They say that with age comes wisdom, and perhaps that adage is true.
Now that I have safely (I hope) delivered my youngest child to her West Coast college, my nest has finally emptied, and I have the time to reflect on the last 21 years of child rearing. How should I score myself as a parent? Did I do a decent job? Have I been successful? Did I have any regrets?
Our children, while possessing some talents, poise, and personality, are definitely not perfect. Of course, my husband and I aren’t perfect either, and we have made our share of mistakes, but none of them has proven too serious thus far. A person can only go so far in one's role as parent; after that, it’s up to the child.
We tried our best to provide both son and daughter with a loving, stable environment. They attended decent private and parochial schools, but we did not rely on the schools to teach them everything. We offered them a wide range of activities, from music to dance to art to sports to scouts to service clubs to manners classes. Some of these were direct offshoots of our own interests. My husband studied piano in college, and I was an art major, so naturally we steered both our children toward music and art.
There were times when we had to consciously urge both kids to participate in extracurricular pursuits. Yes, that’s right, we forced them. As a parent, I don’t see anything wrong with stern direction. If left to their own devices, my young children would have been happy as a couple of clams to spend hours in front of the television.
Still, even though both of us had a bias toward the arts, we made it a point to inject other interests into the mix where neither of us had any background, and that included organized sports. Through raising our children and seeing them through sporting events, both my husband and I were exposed to a side of life neither one of us had experience with while growing up. My son, the now almost-graduate with a degree in piano performance, though admittedly not much of an athlete, at times during his school years played hockey, t-ball, basketball, volleyball, soccer, and golf. My daughter was a dancer, gymnast, and cheerleader. My husband and I tried snow skiing, roller blading, bowling, and golf. (The golf stuck.)
Article comments
1 - Lisa Solod Warren
Yeh, but Joanne, if the art department was, as you say, "poorly housed," then why were you wrong? Why wasn't there a bond issue for that? When was the last time you saw a bond issue to raise money for a new high school arts building? I never have. I am all for high school athletics, in their proper place. But being from the South and now living in the South, they have never been given their proper place. They are the be all and end all. They get the lion's share of the support. Many more people turn out for a football game than for any play or art show combined. And the only people who go to band concerts are the parents of the players. Trust me, as the parents of band kids I knew that first hand. On the other hand, I think more kids would like gym classes (which should be mandatory) if they were more interesting. Both my kids went to school in Europe where the gym or phys ed classes were changed up every six weeks and they were "taught" new sports (or rather got to experience them) and they had a blast, rather than just do the same old, same old in a smelly gym, as I did (but then that was a long time ago). My daughter, in her school, gets gym credit for participating in school sports, which makes sense to me.
2 - Joanne Huspek
Thanks for commenting.
The entire public school budget thing is really a huge monster of a mess, especially nowadays. Special interests on school boards often sway the public thinking (and money) to their pet projects, not unlike what goes on in the larger political arena. I've known of districts that pay for expensive trips for the administrators, will redo their offices, while the students don't have enough text books to go around. (Yes, this really happened. I know because a friend of mine was a mom who was especially diligent.)
It's a little different in private schools, where they try to balance all aspects of a school experience. I think that's vital. Even a good athlete can benefit from exposure in the arts. Plus, private schools have to make do with the money they have, and not count on the taxpayer to shoulder the burden.
My school had really talented musicians (one was in the band Flash Cadillac, which appeared on "American Graffiti"), others were gifted artists. Heck, even I won a creative writing award. :-)
It is too bad that those things weren't nurtured. But, you live, you learn.