There is something about springtime that makes us wake up and appreciate the new life around us.  We see trees and flowers bloom.  New bunnies and birds flit about our neighborhoods.  And, for those of us who live in cities, we take our kids to see baby livestock.

We go to petting zoos and look at rabbits.

We show tiny piglets to our tiny children.

We encourage them to reach their sweet little hands out to pet their new friends.

And somehow we live vicariously through their curiosity and wonder.  We think about what it must be like to experience these things for the first time.

If our kids are old enough to articulate their (and our) wonder they might ask us why new life matters so much.  We might come up with a decent answer about circles of life and nature and so on.  If we are being totally honest, we might just say, “I don’t know exactly.  But it does.”

Yesterday afternoon IEP and I drove six hours to my parents’ house.  They have a place in the country about an hour outside of town.  It is home to horses and chickens and sheep.  And at about this time every year the sheep have their babies.  The first lamb was born this week and I want IEP to experience the farm in the spring.  I want him to see and touch a newborn lamb.  I want him to run around in fresh grass and wildflowers.

I can’t tell you precisely why I want these experiences for him.  But it seems important to me.  Important enough to spend 12 hours in a car with a two-year-old who likely won’t remember much of this particular visit as he grows up.

New life is precious.  We know it the moment we see it or touch it, even if we can’t express it in words.

*The photos above were taken by Nanny at a commercial farm in our area yesterday morning.  Our family farm outing will happen this weekend.

A couple of weeks ago GAP and I were driving somewhere and he said to me, “You know what the next big thing is going to be?”

“Plastics?”

“No.”  He blew right past my joke.  “Robots.”  And then he went on to tell me how we are standing in the doorway of a whole new era of robotics.  I felt like I’d traveled back to the early eighties but still listened attentively while he told me of an article he read about recent advancements in robots.

Then, driving to work one morning last week I heard this piece on NPR about… robots.  As it turns out GAP was not so far off the mark after all.

Apparently there is, in fact, a new wave of robots being designed, built, and actually used in society.  Up to this point most robots (C-3PO notwithstanding) have been utilitarian in nature.  They performed repetitive physical functions like assembling car parts.  They lacked distinctly human characteristics and they presented no threat to our understanding of interpersonal relationships.

However, the nature of robots is changing.  Per NPR robotic babies are being used to comfort the elderly, and robotic nannies are helping look after children.  According to Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, the evolution of robots to fill human emotional needs is cause for concern.  Turkle was interviewed in the NPR piece and commented that the difference between new robots and old robots is that the new robots are, “proposing themselves to substitute for human beings in these more intimate roles.”

Turkle goes on within the interview to explain that the people she has interviewed have expressed interest in robot companions because of the disappointment they experience in other people.  She even told of one woman whose boyfriend was such a slouch that she envisioned replacing him with a robotic boyfriend.

Really?

Maybe I’m naïve.  Maybe it’s all written on the wall in front of me and I’m still not seeing it.  But I just don’t see this actually happening.  There may be a sad, lonely, person here or there who dreams of life with an inanimate companion, but I think that person is the exception.  The reason I believe this is that we know the difference.  (Did anyone else see Lars and the Real Girl?)  We know that programmed affection from a machine is not the same as real affection from a person.  No amount of technological sophistication can change that.

What interests me more, though, is a tangent to the robot premise.  I wonder about the increasingly robotic nature of our relationships with other people.  We keep up via Facebook and Twitter.  We hit Reply All on e-mail threads.  My MBA girlfriends and I try to connect for one breakfast or dinner per month, but even that has been hard now that most of us are mothers of very young families.  Apart from the three colleagues with whom I eat lunch most days, the sweeping majority of my interaction with my friends is electronic.

This is largely due to convenience, but there is also a safety net in mass electronic communication.  If I’m sitting in a one-on-one situation with you I have to be tuned into you.  I have to read you.  I have to respond to you.  That’s a lot of work, not to mention the fact that I could really screw it up.  Conversely, I have an audience of one.  If something I say doesn’t resonate with you, it might hit me hard.  But in the electronic realm we communicate with a panel of friends.  We only have to talk about ourselves.  Chances are good that someone among our online friends will see fit to endorse what we post.  And we only have to respond to people if we really want to.  Most of what we read goes untouched.  We could never get away with this kind of behavior in real life.

I don’t think we will ever rely on robots the way we rely on people.  It just won’t happen.  But I do worry that without practice our interpersonal skills might atrophy over time, and with that atrophy our in-person relationships will become unsatisfying.  The risk here is not that robots will replace people as companions.  The risk is that without practice our social skills become so scant that we might, even if only for a moment, want them to.  And that, to me, is scary enough.

I’m testing a hypothesis here. 

A couple of weeks ago I went on a research bender in preparation for one of my posts on children and achievement.  As a part of that bender I read an article from Psychology Today entitled “A Nation of Wimps” wherein the author posits that “parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile.”  The article is long and covers a lot of ground about parenting young kids and how our parenting decisions influence the kind of adults they become.  Touching on topics from playgrounds to binge drinking to cell phones it sheds light on a many parenting dilemmas.  I highly recommend it.

One of the topics covered by the article that most intrigued me (but which did not dovetail with my prior posts referencing it) was free play.  I have explored the topic of free play in the past, but the “Wimpy Kids” article prompted me to consider it afresh.  It begins by describing a hypothetical-but-realistic playground scene in which the parents do not chat on park benches, but rather stand right next to their kids, “co-playing” and coaching them through the playground.  When I was a kid any snapshot of a playground outing pictured all of the parents on park benches, chatting away and keeping half an eye on their kids while they enjoyed some adult conversation.  Apparently this is no longer the case.

The article goes on to describe the larger implications of the decline in free play: 

“In the hothouse that child raising has become, play is all but dead. Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess. And what play there is has been corrupted. The organized sports many kids participate in are managed by adults; difficulties that arise are not worked out by kids but adjudicated by adult referees. … Kids are having a hard time even playing neighborhood pick-up games because they’ve never done it, observes Barbara Carlson, president and cofounder of Putting Families First. ‘They’ve been told by their coaches where on the field to stand, told by their parents what color socks to wear, told by the referees who’s won and what’s fair. Kids are losing leadership skills.’”

So there it is, plain as day: free play is really good for our kids.  Or, perhaps more pointed, a lack of free play is really bad for our kids.  Given this, why have we as parents, coaches, and educators let this vital part of childhood die off?  If we know it is good for our kids, and we know that constantly hovering around them – whether it’s to ensure matching socks or to encourage them to pick the big slide – is damaging, then why do we do it?

This brings me to my hypothesis.  If we sit back and are uninvolved in our kids’ play we feel neglectful.  If we let them work the puzzle alone while we respond to an e-mail; if we let them dig in the dirt outside on their own while we flip through a magazine or fold laundry; if we are not actively cultivating their minds at all times then we think we are lazy, indulgent, and selfish parents.  We positively swim in the guilt of it. 

Yet the research shows that our parenting would be improved by a longer leash.  Our kids will end up more balanced and capable if we get out of their faces a little bit.  Psychology Today tells us, “The less time children spend in free play, the less socially competent they’ll be as adults. It’s in play that we learn give and take, the fundamental rhythm of all relationships. We learn how to read the feelings of others and how to negotiate conflicts.”

So I ask you, do you let your kids play on their own?  Or do you feel the pull to involve yourself in their play, encouraging learning and guiding their interactions?  The research is unequivocal – we need to back off.  But the cultural pressures to hover are strong.  We feel like slackers when we take a step back.  But I think we owe it to our kids to quit trying so hard.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

- George Santayana, Reason and Art

Spring is not yet here.  Try as I might to will that it be so, I have no such powers.  So as I twiddle my thumbs until mid-April finally arrives, I am prone to consider why it is that I get so itchy about the seasons this time of year.

I love experiencing seasons.  Even more so I love the change of seasons.  I love the feeling of anticipation (and even sometimes the frustration) that builds this time of year when I’ve long since quenched my desire for jeans and hooded sweatshirts and I yearn for sandals and sundresses.  I love knowing that something lovely is on the horizon.  Something about the change itself – not just what’s on the other side of that change – excites me.

I’ve long believed (based on nothing but my own certitude) that as human beings we have some emotional need for seasons; that there’s something in our biorhythms that demands the cyclical nature of our seasons.  Some amateur internet sleuthing on this topic quickly disappointed me.  Our seasons have nothing to do with anything but the tilt of the earth’s access.  And we don’t technically need them for any emotional purpose.  People who evolved in cultures located at the equator have no innate knowledge of seasons and don’t “need” winter, spring, or fall any more than I “need” the 365 days of sunshine per year that they have.

Apparently it’s all in my head.

Comedian Daniel Tosh understands this.  He does a bit in his stand-up routine (which you can catch occasionally on Comedy Central) that pokes fun at people like me.  To paraphrase:

Why wouldn’t anyone want to live in LA?  I don’t get those people who say, “Oh, I could never live in LA.  I just need seasons too much.  I could never live in a place that didn’t have seasons.”  Well, to them I say, “I love seasons too.  That’s why I live in a place that skips all the crappy ones.”

That line about needing seasons?  I’ve said it a few hundred times in my life.  And I know many people who share my sentiments.  There is a chance that my “I need seasons” hang-up is just my way of justifying why I continue to live in a place where winter is cold and crappy, and summer is hot and humid.  But I’ve known more than a few people who moved to milder climates and hated it because they could no longer experience the changing seasons.

So what is it then about our human nature that causes us to crave these changes?  If it isn’t biological must it be learned?

Harvard and UCLA psychiatrist John Sharp’s book The Emotional Calendar delves into this question.  And while I haven’t read the book in full, the synopsis of it that I have read nevertheless intrigues me.  Sharp asserts that numerous factors – seasons being chief among them -  influence our “emotional calendars.”  He also points out that when our emotions don’t correspond with the traditional feelings associated with a season we experience an unpleasant dissonance.  But they are the emotional markers – personal experiences that are forever tied to a time of year – that are the greatest influencers of our relationship to any particular season.

For me, though, the seasons themselves still hold meaning.  Something about the smell of a hyacinth blossom or the crunch of fallen leaves under my feet keeps me tuned into the passage of time.  I like that each month feels different than the one that precedes or follows it.  I like the feelings of anticipation at the start of a season, and the feelings of relief at the end.

Sometimes research backs me up and sometimes it doesn’t.  But, as my sister is fond of pointing out, some things don’t have to be fact in order to be true.

I have many more substantial thoughts on my mind – post topics I’ve been mulling for days, and was looking forward to exploring on yesterday’s flight home.  But my 36-hour bout of flu, powering through a day’s worth of conference lectures in the midst of it, and rallying to get myself home have left me spent.  Mentally.  Emotionally.  Physically.  So instead of raising meaty and challenging questions, I will tell you a story.

I woke up yesterday feeling better.  Not great.  But better.  I napped long and hard Wednesday afternoon.  I went to bed at 8:30 Wednesday evening.  My fever finally broke overnight.  And by Thursday morning I felt like a recognizable version of myself.

The rest of yesterday morning was reasonably smooth.  The drive from Burbank to LAX was slow, but uneventful.  I listened to a Beethoven piano sonata, a suite from Carmen, and an early Mozart symphony as I drove and they kept me calm.  I returned the rental car without incident.  I checked in for my flight without incident.

Then things took a bit of a turn.  The line at security was short, but circuitous and poorly organized. The TSA agents were not re-stocking the bins as quickly as needed.  So I put my bags down, pilfered some bins from another stack, and went to recollect my things.  As I grabbed the handle of my bag and lifted it slipped out of my hand.  My thumbnail tore down to the skin, my breath caught in my throat, and I gave the final performance of my decreasingly brave face in order to get myself through TSA’s lock and key.

Safely into my concourse I dug into my bag for a nail file.  And as I filed the jagged edge away, the tears came.  I wasn’t crying over a broken nail.  I was crying over three days of illness, frustration, loneliness, and stress.  The broken nail was merely a trigger.  I let myself cry.  After a few moments I collected myself enough to get to a restroom.  A tissue and a splash of water helped a bit.

Back in the concourse I looked for lunch options.  There was nothing appealing to a girl coming off the stomach flu.  I grimaced at my options and chose the least of the evils.  I called my mother as I waited for a mediocre bowl of soup and lamented myself a bit more.  She listened affectionately.

I left the restaurant to find my gate.  The concourse was familiar to me.  Last summer on our way home from San Diego GAP, IEP, and I were stuck in that concourse for six or seven hours as we dealt with delayed and canceled flights.  I looked at the empty gate where we’d played tag with IEP to keep him occupied.  I peered into the gift shop where we’d played with toy cars.  I sat one table away from the spot where we’d let him sleep through lunch, only to later regret not having woken him to eat.  It was like some kind of cruel joke.  All I wanted in the world was to be home with my family and I was taunted with vivid reminders of them at every turn.

I found my gate.  I stared at the people around me, wondering if they were headed to or away from home.  I wondered why some were frowning.  I wondered if small pairs and trios were professional colleagues or friends.  But mostly I just sat still.  And then I heard it.

Strumming.  Flamenco.  It was soft and rippling.  It was delicate but rich.  Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” played over the speakers, but I tuned her out.  I sat up in my chair, looked around, and there, in another cluster of chairs, I saw him.  A young white man in his twenties with tousled curly hair wearing a bright orange fleece moved his fingers deftly.  I stood up and, as inconspicuously as possible, moved closer.  From my new location I watched him play, half-focused, as he chatted up the guy sitting next to him.

My shoulders relaxed.  My blood pressure dropped.  For the first time in two days, I smiled.  His music bounced around the gate.  The people near me watched him and also smiled.  The two men sitting next to me talked about a daughter’s semester abroad in Spain.  I thought of my own semester abroad in Spain.  I felt thankful.  I felt even a little bit happy.  It was a real gift.

Years and years ago in the midst of a sort-of-stressful international vacation my mother reached the end of her rope.  Over a plate of smoked fish in Edinburgh she teared up and said, “I just want a pleasant surprise.”  The saying stuck, and has become a standby in my family’s lexicon.  I called my mother again from the gate.  “Mom, I got my pleasant surprise.”

As our flight began to board the guitar player returned his instrument to its case.  I stood up – plausibly to prepare to board – and walked past him.  I wanted to tell him that listening to him play was the first good thing that had happened to me since Tuesday.  I wanted to tell him he was a sorely needed bright spot in an otherwise dimly lit week.  I wanted to tell him that I would remember this moment for a very long time.

But that would have been really weird.

“It was a real pleasure listening to you play,” I said as I walked by.  And that was it.

The thing abut the pleasant surprise is that it is almost always small.  Perhaps this is because it almost always comes in a moment when the bar is set rather low.  Nevertheless, it is small, unexpected, and simple.  But its effect is profound.

PS – Thank you for all of your kind “get well” wishes on Wednesday.  I’m not quite 100% now, but I’m doing much, much better.  Being home certainly helps.

A note about this post:  Fair warning… it’s long.  Once I started researching I realized that this topic really has legs.  I’ve done my best to keep it organized and concise, but in order to do this post justice I felt compelled to go beyond my typical 600 words and really delve into the many important aspects of this topic.  In case you haven’t been following along, you can click here to read my first post on children and achievement, and to learn why I’ve published two posts on the same topic in the first place.

Once again, it starts with Lindsey’s post on achievement last week.  In her discussion of the film “The Race to Nowhere” Lindsey addressed the multi-faceted nature of achievement and identity.  While she clarified that we can damage our kids by fostering the belief that their value is tied exclusively to their achievement, Lindsey pointed out that high standards are not always a bad thing.  I agreed, and wondered why we are reluctant to set a high bar for our kids.

My suspicion was that by ever praising children, even when their performance doesn’t warrant it, we actually undermine their desire to achieve in the first place.  If “everybody is a winner” then why bother to actually win?  Of course I don’t believe everything is a win/lose situation, but the stark language highlights my point.  Whether we are talking about sports, grades, standardized test scores, musical instruments, or even something highly subjective like art, various levels of achievement do exist.  And if we offer our praise unconditionally then children can quickly determine that there’s no need to go to all that effort if the pats on the back come free.

Neuro-researcher David Rock makes the point that, “When kids are praised for everything and told they are ‘special’ it does two things: It reduces their desire to put in effort, and it reduces their ability to self-regulate because they don’t get to challenge themselves. Yet self-regulation appears to be the dramatically central player in whether people succeed or not.”  Rock hints at something here.  In these scenarios filled with unearned praise kids miss out on something very important: actual mastery.  Kids will accept our praise regardless of circumstances.  But if we dole it out indiscriminately they will never have to work for it, and, in turn, they will never know the incredible experience of conquering something.

As stated by the Sydney Morning Herald (this is not a uniquely American problem), “The belief that regular praise will improve the self-esteem of students has backfired, with educators urging over-anxious parents to let their children fail so they can learn from their mistakes.”  But in order for any child to learn from his mistakes, he must first be allowed to make them.  How does anyone learn the fine are of picking up, dusting off, and carrying on if not from experience?  Rod Kefford, the headmaster of a Sydney day and boarding school put a finer point on it. “If we are serious about building resilience, we have to let them fail.”

Resilience is a refrain common to this discussion.  We want our kids to develop coping mechanisms, but we protect them from the very situations that build them.  Tufts University psychology professor David Elkind agrees, “Kids need to feel badly sometimes. We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope.”

Interestingly, the ironic truth of the matter is that with helicopter parenting we squelch the very thing we hope to develop.  “Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences,” Psychology Today’s article on “wimpy” kids tells us.  This shielding fosters fear in kids.  When we protect them from stress early in life, they don’t learn how to deal with it, and often ultimately become withdrawn, shy, and introverted.

Going back to the issue of empty praise for a moment, though, I think there is another issue at hand: kids aren’t stupid.  They know when they’re being patronized.  When Larry Summers became president of Harvard University in the summer of 2001 he learned that 94% of graduating seniors had “earned” honors distinctions.  It doesn’t take a Harvard education to know that the honor doesn’t mean much at that point.  So what message does it send to kids and teens when we tell them ad nauseum that they are special?

I will take an example from my own life.  I used to know a girl (we’ll call her Katie).  Katie was bright, interesting, and very sweet.  And yet her self-esteem was virtually nonexistent.  One day I asked her boyfriend (also a friend of mine – we’ll call him Ben) how someone so smart, personable, and pretty could think so little of herself.  He explained that she grew up with a mother who inundated her with the message that she was brilliant and wonderful and could be whatever she wanted to be.  It sounds great on the surface but Ben (in a psychology PhD program at the time) gave an example of its detriment.  He said, “I could say to Katie’s mom, ‘I’m never going to be an astronaut and that really bums me out.’  And Katie’s mom would say, ‘But of course you can, Ben.  You can be whatever you want to be!’  The fact is, I can’t be an astronaut.  I don’t have the interest or education, and I’m probably too old to shift gears at this point anyway.  But Katie’s mom is so set on being supportive that she can’t be honest.  After 20 years of that, Katie got the message that all praise is completely hollow, and now she doesn’t believe anything positive or affirming that is said to her.”

Katie wasn’t stupid.  Neither are the bottom decile of Harvard grads who walk with honors.  And neither are the countless other kids who are fed well-intentioned-but-ultimately-damaging hot air by their parents every day.

The last component of this issue is the most difficult for me to address, partly because it’s uncomfortable and partly because I have little experience with it.  The problems I’ve highlighted to this point are problems of privilege.  Any kid whose risk factors include too much praise and support is probably leading a pretty easy life.  But there are 15 millions American kids who live in poverty.  That’s about 21% of our nation’s kids.  Most of them don’t have access to well-funded educational or extra-curricular programming.  And there are many of them who hear no praise; who get no support.

The National Center for Children in Poverty’s website tells me that:

• At age 4 years, children who live below the poverty line are 18 months below what is normal for their age group.
• By the third grade middle-income kids’ vocabularies are three times larger than the vocabularies of kids from low-income families.
• Early learning classrooms comprised of about 60 percent of children from low-income homes were rated significantly lower in quality indicators of teaching, teacher-child interaction, and provisions for learning than classrooms with fewer low-income children.

These are real problems without easy solutions, but studies have shown that they are not insurmountable.  As you might expect, the needs of these kids differ vastly from those of their more privileged peers.  Research tells us that, “Children make academic gains when they have teachers that encourage communication and reasoning, are sensitive to their interactions with children, and construct an atmosphere of respect, encouragement, and enthusiasm for learning.”

Psychology Today endorses this view.  Its “wimpy kids” article concludes with this thought:  “Parental anxiety has its place. But the way things now stand, it’s not being applied wisely. We’re paying too much attention to too few kids—and in the end, the wrong kids. There are kids who are worth worrying about—kids in poverty.  We focus so much on our own children. … It’s time to begin caring about all children.”

Interestingly enough, though, even in the face of incredible challenges, the NCCP still calls for high standards to be set for low-income kids.  In its list of Take Home Messages it advises that, “Teachers and administrators need to set high expectations for what all young children can and should learn.”  Apparently lowering the bar is never the right answer.

As I’ve thought about this issue throughout the week I’ve tried to envision what tack I will take with my own kids.  Here is where I have landed:  I will tell them I love them as often as I want to, which will almost assuredly be more than they want to hear it.  I will praise their accomplishments (real accomplishments) but I will not intervene to prevent their failures.  I will push them when I see unrealized potential paired with moments of mastery and moments of joy.  I will not push them if they are miserable because their interests and aptitudes are not aligned with their activities.  I will acknowledge effort and hard work.  I will turn their attention to character as well as performance.  I will understand that kids are not one-size-fits-all and I will adjust my approach for each kid at each phase of his/her life.  And, most importantly, I will fail at each of these things more than once, and that’s okay too.

None of it this is easy.  But I believe we can only come closer to the right answer when we ask the hard questions.

Without the risk of failure, why bother to succeed?

I’ve been thinking about it for several days and I think that’s the single question that best encompasses my thoughts.

Last week Lindsey wrote a very thoughtful post about the nature of achievement, its role in our culture, and the risks it poses to our happiness when it becomes our only source of identity. However, even in spite of those risks Lindsey proclaimed the value of achievement. An alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy, she wrote, “It feels rare, these days, that an institution that deals with children says as baldly as Exeter does: we have high standards. And we know you can meet them. I’m not entirely sure why that’s a threatened stance in education today, but as far as I can see it is.”

This portion of her post really struck a chord with me. It’s true, but why? Why are we so unwilling to ask more of our kids? Why have we let ourselves be lulled into mediocrity by the idea that everyone is above average.  Do we think that Lake Wobegon really exists?  Lately the national conversation about education and child rearing has centered around Sputnik moments and tiger mothers.  We recognize that our test scores and graduation rates are flagging.  We clearly need to do better by our children, but not in the ways that we think.

Achievement is important for many reasons.  It fosters a sense of mastery and accomplishment.  It gives us pride, confidence, and self-esteem.  But it is (or should be) more than just a warm, fuzzy feeling.  Most importantly achievement means that we have improved upon ourselves.  We can do something we couldn’t do before.  We have developed smarts or skills or both.

Yet in today’s culture we shower kids with the trappings of achievement just for showing up.  Everyone on the losing soccer team gets a trophy. Five-year-olds don tiny mortarboards for completing kindergarten.  We tell our kids they are fundamentally and unwaveringly special every single day.  Perhaps individually these things are not such travesties.  But collectively they add up to a culture that provides kids with little incentive to actually achieve anything, because they can garner all the benefits of achievement without having done much.

Of course kids need our unconditional love and support.  But they also need our expectations.

Achievement is not an end in itself.  We recognize achievement because it is supposed to be hard.  It is supposed to mean that someone accomplished something; something that took work.  We reward achievement not for the psychological upshots, but to acknowledge something noteworthy.  The emotional high that accompanies it is just a happy byproduct.  But by offering all of the praise without the performance, are we at some level lying to our kids?  In sugar-coating their childhoods with “everybody is  a winner!” refrains are we failing to prepare them for adulthood where losing is a very real possibility?  This takes me back to my original question.  Without the risk of failure, why bother to succeed?

I realize that there is a flip side to this coin:  The kid on the losing soccer team knows that he lost, regardless of any trophy.  Our attempts to shield our kids from life’s blows will fail at least some of the time.  They will learn to deal with disappointment and embarrassment and heartbreak in spite of our best efforts to spare them.  So if they are going to get bumped and bruised regardless, why shouldn’t we, as their parents, work to cushion those blows as much as we can?  Further, we must be careful not to tie our kids’ sense of self-worth exclusively to their achievements.  We must not let them believe that our love for them is performance-based.

However, while there are some pushy sports dads, stage mothers, and other hard-nosed parents out there, the American parenting culture is, by and large, not long on tough love.

I am not advocating a solely performance-based culture.  I am not advocating an environment that pressures children such that they can’t enjoy being children.  I am in favor of unstructured play and unconditional love.  But I think that we can give our kids these things and still ask more of them.  Or better yet, perhaps if we quit rewarding trivialities they will ask more of themselves.

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*This post is the first of two on this topic.  When I first drafted this post I was challenged on it because I was writing based on anecdote and hunch, rather than on fact.  So I paused to reconsider whether or not I should post it at all.  One commenter offered the bright idea to post two versions – one based on my unsubstantiated opinions, and one based on research.  Today’s post reflects the first of these perspectives.  Friday’s post will address the same topic, but will be based on fact and research.  We shall see if my opinions change with more complete information.

Do we need change even when we don’t want it?  If we avoid change now do we pay for it later?  How big does the potential payoff have to be before we will abandon a known quantity for the promise of something better?

I got to thinking about change and its repercussions yesterday in response to Aidan’s post.  Aidan wrote about being stuck; about how we all reach moments in our lives when we feel as though we are spinning our wheels to no avail; about the scarcity of change in the moments we seem to need it most.  Her post wasn’t about change exclusively, but that was the direction I went with the comment I left on her site.  By the time I finished typing my lengthy response I realized that perhaps this topic was worth exploring further on my own turf.

I wrote:

As children, teens, and young adults life provides us with near constant changes and opportunities for growth and evolution. We learn to walk and talk. We learn to ride a bike and play sports. We learn to write in cursive and to multiply. We learn to drive and to think critically. We vote. We go to college. We graduate. We get jobs. We get married. We have kids.

Then, for many of us, we get to our mid-thirties and realize that nothing big has changed in a while. Career is plugging along. Kids are plugging along. We look around and things are much the same as they were five years ago. And we think, “I’m stuck.”

The fact of the matter (I think, anyway) is not that we are stuck, but that we have arrived in a place where life is not doling out big changes all the time. It is now incumbant upon us to make those changes for ourselves. On one hand, this can be very empowering because we are in more control of the changes we experience. On the other hand, it is very easy to stick with the safety of what we know, continue to spin our wheels, and then deal with the frustration of a life that, in rare moments of real truth, perhaps doesn’t live up to its potential.

All change is stressful.  Obviously, bad change is stressful.  But good change is too.  I’m not quoting specific studies, but any good psychologist will tell you this is true.  Given this, I wonder if we are all hardwired with some base level of disinclination toward change.  This doesn’t necessarily ring true to me – that we are all change averse – because I’ve known people who always seem to be looking for change.  But I’ve never met a teenager or a 20-something with these same complaints; that life has stagnated, or that they feel stuck.  It strikes me as a problem unique to adults.

When we are young change is foisted upon us all the time.  And, for the most part, we embrace it.  The responsibility of a drivers license is welcomed because of the freedom it brings.  We may experience nerves and jitters before moving into our freshman dorm, but I think for most of us those nerves are outweighed by the excitement of a new place, new people, and new experiences.  The same holds true for marriage and the happy eagerness we feel awaiting the arrival of a first child.

So why, once life’s big changes have come and gone, do we settle into adulthood without stirring the proverbial pot every so often?  Aidan’s post indicates to me that this wheels-spinning frustration is something that many adults experience.  Why don’t we just make changes then?  If we are able to embrace change when it is barreling toward us regardless of how we might dodge or cower, why can’t we do the same when it is our choice?

I think the easy answer is that by the time we are older, settled into careers, with spouses and children depending on us, the aftershocks of our decisions reach much further.  We have to consider how big changes will affect our families.  But I also think it is easy to lean too heavily on that rationale, transforming it from a consideration into an excuse.

I wrestle with this conundrum too.  I get itchy and twitchy and feel a need to shake things up.  It’s hard.  Sometimes I chicken out.  But in none of the instances when I’ve been brave and made a change that was hard or intimidating, have I ever regretted it.  I need to bear this in mind the next time I want to let change pass me by.

Once upon a time I was a traveling salesman (woman).  A sales rep for a medical software company, I peddled my wares across the upper Midwest for two years.  I flew out on Monday mornings, and back on Thursdays, usually with a quick stopover at home on Tuesday nights for MBA classes.  There is a lot about those two years that I don’t miss.  The life of a frequent flier is filled with headaches.  Time away from home and husband were draining.  Add part time graduate school to a full time job with regular travel and in retrospect I often wonder how I did it.  (I didn’t have kids then, is the answer.)

There was one thing I did love about all that time away, though: forced relaxation.  When you are in a hotel in Bismarck, North Dakota your to-do list is rendered irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter if your floors need sweeping, if you need to go to the grocery store, or if a thousand other things are hanging over your head.  When you are alone in a hotel in Bismarck (or Omaha or Dubuque or Oshkosh) there is not much option but to sit back and relax.

Yesterday was a similar day for us here in the Midwest.  We got ice overnight on Monday and it sleeted throughout the day on Tuesday.  My office was closed.  GAP’s office was closed.  Nanny stayed home.  And while there was regular checking of e-mail and the odd follow-up phone call, the day was, for the most part, quiet.

I do my best not to lead a life that is forever harried by an unending list of commitments and obligations.  But no amount of effort can fully compensate for the fact that the life of a working mother is a busy one.  If I want to pursue my career, be involved in my son’s life, devote time to my husband, and still have time for friends and hobbies the sacrifice that I make is my quiet time.  I don’t regret the way I’ve ranked these priorities, but I still appreciate the moments when unforeseen logistics step in and upend my little equilibrium, giving me fallow periods that I don’t usually get to enjoy.  There is value to quiet time, and it’s easy to lose sight of that when you’ve forgotten what it is that you’re missing.

When Anne and I were kids quiet time was a regular part of our day.  During the summers when we were too old to nap, but too young to go a full day without my mother needing a break we had “quiet time” every afternoon.  Mom went back to her room to read or write or nap.  And Anne and I were also assigned to our respective rooms.  There was no agenda.  We could read.  We could sleep.  We could play with toys.  The only rules were that we couldn’t play together, we couldn’t leave our rooms, and we couldn’t bother Mom for an hour.

As I remember it I wasn’t a huge fan of quiet time.  I was an active and energetic kid and I imagine I found it boring.  But as an adult I see it in a different light.  One obvious benefit was that it gave my mother respite from my sister’s and my antics.  But more importantly it was the beginning of learning how to be alone.  It was when I first learned the value of pace and patience.  It was when I learned to stimulate my own mind without the influence of other people.  In retrospect I realize that it was an incredible gift.

I mentioned the other day that I’m reading The Not So Big Life by Sarah Susanka.  I’m not through it yet, so I can’t say where it will take me.  But I sense that it’s leading me down a path that will empower me to identify these aspects of my life that I value, but yet have somehow sacrificed (like quiet time).  And I hope that it will also help me better understand how to recalibrate my life to make room for these things, and perhaps trim away aspects of my life that have been improperly prioritized.

Perhaps one day I will look at my life and find it perfectly balanced.  In the meantime, though, I will relish in the snow days and hotel stays that force me to downshift a couple of gears.

If you stopped by this blog on Monday between the hours of 6:30am and 6:00pm you saw my regular Monday post.  If you stopped by this blog after 6:00pm on Monday, you saw the prior Friday’s post.   Without explanation of any kind, POOF! Monday’s post had vanished.  An act of magic?  Or an act of fear?

Early Monday morning I wrote a post which I really loved.  It was a post that I’d been mulling over for a few weeks and had finally found the words to express.  I wrote about how I think the “American dream” falls short because it focuses so much on financial prosperity and pays no attention to the aspects of life (relationships, meaning, thoughtful use of our time, etc.) that are actually much more important influencers of our overall level of happiness.  I wrote about how our passion for proving our success to other people has prompted us to sacrifice careful cultivation of our lives around the things that actually matter most to us.  I titled this post “Dreaming the Wrong Dream.”

My day progressed as usual and periodically throughout the morning and afternoon I checked in on my post to read and approve comments.  With each login I found the usual collection of spam comments, but nothing else.  I didn’t let it bother me at first, but as more time passed I grew anxious about my post.  I’ve written many posts that didn’t resonate with throngs of people.  But I’d never gone a full day without a single response.  I was stunned at the volume of silence.

I realized, in retrospect, that on MLK Day all references to dreams imply his dream.  ”The” dream.  The dream that was more honest and noble than any other dream before or since.  The dream that moved a nation.  The dream that boomed across the national mall.  The dream that we honor every year for its valor and candor and truth.

And then I panicked.

I worried that people had read the title of my post, expected something totally different from what I actually wrote, and clicked away immediately.  I was sure that someone had gotten no further than the title, exclaimed to himself, “How dare she!” and left.  And I worried that every last reader felt that I had suggested something pejorative of Dr. King.  I was scared out of my overly-articulated wits.  I did consider the fact that on a holiday many people might not have really kicked off their weeks yet; that regular blog-reading and commenting hadn’t quite resumed from its weekend hiatus.  But once my other fears settled in there was no room in my mind for a more likely scenario.

And so, feeling embarrassed and ashamed, I took the post down – something I’d never done before.

In the time that has passed since I tucked my tail between my legs on Monday evening I’ve gotten affirmation from my husband and a dear friend that the post was a good one – “thoughtful and meaty.”  I’ve been encouraged to repost it.  And I’m feeling more confident that a slow day in the blogosphere might be a function of a thousand things other than an ill-timed title.

I’ve always said to those who ask that I write this blog for myself, and I do.  Naturally I hope that my thoughts and words will strike a chord with my readers and will elicit thought-provoking responses.  But when the day ends if a post falls flat my ego doesn’t typically follow.  In this case I wasn’t so much bothered by not getting comments as I was by the fact that I thought I may have given people the wrong idea about what I believe.

I suppose the lesson I’ve learned here is that there is real vulnerability in blogging.  In Friday’s post I confessed that my confidence is one aspect of myself I wouldn’t change.  Then just three days later I cowered in the face of massive insecurity.  Despite our best efforts we all have bad days.  We aim and miss.  Our intentions are good but our execution is flawed.  And when we fall short on the stage of the world wide web there is a whole audience watching (thankfully for me in this case my audience is on the small side…).  And that kind of shame is something that even the thickest skin can struggle to withstand.

I don’t know how many of you visited this site on Monday.  I don’t know if you read my post.  I don’t know if you noticed the title and fled for the hills.  But to anyone for whom that is true, please accept my sincerest apology.  Please know that my intentions were good even if my title was carelessly conceived.

I will republish my post next Monday for a number of reasons, but mostly because I still believe in it.