Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Day 281: Power of parents

Today was "Walk a Day" when parents can come walk a day in the shoes of their students. Parents follow their students' schedules and attend classes like high schoolers. Most of the parents are great. Most of the students are well behaved in front of the parents, even when not their parents. Unfortunately, some parents were not positive additions to everyone's classrooms.

I had a parent text messaging through my class. Some of my colleagues had parents showing excessive cleavage. Some parents were eating and drinking in the halls. One teacher was hoarse from talking over chatty parents. We had this problem last year, so the administration stressed that all visitors must follow the same rules as students. All parents were given little pink forms reminding them of the electronic's policy, dress code, etc. What was interesting to me was that the parent that disrespected our rules in my class has a daughter who doesn't feel like the rules apply to her, whose attitude is often out of control.

Are you like your parents? Are you the best of your parents? the worst? As teachers, we often meet parents and see their children are reflections of them. Unfortunately, many times the parents explain the children. Too many times, I have met the parents and understood the children or realized that the poor child has way too much to overcome at home for me to be one more obstacle.

I know I am the product of my parents. I am the best of my parents: educated, caring, loving, thoughtful, insightful, polite, ethical, Christian. I am also the worst of my parents: neurotic, worrying, reclusive, selfish, passive aggressive and confrontational, manipulative, controlling. I see where I get each of these traits from a combination of my parents. My mother was selfless in her care and raising of my sisters and I, taught us valuable lessons everyday. My father was the deep, insightful counselor who saw past the surface and encouraged us to be better.

I am also my own unique mixture of traits, but I can look back and see where ideas formed, concepts blossomed and characteristics took root. Are we cursed/blessed then to be our parents?

Is my daughter then doomed to be me? There are so many things about myself I don't want her to be. I am antisocial and have had to work very hard the past few years to change that about myself. Eve know, unless dragged into social groups, I tend isolate myself. I want her to feel like she belongs with her friends and fits. I want her to have enough self-worth to walk away from people who pressure or abuse her, but to also understand that some self-esteem has to be earned. I don't want her to be afraid of failing. I want her to laugh so much more than I did. I was so the brooding poet, "emo", kid in college.

Parents are a strange part of our lives. They make up most of our lives in our histories and in how we continue to live as adults. Very few of us ever can make a clean break from even the worst parents. Children who survive horrible abuse as children may live relatively normal lives in comparison to their childhoods, but are never free from the scars. Just as I won't ever be free from my "Pollyanna" view of the world coming from my idyllic childhood. I still get surprised after sixteen years when I learn some of the situations my students overcome just getting here everyday.

I think we come from God as palettes full of colors, and parents teach us to blend our paints and to make our brush strokes on the canvas. Our world is forever colored by those early lessons. Knowing this certainly makes me hope to be conscious parent, conscious of my influence, of my legacy, conscious of letting Lil Bit be herself too without my constant opinion.

Parents have so much power. That eight year old throwing a tantrum in the aisles of Wal-mart will someday be an eighty year old who will most likely be living still at least a little in the reflection of his parents' parenting. Don't even get me started on what studies say about parents! I just wish more of them took the time to wield that wand more carefully.

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