NAIS lecture - 2003 Annual Conference Speech from Wendy Mogel

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Psychologist Wendy Mogel, like Michael Thompson, is a gifted storyteller and draws many of her lessons from her clinical psychology practice.  Her opening story involved running a child through a battery of psychological tests - at the request of the parents.  When Mogel announced that she had good news about their child - that he needed no pills, and no therapy - the parents seemed disappointed.  They were convinced their child was either learning disabled, gifted - or both.

Some parents are over the top.  One family that had gone through the grueling admissions process put deposits down on four different schools - “just hoping to buy a little time.” And when it comes to teachers, Mogel says, parents seem to see them in black-and-white:  either perfect, or destructive.

Please tell your parents, Mogel urges, that an independent school is not a cruise ship without any waves.  That it’s OK for your kid to have a crabby, uninspired teacher once in a while, because in life they’ll have a boss like that.  Or a mate - at least the first one. And it’s OK for children to be bored, to be cold, or to be hungry for one-and-a-half seconds.

What, she asks, fuels this anxiety on the part of our parents?  First and foremost - we live in a world of fear.  Independent schools are a safe place.  In fact, independent schools serve as a kind of Walmart - where parents seek to fill all their spiritual and emotional needs. When was the last time you saw a trace of childhood in an elementary science fair?  Parents, of course, are rushing to construct elaborate projects for their children, and Mogel says that her new theory about this is that parents are hobby-deprived.

One school assignment involved the making of stringed instruments.  No shoe boxes and rubber bands here - several parents hand-carved elaborate violins for their children.  Nowadays parents do everything - they fax in their children’s work, they send in their lunches.  One set of parents sent a child a bouquet of roses after a theatrical production - in which their child played a bush.

Parents, Mogel maintains, are both over-involved, but also loving.  Yet through their over-involvement, they are unwittingly damaging their children.  This is manifested when the children go off to college, and counselors can tell immediately which students are self-sufficient, and which ones can’t survive without their parents.  Similarly, at a third grade retreat - Mogel could predict who would be homesick - those whose parents had packed for them - vs. those who had packed for themselves.

Parents create “perfect resume gods,” but what the kids really need is to be able to make their own cheap mistakes.  They must be able to stand alone and take it.  Mogel recommends that parents take a good look at dog training books, which may well serve as a model for how to treat your children.  All the characters are there, including the alpha dog.  Above all, parents must listen compassionately to their children.

Plenty of myths abound in the minds of school parents, hoping for an idyllic experience for their children.  One is: “Any and all troubled classmates will disappear.”  As for school heads, the good ones have an air of slightly detached amusement vis-à-vis the over-involved parents and they also have a good assistant head to hear all the whining (or wingeing as the British say).

Because our world is anxious, confusing, and fast-paced, we need to take time, and form some detachment.  Just like in an airplane, when you are advised to put on your own oxygen mask first, before you put one on your child.  Mogel advises that if parents, teachers, and administrators don’t have their own lives outside the school—then the level of anxiety rises and the children are affected.  She also quotes rabbis who say that if nobody storms out of the temple after a high holiday sermon, then they have failed.

“We need to be able to say ‘no’ to parents,” says Mogel.  Even if parents are experienced, and have had several children - they are still beginners when it comes to school.  Our culture, of course, reinforces the go-go mentality - as illustrated by an ad for a gym in L.A.:  “You can rest when you’re dead.”  Children are so overscheduled that they simply need sleep, not ADD pills.

Teachers and parents need to talk more together.  Homework needs to be confined to a shorter period of time - children have learned to stretch that time out.  Mogel recommends that we convince parents that children need simple basics - like sleep, nutrition, and plain old down time.  Children are walking around like dazed survivors from a bewildering survival camp.  The boys are filled with secret anxiety; the girls think they need to be perfect and produce high grades.

Sad to say, anxious - if caring—parents are bad role models for their children.  When one boy was asked what he wanted to be when he grows up he said, “I know what I don’t want to be.  I don’t want to be like my parents - they seem so sad, scared, and stressed.”

One final story involved an upper school boy who had his own car and one day threw his keys onto the roof of the administration building - where they got stuck.  He went to the dean and demanded that he call the maintenance people to retrieve them.  The dean said sure, in the spring, when everything thaws.  Outraged, the student called his father and the father called the dean.

The father had two words for the dean:  “Thank you.”

February 5, 2003