FAST FORWARD FROM MARCH TO DECEMBERBy Stephanie Rafanelli

Remember that early parenting moment where your child falls and skins her knee for the first time and looks to you to gauge an appropriate response? Should I cry? Am I going to be OK? The calm, quietly attentive parent lets her daughter know, yes, there is a little blood and maybe even some stinging, but you will make it. We learn early that our child’s reactions will mirror ours. Our resolve or, alternately, panic, will become theirs.

Every March, a dozen or so former students wander back over to my middle school classroom to give me their college news. While most are ecstatic, there are always a few who are devastated. More often than not, these students point out that their parents are really disappointed. I wonder, is this a case of a parent’s panic being reflected through the student? Is the young adult really as dejected as he seems? Yes, college is more consequential than a skinned knee. Still, I have seen this student in action for years – conquering a difficult project, experiencing an unsuccessful student council bid, or maneuvering social upheaval. He has had practice in succeeding, failing, persevering, and staying engaged. I fundamentally believe he will be OK and probably thrive. Even at his second or third choice college.

Luckily, I have the December and January visits still fresh in my mind. Last year’s senior is now soaring as a freshman. “I am so excited about the language program – I can take classes in both French and English!” came the report from a student attending college in Canada. “I get to shadow the robotics team at a competition in April,” declared a pleased freshman now on the east coast. From a student in southern California, “I found ‘my people,’ Ms. Raf. Everyone I meet has some kind of combined major.” The angst of not being accepted at one particular college is forgotten as I am regaled by stories about the roommate, the lab schedule, or (my recent favorite) the great cafeteria food.

I know a skinned knee hurts. By now, your high school senior has had, hopefully, a few literal and metaphorical skinned knees, and she can understand both from your words and your loving support that she will survive. Ideally, your child has a network of adults – an advisor, past teachers, a coach – who can remind her of this message. Plant the seeds of next year’s conversation now – What drew her to the school to which she was accepted? What is she most looking forward to? Are there local alumni from that school who might be willing to meet for coffee? Who, among her teachers or advisors, will be excited for a full report in December? I, for one, can hardly wait to hear . . .

Stephanie Rafanelli is both a school coach and a parent education facilitator for Challenge Success. Stephanie has been a middle school science and math teacher for nineteen years. In addition to almost two decades in the classroom, she has served as department chair, both academic and also grade level Dean, a parent and faculty educator, and a leader of curriculum reform. She has founded and run several summer and afterschool programs such as Sally Ride Science Camp for Girls and Menlo Summer Explorations. Stephanie is an educational consultant for multiple organizations. When she is not thinking about education, Stephanie is usually creating chaos with her three children.

Courageous Parenting by Dr. Madeline LevineMARCH MADNESS

Every psychologist knows that there are certain times of the year when the phone starts ringing like mad. Winter holidays are one of those times when people’s hopes for idyllic family reunions often meets the reality of your uncle who drinks too much, your siblings who reliably don’t show up or your mother who thinks you married “down.”  Most of us in the mental health profession stay close to our offices between Christmas and New Years, anticipating teary, disappointed calls from adults who find, once again, that their Norman Rockwell visions have turned into Edvard Munch’s The Scream. For decades, this was the toughest time of year for both patients (well, many people actually) and therapists, when old hurts, disappointments and wounds unexpectedly reappeared, often taking center stage.

But times have changed and we have a new contender for the emotionally toughest time of year - and that is March - when college acceptances and rejections come in. What is profoundly different about this difficult time from what I described above is that, for the most part, it is unnecessary and fabricated not out of real trauma, but manufactured trauma. My phone rings this morning at 8AM (right after mail delivery) and a sobbing mother relates how her son was just rejected from “ the only school we wanted.” The first thing to note of course is the “we.”  I’m assuming it’s her son who is going to college and not the whole family. But like many of these phone calls, the bleeding between the needs of the high schooler and the needs of the parents, practically needs a tourniquet. Parents are beside themselves about rejections that are incidental to their children; children are beside themselves about disappointing their parents. The normal level of excitement and disappointment that one would expect at this point is so out of proportion to the reality of what it means to go to Wisconsin instead of Michigan, Georgetown instead of Princeton, Santa Cruz instead of UCLA or Sonoma State instead of San Jose State as to defy easy explanation. So here’s my best shot at what is really going on during March Madness.

First of all, we’ve come to believe that where our children go to college will have a profound impact on how their lives turn out. There are companies that “guarantee” admission to a prestigious college if you start working with them while your child is still a toddler. Many schools begin college preparation in 6^th grade and even more in 9^th. This emphasis lets our children (and ourselves) know early and regularly that high school and even childhood are staging areas for something that will happen years, even decades later. In fact, both childhood and adolescence have a whole bunch of requirements of their own that have nothing to do with where your child ultimately goes to college. Long before that happens, they need to show self-control, get interested in themselves and the world, know how to talk and work with other people and reflect on their future selves. Premature focus on college takes away much needed time from the tasks and skills that kids need to master in order to go on and be successful college students, and then successful adults.

So does the college that your child goes to matter? Yes, of course. But not necessarily in the way we’ve become accustomed to thinking about it. Colleges and universities matter when they fit well with the needs, interests and temperament of your child. The child who thrives in a big social setting is unlikely to do well in a small rural school. The child who loves structure, may struggle with a school where there are few requirements. College is a match, not a prize. We have our eye on the wrong ball when we care most about the “ranking” of the college our child goes to. Academically talented kids, for the most part, go to competitive schools. But these handful of top schools can fill their classes many times over with bright kids. No kid should feel like a failure (another typical March phone call - a crying youngster who won’t get out of bed saying “I did everything right and it was for nothing.”) It is a tragedy to have high performing kids feel like failures when they don’t get into the toughest schools. It is equally a tragedy to marginalize kids who go to community colleges.  “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” said Yogi Berra. Few of us have walked a straight and narrow path to “success.”  Many of us have changed focus, schools and careers. We should know better. There are few individual things that will determine our life’s trajectory. Life is simply more complex than that. No school guarantees success in life and no school eliminates it.

Instead of crying over rejections, we should be celebrating acceptances with our kids in March. Of course going to a high-ranking school may carry potential advantages. But an Ivy League study showed that there were no ultimate differences in workplace success or satisfaction among students who were accepted to Ivy League schools and attended and those who were accepted but didn’t go there. Ultimately it is your child’s life. The best guarantees of success for our children - not at the end of the grading period, not when they get into college - but twenty years down the line when they move into their adult lives, have to do with real involvement with learning (not just going through the motions,) a good emotional foundation and good values. Their college acceptances have nothing, or little, to do with your parenting. This is about your child. And they should feel good about moving towards one of the greatest transitions in their lives. Wherever your kid gets into college this month, go out and celebrate. This is how you share without bleeding. 

Courageous ParentingThere’s So Much Pressure.Do We Really Have A Choice? by Dr. Madeline Levine

Hi. Welcome to Courageous Parenting. Since you don’t know me yet, and I don’t know you, let’s start with a brief introduction. I’m Madeline Levine, co-founder of Challenge Success and author of the NYT bestseller, The Price of Privilege. I’ve been a clinical psychologist working mostly with teens and parenting issues for the past 30 years (Making me sound rather old. Probably an advantage to you since I’ve either lived through or treated most of the things that you are likely to be worried about.)

I’ve thought long and hard about whether our current high-stakes, high-pressure culture is here to stay. Most of us seem to be participating in this culture, often in multiple ways, and just as often, against our better judgment. We worry about the schools our children attend. Are they rigorous enough? Have we done enough to give our kids a “leg up?” We hover over homework, track test scores, push for competitive sports and keep our children endlessly busy with extracurriculars. While all of these topics will be discussed in great detail over the coming months let’s start with what the research says. I’ll then tell you what my experience has taught me.

Kids do not benefit from excessive stress (period!) That’s not to say that having your kid do his homework, or grounding him for an infraction or insisting on chores is too much to ask of “vulnerable” children. Kids for the most part are robust and resilient. We take that strength away from them when we add stress that is out of synch with the well-documented needs of kids. Homework into the night, depriving kids of the sleep that they need for optimal brain development, is out of synch with healthy development and therefore damaging. So is insisting on near perfect grades, outstanding athletic achievement or building water plants in third world countries to beef up college resumes. Kids thrive at the “just right” challenge. That is when they are challenged just beyond their current level of competence. Not when they’re expected to act like rocket scientists, professional athletes or adults.

Actually, a body of research tells us that our kids are most likely to do well, both academically and emotionally when we are aware of their strengths and weaknesses; help them cultivate those strengths and compensate for those weaknesses. When we see them clearly. When we love them unconditionally and still set limits and impose consequences when called for. When we are alert for signs of excessive stress like headaches and stomachaches. And when we do see signs, are quick to protect our children by looking at both our own contribution as well as their schools’ contribution.

But often the pressure seems to be overwhelming. Getting into the “right” school starts to feel (mistakenly) like a matter of life and death. We become “night teachers” working into exhaustions (for both us and them) so that they turn in perfect work (and lose the opportunities to learn from mistakes.) We neglect to make sure that our kids are getting the mandatory “down time” to think, dream, and reflect on their future selves. Instead we pack their days with a schedule befitting a junior leaguer or a CEO.

This isn’t what kids need. They need what kids have always needed. Love, limits, support, unpressured time, goals to reach for and a sense of having something to contribute.

Challenge Success has many goals. To improve best practices in school, to lessen developmentally inappropriate demands on kids, to insure that they learn to make healthy choices, to support parents. But our guiding principle is that every child is unique and has the potential to contribute to himself, his family and his community. There are many ways to be successful in this world and our sons and daughters need to be fully aware that a good life can come just as easily from being a pianist, a teacher, a nurse or a venture capitalist. It’s what’s inside that counts. Every day, parents come up against choices that are tough to make. Do you encourage your son to turn down the traveling soccer team even when he’s earned a spot? Do you choose the play preschool over the one known for it’s academic rigor? Does your child skip chores because there’s a big test coming up? Most of these questions have relatively simple answers.* Challenge Success is here to help you navigate through some of the thornier calls we need to make. So am I.

Comments, questions, proposed topics and criticism are all equally welcome.

*Depending on your son’s age, his athletic involvement should be up to him. That doesn’t mean that you need to give up family life. If the team demands that you do, I’d think twice.

Play-based preschools have kids, who on average, do better academically down the line than academic preschools.

Much more to be learned from completing a chore and discharging a responsibility than from a few extra minutes of more studying.

The Outliers - A Student's Perspective

This offering comes to us from Leah Messing, a college student and good friend of Challenge Success. Thank you for your insights, Leah!

Sincerely,
The Challenge Success Team

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In his novel The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell examines the lives of today’s greatest success stories with a critical lens. He defies the common belief that any individual can rise through the top through purely hard work. Rather than attack the principle of a meritocracy, Gladwell provides a framework for success by including another circumstance that must be coupled with hard work: opportunity. He believes that when it comes to determining success, the opportunities one has been provided with is more important than his or her personality traits. Gladwell writes:

“We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” (Gladwell 19).

Gladwell’s words should be taken to heart by high school parents. Rather than focusing on a child’s high school and intellectual achievements, parents should focus on how they raised their children and what type of opportunities they afforded their children as a predictor of future success. Hard work is only one ingredient in Gladwell’s equation, yet it’s the ingredient parents focus on the most because it is the easiest to control. The other ingredient, opportunity, is much less controllable and ironically much more important.

Many people are hardworking and talented, but having access to opportunity is key.

The Beatles rose to the top not just because of their talent, but because they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany when they were a struggling high school rock band in the 1960s. This extraordinary opportunity afforded them the ability to perform live an estimated twelve hundred times before they had their first burst of success. There are many talented musicians in the world, but none had the thousands of hours of practice that the Beatles did.

Bill Gates rose to the top not just because of his talent, but because he was sent to a high school that had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. Because one of the parents at his high school worked for C-Cubed, which needed people to check computer code on the weekends. Because he lived within walking distance of the University of Washington, which happened to have free computer time between 3-6 in the morning. There were many talented computer geniuses like Bill Gates during his time, but none had the opportunity to practice like Gates did (54).

Obsessing about pushing children to work hard and giving them every opportunity seems to be the 21st century parental phenomenon. Parents who push children that lack the intrinsic motivation to work hard give children the impression that their success is defined by performance. Parents must show that they value other personality traits aside from hard work. After all, many people that are hard working don’t end up being “successful.” According to Gladwell, in order to be extraordinarily successful one needs access to opportunity.

In my opinion, the obsession with opportunity is a far better obsession than the obsession with working hard. Providing opportunity in the form of exposure to extracurricular activities is one of the best investments parents can make in their children for future success. Gladwell mentions that being a heavily scheduled child has its advantages, and these advantages do not have to do with increasing talent in a particular extracurricular activity. Being heavily scheduled gives a child an advantage in practical intelligence. By increased exposure to a constantly shifting set of experiences the child will learn how to interact with new people, cope with structured settings, and assert his or herself when his or her needs are not being met. Maybe parents should be more concerned with the types of practical intelligence their child is acquiring in these extracurricular activities rather than the child increasing his or her talent. After all, most kids do not end up being professional ice skaters, basketball players, or actors anyway.

A Student Shares

Our latest article comes from Michael Stern, a student at Menlo School in Atherton, California.

Thank you, Michael
Sincerely,
The Challenge Success Team

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I recently watched Race To Nowhere, a documentary that illuminates the problems in our education system.

The documentary speaks of students who are sleep-deprived, unhealthy, and largely unhappy. Kids are under pressure to juggle unreasonable demands of academics and extracurriculars. It also talks about a disturbingly high suicide rate. This leads to an environment in which we only care about grades and college admission instead of learning.

These problems epitomize our schools.

To an observer, everything might seem fine, but that’s an illusion. When you experience these problems and see your classmates go through the same thing, it’s easier to understand what’s really going on. If you ask someone how they’re doing, they’ll smile and say “Good” simply because that’s what we’ve been taught to do.

Most students know there is a problem. Look around. Do juniors look happy? Do we look like we love to learn? Have you ever been in a class where there hasn’t been a substantial amount of cheating or cutting corners?
But if we want to make a radical change to tackle this problem, there is a chain of command we have to go through. Students report to teachers, who report to the administration, which reports to the Board, which “reports” to the parents.

The parents at private schools (especially those on the Board) have a greater responsibility because as children, we are vulnerable to accepting what they teach us. Children suffer because of their achievement-driven tenets, as evident in student actions. It makes me wonder whether they’re afraid to change. And perhaps people further down the chain are also afraid. I know I don’t want to lose a chance to get into college.

The problem is stoppable. We can eliminate some requirements for graduation to foster a passion-based learning experience, because by the time students get to senior year, many have already lost a joy of learning they won’t regain. They’re not stupid or lazy; they just aren’t engaged.
Lowering the amount of homework would give students more time to find their passions through extracurriculars. But most of all, we need a mindset that will guide all of our actions in the future. And it starts with the parents. Your children are suffering and are victims of a misguided education system. There is no reason that schooling has to be a competition-- the priority has to be with learning and if this issue was tackled, students would be more receptive than most think.

New Semester = your new choice to celebrate the work-in-progress you.

Today's offering comes from another good friend of Challenge Success, Maria Pascucci. Maria is the founder and president of CampusCalm.com and author of the award-winning book Campus Calm University: The College Student’s 10-Step Blueprint to Stop Stressing & Create a Happy, Purposeful Life.

Maria, thank you!
Cheers,
The Challenge Success Team

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New Semester = your new choice to celebrate the work-in-progress you.

It’s your brand new semester, so celebrate you by daring to take a chance! Spread yourself outside your comfort zone. Learn what it feels like to not always be good at something from the start. Not a hands-on person? Sign up for an art elective. Paint your way toward being a more confident risk taker. Love poetry? Join a debate team. Challenge yourself to see life through a new lens.

If you’ve been neglecting your health every single semester leading up until now, break the pattern. Commit to getting enough sleep this semester even if it means saying “NO” when faced with the temptation to spread yourself too thin. Commit to stressing less and being grateful more. Grateful for the gift of time that college affords you to learn, explore and build supportive relationships on campus that will serve you forever. Because that’s the real secret about success. Ten years after you’ve graduated from college, whether you left with a 4.0 GPA or a 3.4 will not matter, whether you graduated from a public, private, large, small, elite or non-name-brand college will not have made a difference. But ten years past the day you shed your cap and gown, whether you were able to take chances in college, make mistakes and trust that you can develop the courage to be resilient will make all the difference in the world. And every second you spent inside and outside of the classroom will have been worth it.

Live your vision of a happy, purposeful life,
Maria

"The BLOG about Sports"

Another close friend of ours, and one of our founders, is Jim Lobdell. Jim sent us the following, and we certainly do THANK YOU for it, Jim! You present some very useful thoughts.
Cheers,
Emerson


Sports Blog

I love sports. Throughout my childhood, I played pick-up games of virtually every ball sport, and then swam and played water polo in high school. In college, I played on two NCAA championship water polo teams, and into adulthood and middle age I’ve competed in basketball tournaments, triathlons, running events, and open water swims.

I know playing sports offers kids an undeniable wealth of benefits, from fitness and fun to life lessons about teamwork, perseverance, and effort. But navigating youth sports today is tricky. With youth sports organizations now offering leagues for 4- and 5-year-olds, travel teams for 9-year-olds, and options for year-round involvement, some families find sports to be “too much of a good thing” and struggle to find a balance as they encounter the “earlier is better” and “more is better” mindset.

Here are five guiding questions that parents can ask to help determine choices about youth sports for their children. Often, families have to reconcile conflicting priorities as they answer these questions (for example, a great sports opportunity may impinge on other family needs, or the needs of the parents are at odds with the desires of the child), which is why dilemmas around youth sports are so prevalent. That said, answering these five questions when faced with these dilemmas helps sort out the issues when making decisions.

1. What are our goals for our child in sports? Here’s a partial list of reasons you might want your child to play sports. Check the ones that matter most to you, and keep these in mind as you make choices about your kids’ sport experience and when you are on the sidelines at games. Most parents don’t rate “winning” as a primary goal, yet their sideline behavior often suggests otherwise.
• Become an accomplished athlete
• Develop teamwork skills
• Earn a college scholarship
• Fitting in
• Gain increased self-confidence
• Have fun
• Improve fitness
• Learn “life lessons” that sports can provide
• Make friends
• Playing a high school varsity sport
• Winning
• Other?

2. What do youth sports experts recommend?
• Keep the focus on fun. That’s the primary reason kids play sports, and when it becomes too serious too soon, they typically leave the sport or burn-out.
• Encourage kids to “just play” more. While organized sports offer great benefits, kids develop athletically and learn a ton from playing kid-sized pick-up games and age-appropriate games like tag.
• Avoid early specialization. Better to play a variety of sports to develop a variety of athletic skills and to avoid burn-out and overuse injuries.
• Allow kids to rest and their bodies to recover. Overuse injuries are increasing at alarming rates, largely due to early specialization and year-round playing.

3. How will the sports experience fit in with our family needs? Youth sports require a time commitment—after school, evenings, and/or weekends—that can impinge on family time. Parents must consider:
• How will joining the sports team/club impact the family’s overall schedule?
• How important is having family dinners together? Unstructured family time in evenings and on weekends? Flexibility for family vacations during summer and over school holidays?
• Does driving to/from practices and games and watching youth sports “count” as family time?
• How will the sports team/club impact siblings?

4. Does the sports team/club align with our values? Parents cede oversight of their child to the coach of the team. Especially as kids get involved in more time-intensive sports at later ages, parents need to “screen” the sports team or club. In doing so, parents must determine:
• Do the values of the coach and the sports team/club align with ours?
• Do we feel comfortable entrusting our child with this coach?
• Does the time and financial commitment the team/club requires feel reasonable given our family needs and resources?
• Does our initial experience and observation match what we were told when we were selecting the team/club?
• Who is benefiting most from the commitment required by the club: the athlete, coach, or club?

5. How is our child responding to the sports experience? This question needs to be revisited regularly as a child is involved in the sport. Especially as kids get older and involved in more intensive sports, it is incumbent upon parents to “check in” with kids. This is done for the child’s well-being and to make sure the child’s desires—and not the parents’ needs—are driving the experience. Parents can monitor this by asking:
• Is our child asking to join the team?
• Is our child getting his/her gear ready and bugging us not to be late for practice? (Keep in mind the Disneyland comparison—no parent has to drag a child there.)
• Is our child voluntarily “bending our ear” about their experiences?
• Is our child fired up when they talk about the sport?
• What does our child’s body language reveal when you mention the coach’s name?
• When left to their own devices on their own time, does our child play the sport?
• Is the sport helping or hindering their sleep, eating, and/or study habits?
• Is our child asking to ratchet up the commitment and seriousness?