Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel R. Heischman, executive director of the National Association of Episcopal Schools, lives and works in New York City. Earlier positions include executive director of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools (CRIS), assistant headmaster and headmaster of the Upper School at St. Albans School in Washington, DC, and college chaplain at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Good INFLUENCE

Church Publishing Incorporated

Contents

Chapter One

Living and Fostering the Grown-Up Life

There is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying, than true adulthood. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory.

— Toni Morrison Commencement Address at Wellesley College (May 2004)

A dignified adult life, with its heights and depths, protected by wisely kept secrets, once attracted children in such a way that they wanted to become adults. Now they see incoherent emptiness and chaos.

— Robert Bly in The Sibling Society

FOR A NUMBER of years I served as the division head of an independent boys' high school in Washington, D.C., and among the many tasks I undertook was the routine but difficult notification of parents that their son had been either suspended or put on probation, due to a disciplinary problem or an issue of academic integrity In solemn tones, and frequently over the telephone, I would preface the news by saying, "I have some bad news for you," and in most cases the parent already knew that something might be up. After sharing the news of the decision, I came to expect the invariable first question from the parent at the other end of the telephone: "Will this go on my son's record?"

In most cases, I was able to assure the parent that the school did not, as a policy, list disciplinary actions on the academic transcript that would be sent off to colleges. Moreover, with the passage of time and a clean record from that day forward, the official letter of probation or suspension would be removed from the student's file. It was comforting news to the parent still dealing with the shock and disappointment of this setback. However, as many times as I was able to reassure the parent, that initial question never failed to unsettle me: Was this, I would wonder, where we should begin? Is this where we should be focusing our care for the boy? Rather than ask about how his or her child was doing, or consider the lessons that might be learned from the whole experience, the parent went directly to the consequences. Would this be seen by the college admissions people? Would this hurt his future job prospects? Would seeing this on his record prejudice a future teacher against him? Somehow the internal life of the young man was taking a back seat to his external promotion in the world.

That particular type of telephone conversation, however, although common, was less frequent than another. With great regularity parents would call me to express their concern about how their son was doing in a particular class, on an athletic team, or with a group of friends: How come our son is not doing better in math class, and why did we not know about this before now? Why isn't our son getting more playing time on the soccer team? Why does teacher X not like him (as reflected in the poor grade he received on his recent paper)? Did I know what a bad influence one of their son's friends was having on him? In some cases, all the parent wanted me to do was listen; in other situations, there was a clear expectation that I should do something. After all, I was the one supposedly with the power to change things! In most cases, I would respond that I would be willing to pursue the problem, but I did need to tell the boy, or his teacher, or his coach, about our conversation. Suddenly things would take a very different turn; often the parent would say, "My son would be furious to know that I had called you!"

It is a familiar situation for many educators. In essence, parents wanted me to take action without their being implicated, largely for the reason that the child would be upset with mom or dad. Once again, the external factors— particularly the possibility that a son might be unhappy with the interference of his mother or father, that this would make him resent the parent—took precedence over how the boy was faring, and ignored the fact that emotional, moral, and spiritual growth often comes as a result of someone doing something to us or for us that we may not like them doing.

As I heard these concerns expressed with increasing frequency, I found myself wondering, "What does this say about us, as adults, in our contemporary world?" With a premium placed on the external affirmation and advancement of our children, along with the desire for our children to "like us," I began to conclude that there were some seismic shifts taking place in how we adults perceived ourselves as adults. We all seek to understand how our lives, and the lives of the young people we nurture, are being perceived by the external world; likewise, we all wish to experience respect and regard from the generation below us.

However, adulthood—particularly as it relates to the guidance of our children and students—is less about what we need than what they need. While parents may need to be popular with their child, the child needs parents to stand their ground. While parents may need to see the child always happy, the child needs to encounter experiences where disappointment and setback help her to learn and grow. While a parent may need to be perceived as youthful in appearance and temperament, a child needs that parent to be an adult.

There are many signs in our culture that our fundamental understanding of adulthood is changing. Whether it be the postponement of adulthood or the growing eagerness of adults to look younger and younger, we are clearly in the midst of a cultural shift that is changing the notion of full adulthood. Many of the traditional and principal indicators of adulthood—leaving home, getting a job, finding a spouse or partner—are increasingly being deferred. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in how we nurture the young. The love and care that young people feel from their parents and teachers is clearly abundant; the degree to which young people are listened to by their elders today is doubtlessly unparalleled. Yet there is simply too much of what we do, as adults, that is about getting our own needs met—whether it be the need to look and act young, or the need to live through our children—as opposed to looking out for the long-term good of those for whom we are caring.

This deficit in our understanding of what it means to be an adult stems from two principal assumptions about parent and child, student and teacher, the young and the old. First, our primary duty as adults is to care for our children in a particular manner, namely, to set our eyes on the long-range goal of raising and nurturing children, and that is to see that they become healthy, contributing, and independent people. Some of the ways in which we relate to young people in our contemporary culture, however, work against this goal. If we completely shield them from painful experiences, or create a web of constant dependency upon us as parents or teachers, we thwart the ultimate purposes for which we work with or raise children in the first place. As Robert Evans observes, "The ultimate point of parenting [and, I would add, teaching] is not to have children like us all of the time, but to have them be like us when they are raising their own children." Frightening as that may sound, given that they may end up like us or that ultimately we must let them go to be adults in this world,...