Posted by You teach your children right from wrong. Then the quest for your version of their happiness gives everyone the ‘Varsity Blues.’ How’s that going to look on the application?
I’d do anything for my children.
It’s why you were outraged at the B- your son got for his diorama about Manifest Destiny and the Westward Expansion, even though you built an fully operational “prairie schooner” from popsicle sticks.
It’s why you jumped through your skin when your daughter’s multimedia “Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad journey,” captured in a continuous three-camera shot by your Emmy-winning cinematographer friend, earned the top prize in the second-grade art show.
It’s why you vacillate between joy and queasiness when your daughter makes the varsity swim team as a 16-year-old freshman. “Her sports psychologist was right, honey. It was worth holding her back in third grade. She never would have been physically ready for this if we didn’t.”
I’d do anything for my children.
It’s a thought we have every minute of every day, something that we shoo away like a fly that keeps circling your head. What happens when we, as dads, let it keep buzzing in our ear? We say, “Go to bed, I will finish it.”
We type the paper, with our own fixes. We write the note begging the teacher for a second chance because our kid studied so hard for the test and just froze at the moment of truth. Truth be told, we let them go to the Drake concert the night before and weren’t smart enough to miss school the next day because they had the “sniffles.”
I’d do anything for my children.
It’s why we seek out a bogus ADHD “hall pass” for a child who has never struggled through a distracted moment in their life. That Adderall prescription can deliver an extra couple of hours for studying each night.
Not all of these “dad of the year” moments are created equal. And gluing your seven-year-old’s found-art collage while he washes down the last of the CheezDoodles with an Adam and Eve white-grape juice bag doesn’t damn you to an eternal loop of The Wiggles Greatest Hits. It doesn’t make you Felicity Hoffman or Lori Laughlin.
But at some point — likely the moment when we decided that five-year-olds should have an hour’s worth of homework every night — we decided that kids needed to pore over an unending stream of homework, extracurriculars, volunteer work, and unachievable expectations. So we started “helping”… and the sliding-proportion scale of parental guilt and overcompensation was born, all in an effort to overcome the “Varsity Blues.”
Are we better off — are they better off — if we finish the paper, or if we let them fail their way into durable lessons? Are we better as stand-ins for their responsibility, or safety nets when they flop? One makes us feel better. The other, we hope, makes them better people.
Of course, we are more often than not trying to fulfill our own fantasy… the one where friends notice our new sweatshirt from an Ivy League bookstore and say, “Wow, how did you do it? You must be so proud of your kids.”
A little help here, tutors there, test stand-ins at the ready, educators on the take and college coaches willing to sell spots on the varsity athletic teams at some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the U.S., all so people of status and privilege can indulge children of status and privilege.
I’d do anything for my children.
No, really. Who do I make the check out to?
It’s no secret that people of means and influence use means and influence to get what they want. But we have built a system in which the rewards go to people who stay up all night figuring out ways to cheat rather than study for the exam. It is time for parents to once again become the adults in the room.
“Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.”
Thomas Edison said that. He was the guy whom teachers identified as being “too difficult.” He went to school for a total of 12 weeks. If only his parents had blank checks and an amoral passion to paint him as something he wasn’t, he might have made something of himself.
