Why I Think We’re Bad Parents (And What I Learned About Raising Responsible Kids)
After the first 10 minutes of my 11-year-old son Jax’s first middle school parent-teacher check-in last week, I blurted it out before I could stop myself. We were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder at his too-small student desk, my jeans pinching at the waist from hunching over, a half-peeled Minecraft creeper sticker stuck to my shoe. The teacher had just finished telling us how curious Jax is during class discussions, how he helps his lab group work through problems when they get stuck. Then she paused, and said, “The only consistent gap is homework. Almost half of his assignments haven’t been turned in this grading period.”
I looked at my husband, then back at her, and said, “I guess we are bad parents.”
She laughed it off, said every family has their own system, this is nothing out of the ordinary for early middle school. But on the drive home, my husband and I didn’t talk much, because we both knew the root of the problem. Two years ago, when Jax was starting sixth grade, we made a deliberate choice: we wouldn’t check his planner every night. We wouldn’t nag him five times a day to get his work done. We wouldn’t email his teacher to ask for extensions when he forgot an assignment. We wouldn’t dig through his backpack to find missing worksheets. We’d let him own it, all of it, the good and the bad.
At the time, we’d just spent a year of elementary school reminding Jax to do his homework every single night. If we didn’t, he’d forget. If we stopped reminding for one day, he’d have a zero. He’d wait for us to bring it up, wouldn’t think about it on his own. We looked at what was happening to friends’ older kids: a 16-year-old who still needed his mom to remind him to pack his bag for school. A college freshman who called his mom every other night to ask how to write an email to his professor, because she’d always done it for him. We didn’t want that. So we stepped back.
But standing in that classroom, listening to the list of missing assignments, I couldn’t shake the voice that pops up every time I talk to other parents at pickup. The voice that says good parents stay on top of this. Good parents set daily reminders, check the online parent portal every morning, sign every planner, make sure every assignment is turned in on time. By that standard, yeah, we’re bad parents.
When we got home, Jax was curled up on the couch eating cheddar Goldfish, binging a Minecraft build tutorial on YouTube. We sat down next to him, ready to lay out new rules: we’ll check your planner every night, you lose your phone until work is done, the whole thing. But before we could start, I asked him, “What do you think would help you remember to turn in your work?”
He paused the video, thought for a second, and said, “Mostly, stop asking me every 10 minutes. When you keep nagging, I just get annoyed and tune you out. Can you just ask me once after dinner? That’s it. And I can leave my phone and my Switch on the kitchen counter when I do homework, instead of bringing it to my room. I get distracted too easy up there.”
That was it. No big fight, no rigid new rules from us. He came up with exactly what he needed. We agreed to it, and that’s what we’ve done for the past two weeks.
What I’ve been thinking about since that check-in is how backwards we often have this. We think being a good parent means fixing every problem before it happens, making sure our kid never gets a bad grade, never forgets anything, never faces a small consequence. But small consequences in middle school are way easier to handle than big consequences in college. If Jax gets a C on his progress report because he forgot homework, that’s way better than him flunking out his first semester of college because no one ever taught him how to remember his own assignments.
The concrete stuff that’s working for us, that any parent can try, isn’t complicated. First, stick to one check-in a day, only one, instead of multiple nagging reminders. We use the exact line: “Do you have anything you need to get done tonight?” That’s it. No follow ups, no hovering over his shoulder while he works. If he says no, we drop it. If he says yes, we leave him to it. Second, let your kid come up with the system that works for them, instead of imposing yours. Jax picked the counter charging spot, so he’s way more likely to stick to it than if we’d forced it on him. We didn’t argue when he said he still wanted his Switch in his room on weekends, because that was his call to make. Third, don’t step in to fix his mistakes unless he asks for your help, and even then, make him do the work. When he got that zero for a missing project last month, he had to talk to the teacher himself to ask for an extra day. I didn’t do it for him.
It’s not perfect. Last week, we got an email alert that he forgot to turn in his science lab worksheet. I still get that twist in my chest when I see other parents posting about their kid’s straight A’s, and I think, I guess we are bad parents. Jax still forgets something about once a week. We’re not raising a perfect seventh grader, we’re raising an adult who can take care of himself.
Last night, he came out of his room after finishing his homework, showed us his updated grade on the portal. He’d brought it up from a C to a B+ in two weeks, all on his own. He was grinning, proud of himself, in a way he never was when we were reminding him every step of the way. That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re comparing yourself to everyone else’s parenting highlight reel: the “bad” hands-off approach that makes other people side-eye you might just be the thing that teaches your kid they can handle their own stuff. We still have a lot of bad parent days ahead, I’m sure. But for right now, this is working.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why I Think We’re Bad Parents (And What I Learned About Raising Responsible Kids)