Defining Success


When my oldest son was a senior in high school, the question I grew to despise was “Where’s Alek going to go next year?” When my answer, through the month of April, was, “He doesn’t know,” it was met with sympathetic nods, and implied knowledge that my kid wasn’t an academic. He obviously wasn’t on track to go to a high-end school…like everybody else’s kid. Or so it seemed. I resented the sympathy, but even more I resented hearing about plans other kids were making.

I tried adjusting my thinking, my point of reference for what determined success in a 17 year-old. But mostly I came up disappointed and questioned our parenting and where we went wrong.

Alek was an easy-working (someone who doesn’t work hard) B student, didn’t belong to clubs, and didn’t do volunteer work but did work part-time for a chain sandwich restaurant nearby. A tall, good-looking boy, he laughed and joked easily, and enjoyed hanging out with us until he began driving and dating. He didn’t engage in risky behavior…in other words he didn’t drink and do drugs, and he had nearly perfect school and work attendance. He was also polite. In my day, we’d have said he was doing enough. But this was his day, and I was feeling mighty disappointed.

Ultimately he did choose a school, one far away from home, one that was happy to provide a scholarship for his 3.1 GPA. And I finally had an answer to inquiries about his plans.
My sister had accused me of wanting a “Stepford son.” I’ll admit it, I did. Think how simple it would be to parent a kid who is doing everything you envisioned for him since that day he announced as a three year old he’d like to be a paleontologist. When his nanny described him as a thinker. When his second grade teacher said he was brilliant, but would always be a victim of his attitude. There it is, the early veering off the path, away from the perfection of the robotic Stepford life.

As parents, at what point do we back off and let our older kids, those high school juniors and seniors to twenty-somethings, make choices that make us cringe? And what if in backing off, the result is that independent child chooses a life far from our dreams? The dreams based on his potential, his genetic predisposition to intellectual greatness, and enlightened parenting.

I guess the answer is, it’s his life, not ours. Not ours to live, and not ours to fix. That’s hard to swallow for most of us baby-boomers who have hovered over our children like no other generation. We are the first generation to be so engaged on a continual basis with our kids that the term uber-parenting is used to describe us. (I’m pretty sure it’s not intended as a compliment.) Some of us feel our kids owe it to us to turn out the way we envisioned, agreeing with the values that we imparted, and behaving accordingly. We want back what we put in.

I couldn’t understand why my son couldn’t pull off academic greatness that would have landed him in a prestigious…ok, nice, college. And when he decided to quit college for a year, I worried he would be aimless and find it difficult to re-enter academia. He dated an uninspiring girl, and his friends were floundering with him…what happened to my paleontologist?

There’s very little written about parenting children in their high-teens to low twenties. What you find are books about your adult children moving back home, how your grasp of English isn’t enough to communicate with your child, or how to love a truly dysfunctional (as in the real bad stuff like drugs, criminal behavior and the like,) child. There’s no celebrity pediatrician like T. Berry Brazelton telling us to stop looking in our high school senior’s backpacks for homework assignments, no British parenting guru Penelope Leach suggesting how to ensure our college freshman goes to class each day, no Marguerite Kelly providing personality descriptions/what to expect of the 21 year old.

Several parents with whom I have commiserated, have opined that they are frustrated with their older child… the high school senior who seems to only wake and get to school upon the shill of his mother’s angry voice and then forgets to turn in homework, the college sophomore who dropped out of school to work in a tattoo parlor, and the socialite who stays in constant contact with his peers via his always connected cell or computer at the expense of his grades.

The problem as parents see it, is the child isn’t performing to an academic/success formula that we recognize, and we wonder, “Will he ever get it together?” And we guiltily admit that we wish our kids were the ones attending the selective colleges, getting academic honors, as well as doing community volunteer work, acting in the local theater, dating someone equally high achieving, not to mention saving the planet….

But I wonder how much of what we want for our children is really a matter of imposing our middle-aged maturity onto them? We see so clearly the opportunities that could be theirs and can’t bear to see them throw them away.

Are we really just impatient for them to catch up with us, skipping all the mistakes and miscues we suffered through?

I suspect all we really need to do is to change our definition of success.