Find Your Happy Place
I’m curious as to whether it’s the kids or the parents who need to be convinced to have elementary school students enroll at the “no-stress,” alternative Christa McAuliffe School in Cupertino, CA. The nearby Faria Elementary, a more traditional, all-standardized-tests-included school, has people lined up to enroll. But the no-pressure “research magnet school” where the students are engaged in their education every day and are all encouraged to think outside the box, be creative, and ask questions has seats available.
The cranky, cynical, hater-of-high-pressure-parents in me would be willing to bet large sums of cold, hard cash that it’s the parental units who are enrolling their offspring in the more traditional school, and if an objective third party (clearly not me) were to take the prospective students aside and ask them to choose between the two educational institutions, the kids would choose the happy engaging place.
For the record, kids from both schools go on to do well in high school and beyond. And the Christa McAuliffe School isn’t some new-fangled hippy-dippy place; it’s been around for 30 years and it used to have a waiting list. But now it’s one of the only low-key happy places in Silicon Valley, which pretty well solves the mystery as to why parents aren’t sending their kids there.
If someone’s looking for a research topic, I’d love to know at what point during parenthood do progeny-producing adults tie up their own self-worth so inextricably with the performance of their offspring that they can no longer just let them happily survive in a forward trajectory. When does it all become only about how much amazingness your kid can exhibit on paper?
My theory (which I’m totally pulling out of my posterior) is that the decades-long state of sleep-deprivation brought on by parenting tiny humans retards the logic and compassion functions in the parental brain. This is why there are so many hyper parents running loose in our society, demanding higher, better and faster hoop-jumping from their kiddos. And god knows we don’t want our kids growing up happy and calm; that would only lead to contented adulthood (a scourge we should all be striving to obliterate).
Posted by Alexa Harrington
image: shilo shiv suleman
very well said my friend…very well said.
Thank you.
All I can say is “amen.” We barely treat our children like people anymore. They are now products for us to build on an assembly line: the more parts we can add to them, the more competitive of a product they will be.