My Mother is Not a Tiger and I Am Too

My mother is American French-Irish and most definitely not a Chinese Tiger Mother, as Amy Chua describes herself.   My mother played the piano beautifully (though not as well as Chua’s kids) for fun and relaxation every spare minute she could find in a day.  Even though this was her first love, my mother did not force me to practice or even to stay with it.  Far from a tiger, she was more like Golden Retriever Mother.

She would chase down any person or opportunity she thought was good for us and come back beaming, dropping it at our feet eagerly, her face just begging us to pick it up.  How could we say no? 

Beaming Golden Retriever

As excited as she was to get us involved in new activities, though, she always let us quit-- and the five of us racked up quite a quitting record: piano, sewing, dance, paper routes, soccer, a month of kindergarten, and even college.  And as my husband once noted, “she thinks everything her kids do is wonderful” (other than wrapping presents, which I wasn’t allowed to attempt).

Sadly, as my daughters moved up in school, I became worried that if I wasn’t more of a “Tiger Mother,” they would spend their lives in front of the tv.  I wondered if my mother had been too lax with us and if she could have forced me to be more disciplined (that was before I realized, mid-life, that I had ADD; now I have an excuse for my lack of discipline).   

All I ever really wanted to be was what David Elkind calls a “Milk and Cookies Mom,” and during the early years, it was easy to relax, play, and notice how remarkable my kids were.  But as they moved through middle school and high school, I got scared.  If there is one thing I could do over (there are about a million), it would be this: don’t parent from a place of fear.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know that then and as school pressures increased, so did my feeling that I was somehow failing my kids: they weren’t as motivated as they needed to be-- if they were going to get into a “decent” college and get a “good job.” 

We had tried to raise them as self-starters, but when, as teens, they weren’t performing at the highest levels, my doubts bubbled up and I would swing between a few days of hounding them and a few months of allowing them to self-direct.   Unlike Chua’s husband, who begged her not to scream at her kids, my husband begged me to be pushier because he felt he would have done better in life if his parents had pushed him.  (Done better than marrying me?  Really?)

Instinctively, I believed that self-motivation was the way to go – only now I wanted them to self-motivate for what I wanted them to do.  To be fair, it’s not as if they were doing nothing.  They both got their homework done every night, even when it took four, five or seven hours.  It’s just that the results (grades) weren’t always there – and after all, they did spend time watching tv and texting with friends.  I thought I should try to pack a bit more into their days and nights. What saved us, and for this I'm truly grateful, is that I also had doubts about the relentless pace (since I couldn’t keep up with it).  It turns out that my instincts were right, but at the time, I had no validation.

Later, when I formally studied motivation, I was delighted to discover that the highest form of motivation is intrinsic.  It turns out that the type of motivation Chua practiced with her girls is one of the lowest forms of motivation: external (and grades are also external motivation).  So now I’ve purged the doubts and the tiger from my playbook and it’s time to admit: “Mom, you were right.”  In my next life, I’ll be pure golden. Really. 

Surprised (Happily) by College's Service Culture

“How do you figure out which colleges will be best for your child?” a mother in the audience asked me recently.

“A good place to start is by asking your child to think about times in his life when he felt confident, energized, connected, or felt he was making a valuable contribution,” I replied. Four years ago, when my daughter Lauren was doing this exercise, she realized that a number of her best moments came during community service projects.

So I took notice last week when the college she chose, Ohio Wesleyan University (OWU), won a 2009 presidential award for community service.

“Did you know OWU was so strong in community service when you picked it?” I asked Lauren, now a junior.

“Yeah,” she said. “Don’t you remember?’’ My memory’s not what it was… “That was one of the questions I always asked colleges because I loved the Honduras work [done in high school] so much,” Lauren explained (patiently). I guess I was the only one surprised by how that played out four years later.

How do you make a culture come alive-- even to a high schooler?

This made me curious: how does a college foster a service culture that is noticeable even to a high school student? I asked OWU’s Susan Pasters, Director of Community Service Learning, and Rock Jones, President.

CD: Why do you think so many OWU students volunteer so many hours in community service?
SP: Each student’s motivation is uniquely individual, but OWU attracts students who are predisposed toward participating in community service. Many of our students want to be engaged in service-learning activities outside the classroom. Others find that community service is a good way to make friends and feel good about themselves.

RJ: Ohio Wesleyan has a long heritage of combining rigorous classroom work with real-world experiences, including volunteer service. There is a particularly strong culture of service on the campus that is embraced by virtually everyone at OWU.

CD: Many colleges have community service. When you arrived at OWU, did you expect that this was an area where the school would stand apart?

SP: I arrived in July 1989 to establish a community service office. I knew that OWU had a long history of producing a large percentage of graduates who entered a life of service…[but] in 1989, I had no idea that Ohio Wesleyan would end up being an exemplary school for service and service-learning.

RJ: I learned in the interview process of the longstanding commitment to service at Ohio Wesleyan, dating from the early 20th century when OWU sent large numbers of graduates to serve as Methodist missionaries to the late 20th century when OWU was recognized for being one of the universities to send the largest number of graduates to service in the Peace Corps. Service is in the genetic code of OWU.

CD: How do you encourage students to get involved?
RJ: We start talking about it during the admission process, we talk more during Orientation, and we host a Volunteer Fair during the first week of classes.

SP: We advertise through every means possible, but there is also a great word-of-mouth network where students recruit their friends to get involved because they are having such great experiences.

Finding Meaning

CD: Finding meaning isn’t always easy. Does community service add meaning for OWU students?
RJ: Yes – it happens every day. Many students share with me stories of the deep meaning they have found through volunteer service. I believe that a part of our educational mission is to help students understand the connection between their academic work and their most cherished values that provide the source of their understanding of life purpose.

CD: What else does participation in community service do for a student?
SP: In my opinion, students who engage in service have a better idea of what they want to do in life, have more hands-on experience to put on their resumes, and are apt to be more compassionate toward people different from themselves.
RJ: When I interview graduating seniors, many of them cite community service as a source of important growth and personal transformation during their years at OWU.

Community service is one of the ways to bring out gifts that don’t show up in the classroom and to bring meaning to life.  It's also often a place where kids who don't do well academically can feel they make a valuable contribution.  For these reasons and the inherent gift of helping someone else, I recommend encouraging service in your child even if his school doesn't (and you may be surprised!).

I originally wrote this for Positive Psychology News Daily and the original article is here.

Teens Who Bring Good Dreams to Life

y articles and videos are now posted on my new website: www.christineduvivier.com. You can find this article


Imagine you were asked to help improve the future prospects of Jill, a high school junior with a GPA of 2.0 who daydreams in English, History, and Spanish. What would you advise Jill to do?

a) Get screened for a learning disability and, if needed, take medication to focus.
b) Visualize a report card with all “A”s.
c) Both a and b.
d) Keep on dreaming.
e) None of the above.



If you answered, “keep on dreaming,” congratulations. You may already know that daydreaming can lead to better life satisfaction by improving relationships and boosting creativity. If not-- or if you answered a, b, c, or e, please read on.

Dream Relationships

Daydreaming may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think of ways to improve your love life, but this is one of the surprising scientific findings cited by author Jonah Lehrer in his article, “Daydream Achiever,” (Lehrer, p. C3). By imagining a variety of scenarios and testing them in our minds, we role-play internally and then take action in our real-lives to create the relationships we want.

Daydreaming and Creativity

Scientists have also found that daydreaming fosters abstract thinking, says Lehrer, by allowing us to make the new connections and develop the new ideas that are the heart of creativity. Ask Arthur Fry. Arthur was a daydreamer and one day in church, instead of listening to the sermon, his mind went off on a tangent. He started thinking about the paper scraps he used for bookmarks and how they were always falling out of his hymn book (Lehrer, C1).

Now it may be that Arthur missed an important message from his minister that day, but let’s all give thanks for his distraction -- it brought us the eternally useful Post-it® Notes.


Creativity and Economic Success

Fry’s creative new idea not only gave us walls covered with colorful reminders, it gave the 3M company more than $1 Billion a year in revenue, reports Greg Beato. This is just one example of the link between creativity and economic success.

Professor Richard Florida says that the “creative class” is now the fastest-growing part of our economy and will continue to be our decisive economic advantage in the future. The core professions in this class range from technology to sports to the arts and they develop best in communities that foster diversity—of ideas, cultures, interests, and abilities (Florida, 2002).

This is great news for all teens – but especially for those in what I affectionately term, “The Bottom 80,”TM—those who are not in the top 20% of their classes. I found that students in The Bottom 80 TM have the strengths and gifts to thrive in the dynamic world Florida describes (see http://www.positiveleaders.com/ for more details).

It could also be good news for students like Jill, the high school daydreamer in question at the start of this article. In a world where connecting diverse ideas is a crucial competitive advantage, you’d expect daydreamers to be revered. Sadly, though, this is not yet the case. Adolescents who daydream are often seen as unmotivated, underachievers, or problems that need to be “fixed,” tutored, or medicated.

What’s Right with Daydreaming Teens?

When you think about it, daydreaming is paying attention—it’s giving your attention to something more engaging than the reality in front of you at the moment. That’s what happens with ADD students, for example. Their distraction doesn’t mean they can’t focus on anything-- just the opposite, in fact: they actually hyper-focus, becoming absorbed in activities they find so intriguing that they cannot give attention to anything else around them according to expert Ned Hallowell, M.D. So what would you guess is a top strength in ADD teens? Creativity, of course.

Imagine what would happen if we stopped looking at what’s “wrong” with daydreaming students – and started seeing what’s right with them?* It is when they are not interested in a topic-- or they are more interested in something else-- that they daydream…and make creative connections, as Arthur Fry did on that fateful Sunday morning.

What if, instead of focusing on how to make these students listen in class, get better grades or go to a “great” college—we encourage them to bring good dreams to life?

This article originally appeared on Positive Psychology News Daily.The original article is here: http://pos-psych.com/news/christine-duvivier/200809121016.

My website: http://www.positiveleaders.com/

Images: Daydreaming Girl, Link, Post-It, Daydreaming Boy

References:

Beato, Greg (2005). Twenty-Five Years of Post-It Notes. Retrieved September 6, 2008 from:

http://www.rakemag.com/reporting/features/twenty-five-years-post-it-notes0#adjump
Duvivier (2007). Appreciating Beauty in the Bottom 80. University of Pennsylvania:

Capstone, August 1. Retrieved on September 3, 2008 from:

www.positiveleaders.com/studyresults.html
Florida, R. (2002). The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure,

Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.
Hallowell, E., & Ratey, J. (1995). Driven To Distraction : Recognizing and Coping with Attention

Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood. New York: Touchstone.
Lehrer, J. (2008). Daydream Achiever. Boston Sunday Globe, August 31, pp. C1-3.

* Inspired by Dewitt Jones’ film, “Celebrate What’s Right with the World” (2007).

Preventing Depression

y articles and videos are now posted on my new website: www.christineduvivier.com.

In my June 11 article, I talked about alternatives to anti-depressants. Here I will turn to what I believe is the bigger question: how can we prevent depression in the first place? In other words, how do we help healthy kids to enhance their well-being and flourish in life?

Optimism and Engagement are two ways individuals can buffer themselves against depression. But to have the greatest impact, we need system-level change so that teens develop in an environment that prevents depression-- and this means changing our approach to education.

Optimism
One of the best things we can do for our children is to teach them the thinking skills that build optimism and hope. The way we explain life events to ourselves falls into two styles: pessimistic and optimistic, according to Martin Seligman, in his book, “Learned Optimism.” The pessimistic style is associated with depression and the optimistic style prevents depression.

When a bad event happens, the key question is how I explain it to myself. Do I say, “It’s my fault; there’s something wrong with me; I failed?” Or, do I name multiple factors, beyond me, that contributed to the event? The first set of answers reflects a pessimistic style and the second answer reflects an optimistic style. When good events happen, I want to do just the opposite: focus on things I did to make the events happen.

Engagement
Engagement is the experience of being so absorbed in an activity that you lose your sense of self—and your sense of time. For example, playing tennis, planting a garden for your community center, meditating, and using your top strengths in new ways are all engaging activities. Each of these requires focus beyond the self – which is crucial to preventing depression, according to Seligman, in his latest book, “Authentic Happiness.”

Sadly, researcher Mike Csikszentmihalyi found that most teens are not engaged during much of the school day. Further, the two areas where teens are most engaged at school are the same areas where opportunities become more limited as kids get older: Sports and Arts. Increasing the amount of time spent in engaging activities, through participation in sports, arts, using one’s character strengths, meaningful service to others, and meditation are all ways to enhance well-being and buffer against depression.

Changing Our Approach to Education
In addition to individual skills, we also need to consider the system in which teens operate daily-- to be sure it enhances well-being. In a study last year, I found that our current system reinforces factors that cause depression (lack of control, defeat and pessimism, as well as focus on rank and status). For more detail, please see my study at www.positiveleaders.com/studyresults.html. If we want to systematically prevent depression in teens, we—parents, voters, and educators-- need to change our approach to education.

To begin with, three false myths affect the way we view and talk about education: (1) Not being a top student means you are not hardworking, motivated, or intelligent; (2) Being a top student leads to a great life; and (3) Our approach to education is best for our teens.

Students in the bottom of their classes have strengths and gifts that are well-suited to successful lives, but often these abilities are not amplified and enhanced in school. Nor are some strengths of the best students. While top students can thrive in school, they are also encouraged to focus on factors that correlate with anxiety and depression: rank, teacher opinion, being the best, or looking smart.*

World, corporate, and scientific leadership – as well as the future economy — depend on a far broader set of abilities than those we currently emphasize in school. Changing our approach, and actively engaging diverse gifts and strengths, not only leads to teen well-being, it also prepares the next generation for the world they will run.

* Jennifer Crocker at University of Michigan, Janice Templeton, at Fort Lewis College, and Barry Schwartz , author of “The Paradox of Choice,” have written about these factors.

For More Information:
Optimism and strengths tests: http://www.authentichappiness.com/

My Website: http://www.positiveleaders.com/

If you would like to be on our distribution list (we do not give your information to anyone else), please email julie@positiveleaders.com

"Learned Optimism" and "Authentic Happiness" are available on Amazon.

© Christine Duvivier 2007, 2008 All Rights Reserved