The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins

Author:Alexandra Robbins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Sociology, Psychology, Science
ISBN: 9781401302023
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2011-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

PARENTS AND “NORMALITY”

In my standard interview questions for this book, I did not ask students specifically about their parents; this is, after all, a book mainly about the dynamics and targets of exclusion at school. But as a considerable number of students raised the topic, I realized that if there is a single factor that spells the difference between cafeteria fringe headed for greatness and those doomed to low self-worth, even more than a caring teacher or a group of friends, it is supportive, accepting parents who not only love their children unconditionally, but also don’t make them feel as if their idiosyncrasies qualify as “conditions” in the first place. “My mom likes to compare me to the rest of society, or at least how she perceives it to be, and I just want her to stop,” Eli told me. “I want her to accept me for who I am.”

Throughout my years of lecturing at schools, my biggest surprise was a parent who, even after listening to a talk about how children’s health and happiness should be prioritized over prestige and accolades, asked me how to force her children to follow their mom’s dreams. At a high school outside of Seattle, she asked me, “What if my only dream for my kids is that they go to either Stanford or Yale?” Later, as the principal drove me back to my hotel, I told her about the encounter. The principal knew the woman. Her oldest daughter, she told me, was at Yale. Her younger daughter still attended the high school. “There’s a middle daughter, too,” she told me. The mother hadn’t mentioned her. “Where is she?” I asked. The principal named a small college. At that moment, my heart broke not only for the daughter who already was forced to become her mother’s alarmingly narrow ideal, but also for the middle daughter who knew that in her mother’s mind she had already failed.

“All parents want their kids to be popular,” psychologist Lawrence Bauman has claimed. “Popular kids seem to be a vindication of all the early years of support that parents have given and the effort they have made in raising their kids.”3 In this respect, there may be scant difference between parents who push their kids to get into a prestigious college and parents desperate for their kids to be cool. Both sets of parents, intentionally or not, restrict their children by jamming them into a specific mold. Both sets might seek some sort of brag-worthy validation of their “successful” parenting. Both sets might make their children feel as if they aren’t good enough—or worse, that they are deficient or failures—the way they are. Certainly some parents push for popularity because they want to spare their children the pain of friendlessness. But what’s tragic about students in Eli’s situation is that rather than assure children that there’s no such thing as normal, some parents are telling them that they aren’t—and then making them feel like they should want to be.

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