Fear and Failure

That is the chapter I am currently on in How Children Fail. I am not even all the way through the chapter yet and I can not help but write about it. I have not only found myself as a young child in this chapter but as a parent as well in some areas of it. It has almost given me a breath of fresh air to be able to see that there could be an "easier" side to this parenting thing. And yet it makes me wonder, as I have so often, why we seem to make parenting so much harder than it has to be. But worse yet why I have been able to learn this in so many other areas with my children but still struggled as much as I have in some. It seems like with each child it has gotten "easier" in a sense. I have simplified and gone back to more natural ways with each child I have had and it has certainly lightened my load so to speak and yet it seemed to happen just in time for the next "big challenge" or child as the case maybe. Am I talking in circles?

I guess it is funny to me how each child that comes along seems to challenge me more but are in a sense easier to handle since I have figured out how to be relaxed as a parent in that age. So in essence it seems I continue to struggle in the areas of my oldest children certainly not because they are more difficult but because I am still trying to "figure it all out" and perhaps it is that very thing that holds me back more than ever?

Gage continues to be a handful for us. Not in the way that Brody is a handful where he is just into everything and never know what to expect out of him next kind of way. See Brody is a new adventure and while Gage is as well it is a far more heart breaking way. We watch him struggle and I can recognize the same agony in him I had as a child but it manifests in a different kind of way. I expect since I can empathize with his feelings like I had them myself only yesterday that I will know how to help him and yet I don't. Maybe it is because these are the very feelings I myself have still not "fixed" within myself. How can I help anyone else sort through these if I myself have not done so myself? But this book gives me hope that it could very well be an easier fix than I ever expected.

"Note the danger of using a child's concept of himself to get him to do good work. We say 'You are the kind of sensible, smart, good, ect., ect. boy or girl who can easily do this problem, if you try.' But if the work fails, so does the concept. If he can't do the problem, no matter how hard he tries, then, clearly, he is not sensible, smart, or good.
If children worry so much about failure, might it not be because they rate success too high and depend on it too much? May there not be altogether too much praise for good work, we make him feel 'good,' may we not, without intending it, be making him feel 'bad' when he does bad work?
Do children really need so much praise? When a child, after a long struggle, finally does the cube puzzle, does he need to be told that he has done well? Doesn't he know, without being told, that he has accomplished something? In fact, when we praise him, are we not perhaps horning in on his accomplishment, stealing a little of his glory, edging our way into the limelight, praising ourselves for having helped to turn out such a smart child? Is not most adult praise of children a kind of self-praise?"

Now first reading this you may think what I did and even what Dave said after I read it to him... "so we shouldn't praise our children?" I don't believe this is what he was getting at but you really have to give it a good long ponder. It did not take us long at all to realize that Gage's biggest issue was in fact a self-esteem issue. He clearly feels and has expressed that he is always living in his brother's shadow and Dave and I have witnessed this on more than one occasion. So naturally we thought if his self esteem was low it was up to us as his parents to "build" it back up. So we did... or so we thought. But yet for every time we would tell him how wonderful he was at this or that he would seem to have even more breakdowns leaving us wondering what in the world we were doing wrong. These few paragraphs were a light bulb moment for me... We were not building his self esteem at all, we were adding to his pressure he has already put on himself to be "as good as" his brother.

He certainly doesn't have to "prove" himself we already know how wonderful he is. So why were making such a big deal about him proving himself? So I suppose it is not the praise they need as much as it is simply our love.

Another section of this chapter which spoke to me VERY deeply was when the author wrote about retarded children. The reason for that being that my mother was the oldest of four children and he sister just beneath her was hit by a car when she was 3 years old leaving her mentally retarded. After reading about the fear of failure the "normal" child feels he went into what life must be like for the retarded and how they are probably more "created" than that being just how they are. My mother, her sisters and her mother witnessed and spoke often of their speculations of the very same thing. My Grandfather had a lot to do with the mental condition of how my aunt was treated. He held a lot of guilt over her accident and it showed in the ways he spoiled her. It wasn't until she moved out on her own and out of his home before she and everyone else was able to see her real capabilities take place.

Not that I can compare my "healthy" daughter's lack of speech at an age when most feel she "should" be talking to that of my Aunt's mental illness due to a care accident but I believe these very suggestions must have echoed in the back of my head when Dave and I made the choice to not place Aubriel in a box, or at least that was our definition of it. I remember many people asking me if I was planning on getting her "help" or simply tested even to see if she needed help. Being that she was 3 years old and barely speaking and not very well compared to other 3 year olds at that. I knew I didn't want her tested because I knew what they would tell me. That she was somewhat behind and she would benefit from speech therapy or even worse than that. But it was just that, we didn't want her in a box. To feel the pressure of not living up to someone else's standards. We didn't want someone else telling us how smart or not smart as the case maybe. We knew she was who she was and that she would develop all on her own in her own time.

Now she is 5 and when people hear that she spoke "late" they are shocked. Like she would show some "sign" of it since we never got her help.

"Our mistake is at bottom a mistake of language. We take the word 'normal,' meaning usual, what happens most of the time, and turn in into proper, correct, desirable, what ought to happen all the time."

As I read this book it does make me grateful for somethings about my children's school such as no letter grades since that does not tell you how intelligent your child is rather simply how much information they retain. That is not to say they do not keep track of how my children are doing in school, it is just with a different system than the added pressure of letter grades. But even now as I read this book I wonder how much of it they are actually "learning" when they are showing signs of retaining information.

"What puzzles me is, if IQ measures even roughly the rate at which we learn, why a child with an IQ of 50 should not in time get to be a reasonably normal and competent person. It is said that, in terms of what he knows and can figure out, the average adult is not much beyond the level of the average twelve-year-old. For all my skepticism about the measurement and testing of intelligence, I think this reflects some kind of truth. Then why should not the child with the IQ of 50 catch up with the crowd, more or less, by the time he is twenty-five? What happens to him along the way to ensure that he will never catch up?"

I am now sure that speak therapy, since our daughter currently shows no signs of ever needing it, would have hurt her much more than it would have ever helped her, even if it would have made her "normal" sooner.

I think this book is slowly giving me back the wonderment I felt when I first had my children and I continue to feel with each new baby as I watch them develop and grow all on their own. I felt like I somehow "lost" that as my children aged and accepted it as simply part of them growing up but I am starting to see glimpses of it returning and it is giving me the feeling of "coming home again." Like these little miracles I gave birth to are still right here in front of me and not lost to old age as we are lead to believe.