Category: Parenting

One of my correspondents let me know that my private/public school piece a few days ago, though it was written with families with younger children in mind, was very helpful to her in thinking about the high school choice for her son.

In many ways, the issues are the same. But then again, you’re talking about a teenager, so it’s complicated in a whole different way.

Here are many of the issues that have come up in talks with parents and teachers of high school students:

The social fit

High school is a time of great social growth for most kids. How they grow, though, is completely different. Some kids are really going to thrive in that big high school scene: football games, lots of different cliques, numerous choices for both academics and electives. These kids feel constricted, socially and/or academically, in small private schools.

Other kids, however, find these teen years to be sensitive and introspective ones. The last thing they care about is being in a big school with lots of excitement. They’re happy being in a class of 15 kids in a small school where everyone knows them. They’re willing to trade variety for stability. Or perhaps they have one keen interest that a smaller school serves well.

In either case, though, our local schools provide a variety of public and private options. For big schools, you have all our major public high schools plus a few larger private ones that have similar social scenes. For small schools, not only can you find private schools, but there are also small public programs in Live Oak and Santa Cruz City Schools that you should look into.

The intellectual fit

By high school, it should be pretty clear which direction your child is headed in academically. Of course, we all have the ability to change midstream, so your non-academic artist could suddenly be turned on by biology. But in general, it’s probably pretty clear what your child’s academic abilities and interests are at the moment. It’s really important to communicate with your teen about this. You might think that your straight-A student belongs at an academically intense school like Pacific Collegiate, but she might reveal to you that she prefers a more laid-back atmosphere. You might think that it’s healthier for your child who has grown barefoot and happy to continue on a less academic path, but he might have his sights fixed on a more competitive, college-prep education.

Most of our big public schools offer a wide range of classes. They also have specialties. I’m writing right now about innovative public school programs and found out that the Santa Cruz High Schools have a really cool program where each high school hosts a different “academy” that focuses on a different discipline. This might be enough to entice your child away from your local school, or even from the private school she’s attending.

Our private schools tend to be smaller and thus will not offer such a wide range of classes and activities. If the school is doing its job right, it will make it clear whether it’s the right place for your techie-minded math kid, or whether a different high school would be a better fit. Some schools have very strong programs in one discipline but don’t have the staff or funds to offer much in another.

How much time is there in a day?

I know someone whose two children go to a very competitive local high school. I asked her whether they were going to accompany her to some event and her answer should have been predictable: “Are you kidding? They’ll be doing homework!”

A great question to ask your teen is, “How important is it that you have extra time to pursue non school-related activities?”

A great question to ask a potential school is, “How much homework do kids in your high school get nightly?” Also, “How flexible are your teachers when working with a student who has an important non-school focus such as performance or competition that may interfere with homework?”

If your child is satisfied with school as his main outlet, then perhaps a homework-heavy routine isn’t a problem. But a fair number of students who have passions that their schools don’t fulfill find themselves better suited by a school program that offers more flexibility.

Don’t forget “home”schooling!

Homeschoolers generally laugh when people say that they shouldn’t be homeschooling their teens because they can’t teach them higher level math or science. These days, very few homeschooling teens spend much time being taught by their parents at home. A lot of them find that they’re more successful studying independently or through online courses. Others attend community college for their core courses, which offers them access to great, cheap instruction and lots of time to pursue other interests. I know plenty of families who weren’t homeschooling families before but have realized that their teens are happier and better educated now that they can put together their own schedule and get out into their community rather than being stuck on a school campus all day. (The Yahoo Group Homeschool2College can help you learn more about this if you’re concerned about whether or not your teen will be able to get into a good university: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/homeschool2college/. Also, local educator Wes Beach just wrote a concise and well-reasoned letter to the Sentinel on this issue.)

My oldest is twelve, so we’re just on the horizon of this part of schooling. If you have any other suggestions, please leave comments below!

Yesterday I took two surly children to the beach. They clearly both needed exercise, and it was a gorgeous day. They refused to go into the forest, so I loaded them into the car with her bike (he didn’t want to ride) and off we went.

I thought I may have gotten us over the hump till we got to the beach entrance kiosk. The lower parking was closed for construction so we had to park at the top of 80-some stairs down to the beach.

Surly girl was not buying this. She insisted she wanted to haul her bike down the stairs, but I knew who would end up hauling it back up. I suggested she ride in the parking lot, which was largely empty. No deal.

Surly boy and I got out. He was complaining that he hadn’t wanted to come to the beach anyway, and now what were we going to do? She wouldn’t get out of the car.

I led him over to the top of the stairs where there were benches to sit. We had a direct sight-line to the car, and would have hardly had to yell to be heard by her.

So he ate a snack (and thus became less surly) while I sketched the stairs, the beach, and the pier leading out into the water. I could hear her kicking the car window, and hoped she wouldn’t break it. I wasn’t worried about her, though. She’d get over it.

After a while I glanced over and saw a woman looking into the car with a shocked expression. She called to the man she’d been walking with.

I called out to her, pointed to myself, and said, “Don’t worry. She’s with us.”

Now you’d hope that anyone would know that an eight-year-old could let herself out of a car if she wanted to. But those people shot me such a dirty look and as they walked away the man yelled out, “You coulda cracked a window!”

Like I was in control of this situation. Apparently, he didn’t know any eight-year-old girls. He didn’t know how to suffer defeat with a measure of gravitas. This is what sketchbooks and benches overlooking the bay are for: pretending you have some control in your life when your eight-year-old daughter has decided to be surly!

To demonstrate (to myself – the man and woman had moved on) that I was not, in fact, locking the girl in the car, I used my remote and opened the sliding door next to her.

As predicted, she immediately closed it and started screaming again.

This reminds me of a short, ugly period in our family life when our four-year-old son took to screaming in the car. It wasn’t crying, yelling, or anything else but simple screaming. He was doing it to hurt us, and he was succeeding.

We came up with a simple, passive solution. As soon as he started screaming, we’d pull over, step out of the car, close the door, and wait till the screaming stopped. Perhaps many of my most memorable parenting experiences happen in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. I remember standing there, this screaming child in the car, on a hot day.

I was practicing my response to the meddling adults who, perhaps, thought that they were stronger than a four-year-old. (Ha, those ignorant non-parents. They think they know the way the world works!)

“He knows how to get out of the car,” I’d tell them. “I’m just waiting till he stops screaming.”

Why is he screaming?

That was a question I never found a response to. After a couple of nasty weeks of this response to his screaming, when I had to stop in all sorts of random parts of our county, he finally stopped the screaming.

Back to the beach: eventually my daughter stopped yelling. The door of the car opened, she got out, closed it, went around to the back hatch and opened it to get her bike out. I went over to help her, and she happily rode around the parking lot a few times before we decided that it was time for Surly Beach Day to come to an end.

Home we went: bike, surly kids, a bit of sunshine, and two sketches of a stairway I didn’t want to be at the top of, anyway.

Perhaps I’ve just been in a self-critical mood these days, but lately I’ve been wondering: Do people think that I write about parenting because I think I’m the perfect parent?

It’s the “gone to school in my underwear dream” gone awry.

Sometimes I’m out somewhere and my kids do something (the particulars hardly matter) and I’ll not have the perfect Positive Discipline response. Almost immediately (but not immediately enough) I might think: What if one of my readers saw me now?

Moral of the story is, we’re all human. Parenting is neither a science nor an art nor a discipline. It’s something we make up anew every single day.

I know at least one of you is out there thinking: Well, MY kids are just fine and I never snap at them.

Go away.

To the rest of you: It’s likely, given demographics and the way life works, that you did something before you had kids. You probably had a job. You may even have had a career. You may still have that job or career! In that job or career, when you did something really well, you got paid! You may have gotten raises! You may have gotten a plaque to put on your wall! You may even have gotten lunch out at a pretty nice restaurant.

At your place of employment, they may have had those little sheets of paper ready for patrons to fill out: How did we do today? Your clients or customers or patients may have said wonderful things about you. They may have been overwhelmed at the service you gave! Perhaps your interaction with them was life-changing. Or perhaps just very fulfilling. They may have filled out that little slip of paper and put it in the slot. And your manager looked at it and nodded. Yes, s/he is a very valuable employee. Next time raises come around, next time I need to commend someone, next time I have to choose someone to represent us at the really wild convention in Las Vegas, that’s who I’ll send.

Welcome to parenthood: There are no How are we doing? boxes. We all know what our customers would say:

You’re mean!

You didn’t let me have a lollipop!

How dare you criticize my essay and say it needed work?

Why didn’t you let me go to the Debbie Does Dallas sleepover that my friend had?

Who said you could tell me what to do?

Who made you God?

It’s not like you know anything about me!

What am I? Your servant?

We don’t put out those little slips of paper. Occasionally our spouses would write, in an attempt at childish penmanship, “I lov yoo so much Momy!”

We wouldn’t buy it. Parenting isn’t about positive feedback. It’s about sticking with it till…

Oh, and then there’s those parents you know who have grown up children. You’re ready to worship them. You’re ready to say, Oh, you got through it. How did you do it? What is your secret?

Then those parents say something like (don’t they always say something like this?):

Johnny needs me more now than he ever did as a child.

Really, raising children is nothing next to having to deal with them as adults.

And you think, Oh, gee, thanks. Will I ever get a break?

I’m here to say: No.

I’m not a perfect parent. I read Positive Discipline the way that my friend’s Dad read Playboy. I don’t actually expect to be able to channel Jane Nelson most of the day. Occasionally I remember to do it. But most of the time, I fall well short of the goal of perfect parenting.

My husband’s family has a plot in a cemetery where they all get buried. And because they know that people will actually be reading their tombstones, they actually think about them ahead of time. It’s pretty cool. One uncle’s stone says, “Cha cha cha.” I don’t know what it means, but my husband always laughs when he sees it.

It begs the question: If I thought I’d ever have a tombstone (I don’t have time to die at the moment!), and if I thought anyone would ever look at it, what would I say? I know that before kids (B.K.) and after kids if that ever happens (A.K.) perhaps I would come up with my own “cha cha cha” that would make my offspring, nieces, and nephews laugh when they saw it.

But right now, I can think of only one fitting phrase:

I tried.

Positively imperfect, that’s me. Every day, chugging and cha cha cha-ing along, trying to get it right.

And being pretty darn happy when I approach “only a little bit wrong.”