children must take in order to grow and develop, whether they are academic aces or borderline dropouts. Most of us remember this journey, if we are honest with ourselves, but our children must experience it in their own way, for better or worse.

In stories that are by turns poignant, shocking, uplifting, and inspiring, we see students grapple with the textured reality of their lives, devising their own unique strategies to survive and thrive in school. For parents, this book reveals the hidden emotional landscape of the school day and points toward the answers we both desire and dread as we seek to help our children find success in school and beyond.
Bridging the worlds of the growing and the grown-up, and told in Thompson’s compassionate voice as both psychologist and father, The Pressured Child shows us how to listen for the truth of our children’s experience–and how to trust, love, and ultimately let go of a child. It is a crucial book for our stressful age–and an ideal resource for families struggling to survive it.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Thompson, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, lecturer, consultant, and former seventh-grade teacher. He conducts workshops across the United States on social cruelty, children’s friendships, and boys’ development. With Catherine O’Neill Grace and Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D., he co-authored Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children and Mom, They’re Teasing Me: Helping Your Child Solve Social Problems. With Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., he co-authored the New York Times bestseller Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. He is also the author of Speaking of Boys: Answers to the Most-Asked Questions About Raising Sons. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Teresa Barker, who collaborated with Thompson on Raising Cain and Speaking of Boys, is a journalist and mother of three school-age children. She lives in Wilmette, Illinois.

Reviews

Few questions have been uttered more frequently by parents than "How was school today?" And few questions have been met with more blank stares, shrugs, lies or unhappy truths. In this compelling follow-up to the now-classic Mom, They're Teasing Me, Thompson attempts to put parents "back in touch with the gritty reality of being a child in school," prompting them to recall their own school memories: was it boring, scary, exciting or painful? This, Thompson believes, will help them better comprehend their children's experiences and support them more effectively. Despite the title, Thompson says this book is for "the pressured parent, which is every loving parent, no matter what kind of student your child is." With the demands of standardized tests, the fear of failing school systems and baggage from their own academic pasts, Thompson says, parents' concern about their children's educational welfare is ballooning into panic. As Thompson shadows several students from diverse backgrounds through their school days, a rather mundane—but significant—reality emerges: school is a difficult, unavoidable part of life, but parents can help by being calm, empathic and engaged. Though short on practical strategies, the book sheds light on what goes on behind classroom doors and urges parents to "value the truth of a child's experiences."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Psychologist Thompson and journalist Barker, collaborators on Raising Cain (2000), offer advice to parents and educators on how to help children cope with the ever-increasing pressures of school and life. Based on interviews with children, parents, and teachers and--most revealing--shadowing students at school, the authors present a portrait of children facing the usual pressures of growing up with the added pressures of a fast-paced modern American culture. The authors lament that so much emphasis is placed on academic performance that parents and educators too often ignore the psychological aspects. On the surface, students present the usual preoccupations with friends and grades. But, as the authors detail here, there is a lot going on beneath the surface as students scratch good-bye messages into the locker of a boy who was killed in a car accident and students express cynicism about whether their teachers really care about them. In this absorbing look at modern childhood, the authors advise parents to get beyond their romantic and selective memories of school years to understand the pressures facing their children. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

If You Believe What Children Say

I know that school is meant for learning and expanding your personality but adults either don’t think you’re trying hard enough or they don’t care.

—Sixth-grade girl

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

—The Hebrew Bible, Ecclesiastes 12:12

The question “How was school today?” may be the most-asked and least-answered question in America. It is the question that all parents are compelled to voice every day sometime between three p.m. and bedtime.

“How was school today?” No matter how gently you ask it, no matter how cleverly you phrase it, 99 percent of children don’t give you the information you crave. “Fine,” they reply, or “Okay.” Younger ones may give you some details; a child who is a real talker, a born journalist, may give you an extended news report. But such kids are rare. Most children don’t share the kind of information about school that parents want to hear. Besides, they know that if they made the effort, you’d just ask again the next day. You’d never be satisfied. That’s the way it is with all of us parents, and as our children get older they may protest being asked the “How was . . .” question. “Mom,” they declare through clenched teeth, “it was fine.” What they mean is: “Don’t bug me!”

Still, we cannot help ourselves. We were so connected to our children when they were little. We watched everything they did; we charted their developmental progress daily. We phoned our closest friends when our eleven-month-old seemed ready to walk. “She’s cruising around the living room holding on to chairs and the coffee table.” Nothing escaped our vigilant attention and eager celebration.

Then off they go to school and suddenly we’re starved for information. We can’t see what they’re doing or what’s happening around them or to them. We’re cut off from much of our children’s lives. We want scraps, quiz grades, gossip about the teacher’s personality—anything. I once asked an audience of parents what they would ask for if they had “the teacher of their dreams.”

A mother said, “I’d like my son’s teacher to call me every day and tell me about his day.”

“In what grade is your son?” I asked.

“Tenth grade,” replied the mother without embarrassment, as the entire audience laughed.

But what do we really hope to learn from that question we keep asking? I imagine a parent asking a child, “How was school today?,” and the child answering with something like this: “Mom, I’d like to tell you, I really would, but it is all too complicated to put into words. I don’t know where to begin. The truth is that you’re not asking me about school really, you’re asking me how my life is going, and I don’t have any perspective on that. I’m trying to develop into a person here and sometimes the school seems to be something of a help and at other times it feels like it is totally in the way of my becoming a person. Besides, why do I have to tell you what school is all about? Didn’t you go to school? Don’t you know what school is like? Why keep asking me?”

Of course you did go to school, but what does that have to do with your child’s education? The aim of this book is to take you into the minds of children as well as back into your own school memories in an attempt to put you back in touch with the gritty reality of being a child in school. I hope I can help you appreciate the extraordinary psychological journey that constitutes every child’s institutional education. But first, let’s start with you.

Have you recently thought about your school years, what it really felt like, down to your bones? How did it feel to sit on those hard wooden or plastic chairs for hours, to stand in line to go to music or PE? What about eating lunch in a crowded, noisy cafeteria? Do you remember struggling to master a concept? Do you remember how it felt to get bad grades? Or perhaps you never received an F or a D or even a C. Were you ever afraid of the possibility? Did you come home from fifth grade and find yourself anxious until you finished your homework? Did you ever feel sick just thinking about going to school, or at the end of a school day? I know a talented physician who was, as you might expect, an accomplished student in school. Many days, however, his take on his teacher’s demands made him so anxious that he threw up when he got home.

Did school ever bore you? Do you remember what a difference it could make in your daily life if the teacher really liked—or seemed to hate—you? Do you remember PE class? Did you love it or fear it? Do you remember the texture of it: the exciting, scary games like dodgeball (if you liked it) and the stupid games like dodgeball (if you didn’t)? Were you afraid of being picked last? Were you nervous about the way your body looked or about changing your clothes in front of other children? Do you remember the endless amounts of wasted time in school?

Did your parents care about school? Had your mom or dad been good in school? Do you remember a teacher whom you loved? A teacher who seemed to care deeply about you? Do you still think of her from time to time? Was school a refuge from your family? Did it seem a calm and organized place in comparison to the chaos of home?

There are a million questions I could ask, hoping to make you remember things you haven’t thought about in years. Why would I want to dredge up those memories? As a psychologist, I am fascinated by the lives people lived in school. I am also committed to reminding parents about the day-to-day experience of school so that they can really comprehend what their children are experiencing daily. Every child’s school experience is an intricate, exciting, sometimes painful, often boring psychological journey. We should all be aware of that, but that’s not what parents describe when they talk to me about their children’s school experiences.

Parents Have Lost Their Memories of What School Is Really Like

As a psychologist who works in schools, I spend much of my day with the unhappiest, least successful, and sometimes most bitter children in the building. When I finally sit down with a child, there is the hope and assumption that I will get him back on track in some way, that I will find the key to motivate him, that I will learn some secret about his family life—teachers always speculate that there are problems at home—that will remove the obstacles from his path and help turn him around.

Sometimes I am able to do exactly that. I find the key and I share that information with the child’s educators. Most of the time it is not that easy. Generally I succeed in doing something less magical but more substantial. I learn how a child perceives school, in what ways school might not be a good fit for her, and, most important, I come to understand what she has to do every day to survive school.

My understanding of a student’s school journey, of his strategy for negotiating school, is perhaps the most important thing I can learn from a therapeutic encounter with a child. This goes beyond any simple diagnosis, and beyond testing for a learning disability, though either of these may be an important part of the journey. Just the act of a child communicating to me how he feels he fits or doesn’t fit into the school environment may change his experience of school entirely: simply being heard and understood can be healing or encouraging. If I can find a way to convey a portion of what I have learned from the child to my colleagues, and they respond helpfully, and to a child’s parents, that too may change the nature of the child’s experience in school.

After twenty years of working this way with parents and children, I am convinced that one of the greatest barriers to helping children in schools is the fact that parents don’t have an accurate view of school. It’s paradoxical: Since parents spent time in schools when they were kids, they should, theoretically, have such information available. However, it has been my experience that adults have lost touch with the texture and meaning of their own educational experiences. As a result, children feel that their parents are “out of it,” that they don’t understand. Parents tend to focus on grades and how it is all going to turn out and miss seeing the realities of their child’s life as it is lived day to day.

This happens for a number of reasons: Our childhood memories are often lost or repressed. Also, perhaps starved for information about a child’s school day, parents are condemned to focus on their child’s future. Doing so, they may overlook important aspects of their child’s present.

Even the most thoughtful parents of school-age children tend to hold the simplistic view that their kids operate at just two speeds: working hard enough or not working hard enough. Parents all too often use mechanical metaphors to describe children. We say that a child may need to “get her act into gear,” or “put the pedal to the metal,” and get her grades up. Sometimes, indeed, it is the case that a child isn’t working as hard as she theoretically might. However, she cannot just be shifted into higher gear, or given a “kick in the butt” or a “jump-start,” as many parents have said to me. If we’re going to think about children as having gears, we should compare them to the most sophisticated mountain bikes. Children have at least twenty-eight gears and are constantly making minute adjustments as they go up and down the hills of the school day.

Every parent shou...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0345450124
• ISBN 13: 9780345450128
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272