Presenting the Right Expectations

Don’t hand­i­cap your chil­dren by mak­ing their lives easy. –Robert A. Heinlein

I have always believed that chil­dren will live up to our expec­ta­tions. If we expect them to work hard and suc­ceed, then they will – or at least they will try to. If we don’t expect them to try, then they won’t. I have applied this stan­dard to my own chil­dren, of course, but also to every child whom I have coached in youth base­ball and in what used to be called Boy Scout­ing. I’d like to think that it’s work­ing, and actu­ally have objec­tive data to that effect both in the suc­cess of my own chil­dren and also from feed­back I have received from many par­ents of the chil­dren whom I have men­tored over the years.

I make my liv­ing in a tech­ni­cal field by being the guy who does pre­sen­ta­tions (among other things), so I know the value of being able to speak in front of an audi­ence. I was struck recently by an arti­cle in The Atlantic about a grow­ing move­ment among some high school­ers as dis­crim­i­na­tory and demand­ing alter­na­tive assign­ments. I’m sure that many will think me insen­si­tive, but my reac­tion is that these kids should just “suck it up” and do the assign­ment and they will even­tu­ally come to appre­ci­ate the value in hav­ing done so.

The arti­cle focuses ini­tially on chil­dren who legit­i­mately have anx­i­ety dis­or­ders, and I think that Mary Chas­tain over at LegalIn­sur­rec­tion does a won­der­ful job of rep­re­sent­ing that side of the argu­ment, but even as an anx­i­ety suf­ferer her­self, she con­cludes that anx­i­ety shouldn’t be an excuse for kids not hav­ing to do pre­sen­ta­tions. Instead, she sug­gests that the teacher should work with the stu­dent and “start off small.” She points out in Shapiro-​esque fash­ion that “the real world doesn’t care about your feelings.”

It is of course impor­tant to under­stand children’s feel­ings, but only in the con­text of being able to help the child over­come those feel­ings to do what is in his or her best inter­est, which a child is, by def­i­n­i­tion, not capa­ble of know­ing. That’s what par­ents and teach­ers are for. A teacher like Kath­leen Carver, quoted in the arti­cle, who thinks that she needs to cater to her stu­dents’ feel­ings or they won’t like her, is actu­ally hand­i­cap­ping her stu­dents as Hein­lein says in the quote above.

I once had a player on one of my youth base­ball teams. We were in the play­offs and, due to eli­gi­bil­ity rules, he was our last remain­ing pitcher. He had a bad inning where he walked a few bat­ters and gave up a few runs and he came off the mound at the end of the inning in tears. Our team scored, so we were def­i­nitely not out of the game, but when it was our turn to take the field again, this boy refused. I lis­tened to him express his feel­ings about why he didn’t want to pitch and then pro­ceeded to tell him that he didn’t really have a choice. He was our only pitcher and the rest of the team was depend­ing on him to go back out there. He reluc­tantly agreed, still in tears, and pro­ceeded to walk the first bat­ter he faced. I thought he might break down at that point, but he struck out the next bat­ter and the inning ended with him get­ting a dou­ble play by catch­ing a line drive back to him and dou­bling the run­ner off first base. I will never for­get the smile on his face as he came off the field and high-​fived me.

Does Ms. Carver really think that I should have “responded” to his feel­ings by let­ting him sit out?

Please remem­ber to hit DaTip­Jar, or bet­ter yet, subscribe!