Sometimes, it's the best we can do

No one ever said that education was easy. Ask any parent and he will regale you with stories of his children's celebrations and successes, but if you gently encourage him (or buy him another beer) he will also relate stories of frustration and doubt. The same is true for teachers.

The other day, I talked with a parent about some inappropriate things his daughter had repeated at the dinner table. It was unclear where the girl had heard these things - it could have been at recess or in the supermarket or on the radio - but the parents were justifiably rattled because they had made a point of trying to protect their daughter from pernicious influences: they carefully circumscribed what she watched on TV, they listened to age-appropriate music in the car, and they were scrupulous about the language they used at home.

All the same, their daughter had blurted out these ugly words at the dinner table. And the father wanted to know, "How had this happened?"

I understood his concern, for it is never easy to realize that you are losing jurisdiction over your child to a world which can be crass, callous, and dangerous. It is entirely natural to want to protect the innocent for as long as possible. However, I wasn't sure that his was the right question.

And even if it was the right question (and for him, of course it was), I wasn't sure that the answer would be altogether relevant. For instance, let's say that I determined that the girl overheard these words at school, what would be the next step? I could talk to the offending parties and forbid them from using those words ever again, and maybe the kids would refrain from infecting their peers with indecorous figurative speech and maybe they wouldn't.

If they stopped, the girl still would have heard what she heard; and if they didn't stop, the girl would still be exposed to that which her parents abhorred.

Which is exactly my point. There is only so much control that one can exert over the actions of others. As a coach, I used to tell my players that the only thing that they could control was their effort: they couldn't control how good the opponent was, and they couldn't control the referees; but they could control how they prepared for games and how they reacted when competing.

I believe that roles of parents are similar: we cannot possibly prepare our children for every situation they might face, but we can prepare them (hopefully) to react appropriately. Of course this is easy to preach and tough to practice, for we cannot possibly anticipate all the situations in which our children will find themselves.

But we can, for instance, talk with our children about what's appropriate in different places. Kids learn early that there is an "outside voice" and an "inside voice," and they understand when each is suitable. Similarly, students learn that there is language teachers expect in the classroom and language that is unbefitting an academic environment.

It is important to keep in mind that for children an understanding of what's appropriate and what's not takes time. They experiment with language just as they experiment with boundaries, and during this process of experimentation there are bound to be mistakes made. Hopefully those mistakes will be relatively harmless and become the stuff of family legend, to be laughed at over a beer.

We parents and teachers cannot protect our children and students forever, but we have a responsibility to prepare them as best we can for the world they will face once they leave our care. And once they leave our care, there's not much we can do other than to cross our fingers and pray that other parents have prepared their children as well as we have.

--Steve McKibben
10/8/06