As a parent of three young children, I reflect a lot on what it means to parent. I know for sure that I am not the best parent, and I make tons of mistakes. What I am about to write, then, is not meant as criticism to any parent, but for me to express what insights have been dawning on me, and to put them together in a way that is hopefully helpful for other parents in their own reflections on what it means to parent well.
The typical American parent seems to involve their child or children in some activity, like sports, gymnastics, ballet, music, or something else along these lines. When asked the reason for this, the answer is not typically that they want their children to be professional athletes, gymnasts, ballet dancers, or musicians, but that these activities provide opportunities for self-awareness, learning to play with a team, have more appreciation for some facet of life, or some kind of other enrichment.
The problem with this is the almost totally indirect nature of these aims. The following will attempt to show how this indirect aim can and often does create some real, long term negative impact. One example, however, may suffice to demonstrate what I mean. For example, a parent sends their child to baseball, not with the intention that they become professional baseball players, but so that they can learn some hand-eye coordination, learn how to play with a team, develop focus, have fun, etc. Notice: the baseball itself is incidental, for basketball could serve the same overall practical purpose.
Now, what is the scope of this activity? The child who plays baseball, let's say they play from eight years old to eighteen, will play and practice on average about five hours per week, often far more. Many sports go year round, and certainly gymnastics, ballet, and music lessons can, and so let’s say they average about forty weeks a year of five hours per week. That amounts to two hundred hours per year. That’s two hundred hours per year of the indirect accomplishment of the intended goal, and two thousand hours over the course of ten years.
We are now in a position to flesh the example out more. When a child goes to baseball practice and to games, the coaches largely spend their time in baseball-specific skill training, such as fielding ground balls, catching pop-ups, throwing to first base, to second base, making double plays, pitching, catching, batting, and so on. During and after practice and games they assess, and constantly assess, their performance of these skills. They don’t spend specific attention on team building, trust, effective communication, concentration, etc. These are ancillary to the principle focus which, naturally, is winning baseball games. What is more, these ancillary skills, the actual goals of sending the child to baseball, are only developed marginally and to the degree required for the production of baseball-specific skills.
The foregoing is an incredibly time-intensive and therefore inefficient way to learn an intended skill or gain some appreciation, especially when the desired skill is not the focus of the activity. Moreover, the desired skill, let’s hone in on team building, is often sidelined and left out of focus. The team building is simply an accidental by-product of doing coordinated tasks, like throwing a ball from first base to third base, but certainly that does not teach all that needs to be known and practiced for effective teamwork. The same goes for ballet, gymnastics, and music, which in some cases may require little to no teamwork at all, or much, as in the case of playing music in an orchestra. But even here in an orchestra, the overwhelming majority of the time is spent on developing a specific skill set related to the particular task, the performance of some piece of music. How much of that kind of participation in an orchestra is required to learn team building?
If, alternatively, a company wanted to teach team building among their staff, they would hire someone to come in and directly teach team building. They would not bring in a baseball coach to teach baseball with the hope that team building would emerge as a byproduct. They would not bring in a music teacher with fifteen different instruments who would then teach them these instruments over the course of years in order to derive team building lessons along the way to the performing of some piece of orchestral music. They would teach far more directly, using tasks that are subordinated to the actual purpose for which they are there: team building.
The same goes for physical skill building. Baseball does not teach a person how to use their body in a comprehensive way. They are not learning anatomy and physiology, they are not working through the entire range of motion of their muscles, learning how to balance strength and flexibility, except maybe for a few minutes prior to skill practice or games. The exercise they receive for two thousand hours over the course of ten years is subordinated to the specific task of baseball, to continue with that example, and so again the goal of exercise is not met in an effective way. Gymnastics may be so thorough, but how many hours on a balance beam are required to accomplish the actual parental goal? A general athletics course that balances theory and practice would accomplish that goal far more effectively.
Moving on, one of the goals of parenting is not simply to grow large children, but to foster effective habits and skills in young adults for the sake of effective and skillful living. I am afraid we are training our children for two hundred hours a year in activities that give the preponderance of their focus to arbitrary and useless skills, which is to say a skill that is not immediately useful to their life or others. This is why children’s activities can be so exhausting for a parent, because they intuit the fact that an enormous amount of energy is being expended for their children to learn a baseball, ballet, gymnastics, or piano skill that they will not use, for the inefficient delivery of the goal they are intending, such as healthy bodies, balance, gracefulness of motion, or appreciation of music.
What is the solution? Well, instead of spending countless hours perfecting them in skills that will not help them, teach or have taught to them skills that will. Not everyone needs a baseball player, but everyone needs a carpenter. Not everyone needs a ballerina, but everyone needs a plumber. Not everyone needs a gymnast, but everyone needs a mechanic. Not everyone needs a piano player, but everyone needs an electrician, a farmer, and a person who can make or repair clothes. If, over the course of ten years and two thousand hours, children were taught some or even all of these skills, with the same level of dedication as given to sports and entertainment-industry skills, if they were taught how to work together to build, repair, and make things work, then after ten years a young adult could repair almost anything, build almost anything, save enormous amounts of money, and have a tremendous and practical set of skills that would give them authentic confidence to survive in the real world.
Instead of getting a trophy, putting on a performance, or playing in a concert, a graduation project could be the supervised building of a house for a homeless family. In other words, instead of giving children over to activities that produce a useless set of specific skills, teach them how to be skillful and effective with personally and communally needed and helpful things. Let them learn teamwork there; let them gain confidence there; let them get exercise there. I am afraid we are subtly teaching our children to be useless and helpless, to place all their eggs in the college basket and there to receive an education that still leaves them utterly dependent on the narrow demands of their field.
In conclusion, I don’t think what I said above is original, but it is a growing awareness that really needs to be spread. As everyone acknowledges, children are our future, and so instead of grooming them to be athletes and entertainers, rather groom them to be helpful, to build, to repair, and to survive. It’s time we revision parenting.
-Fr. Joshua Schooping
No comments:
Post a Comment