Q: I see so many parents pushing their children so that they’ll be at the top of the heap. I don’t remember being pushed like this as a child. Sure, my parents wanted good things for me, but I wonder if somehow people want too much for their children? What do you think?
A: This is an interesting question because over the past twenty-five years I have worked with children in a variety of settings, from the elementary school classroom, to camp outs with Girl Guides of Canada, to my own children and their playmates and now to my private practice as a Parenting Coach. And I too have wondered if parents, in their efforts and worries about securing their children’s future, have somehow forgotten how much pressure they can impose upon their prodigy. What kind of pressure?
I have seen a pattern over the years of parents’ expectations becoming higher and higher which isn’t always in their child’s best interests. They send them to sports activities that eat away at their evenings, weekends and summer holidays without regard for how important having down time is to the balanced development of their child. They send them to tutors, foreign language classes, music lessons, and seek out private schools, with the intent of raising their children’s academic achievements so they can be streamed into post secondary schools and programs, without regard for their child’s unique interests and strengths. They seem to have decided what career choices the child should consider long before their young ones even know who they are as people. They worry that if the child chooses auto mechanics as a career instead of law or medicine, that somehow they’ve failed as parents. It’s almost as if they’ve become obsessed with having extraordinary children who will rise to great heights and that anything less will be their greatest disappointment. So, what’s a parent to do?
I think parents today forget to embrace the ‘ordinary’ in their children, with all its glory attached. Let me share a story with you from my own ordinary childhood. I remember entering high school feeling very plain. I wasn’t athletic. I couldn’t sing or play a guitar. (In my day being able to play a guitar was very cool!) I wasn’t the brightest child in the class. And my social skills weren’t spectacular either. (No boy friends, and not what one would call ‘popular’.) However, one day during class, my teacher Sister Rita Marie shared a story with her students about her dream as a young novitiate. Her vision upon entering the convent was to rise to sainthood through good deeds. She knew the path needed to be filled with extraordinary acts of generosity, yet her first assignment after leaving the convent was in a senior’s residence. She disliked old people intensely and found them difficult and frightening. Her situation was extremely disturbing to her and she could not understand how sainthood could be achieved in such terrible surroundings. She cried herself to sleep each night and she continued to remain unhappy. However, over time, a new possibility crept into her thoughts. Perhaps she wasn’t destined for sainthood after all! Perhaps, God had other things in store for her, which included taking care of the frail, fragile and sick senior members of our society. She began to carefully reflect upon what sainthood was all about, and more importantly what kind of people the saints were. She decided that in order to become a saint, one needed to begin with life’s ordinary tasks and that life’s ordinary tasks were tended to by ordinary people like her. She began not to worry about her own destiny and instead put her efforts into being a comfort to those around her. As she continued tending to her charges, she developed a wonderful rapport with them. She was a good listener, had a wonderful sense of humour, an infectious laugh, and made new people to the group feel warm and welcome. For my part, I thought she was the most extraordinary ordinary woman I had ever known. She had a way of engaging her students in conversation, always made us feel important and significant, and was never too hurried to talk. As I moved into my adult years I was always grateful to her for teaching me one of my most important life lessons and that is that there is great glory in being ordinary. Through Sister Rita Marie I became happy with the person that I was. I was not Gandhi, Mozart, nor Einstein. I was a young woman filled with my own dreams and visions and I knew that the path I followed would be wonderful. And wonderful it is.
Today, I lead a wonderful ordinary life….I am a wife, I am a mother, I am an entrepreneur and I am a coach. In fact my life is so ordinary that it’s extraordinary in its ordinariness. And I celebrate that. I encourage my clients to not fear the ordinary for their children or themselves. I invite them to slow down and be patient with their own ambitions and worries. I invite them to celebrate the wonder their children possess and ask them to practice patience with them as they grow and explore who they are. And I invite them to be open to the possibility that through being ordinary, one can be positively extraordinary!
Terry Carson, M.Ed. is a Parent Coach and a mother of four children, who understands the demands and challenges facing today’s urban mom. As Canada’s first licensed Coach-Parenting ™ Coach, her goal is to make parenting easier, more fulfilling and less stressful. She coaches clients on a one-on-one basis or through her Parent Coaching on Wheels workshops and is a regular contributor to urbanmoms.ca Urban Parents section. Please send Terry questions by email or through her website.