Yesterday I was walking Stella to school and she said, "Mom, would you ever take away my phone because I got a bad grade?" "Probably not," I said cautiously, unwilling to offend a friend's mother through a subsequent lunchtime conversation. ("My mother says it's a TERRIBLE idea for your mom to take away your phone": not the best way to endear oneself to other junior high parents.) We talked about it all the way to school, and I am still not done thinking about it. Ergo, a blog post.
It turns out that this question did not arise from a conversation with a temporarily phoneless friend lamenting her lot in life. It came from listening to the PE teacher, who says confidently, "Whenever my daughter gets a bad grade, I take away her phone." This, I submit, is short-term thinking with the potential to create future problems.
In these days of online gradebooks, I think a lot of junior high parents are hyper-aware of how things are going in the classroom. I am not sure this is a good idea. Junior high grades are a low-stakes way for kids to take responsibility for their own learning. The thing I want most for my kids to take from school is a love of learning for its own sake -- certainty that the world is a wide and interesting place, where they will make mistakes and struggle and learn over time to do hard things. In my view, aggressive parental oversight can interfere with this process. The goal isn't to get perfect scores on every assignment. Some assignments are dumb. Some are genuinely hard -- sometimes learning takes time. Perfectionism is destructive. Perfectionism about grades can directly interfere with a student's learning: I see this at work all the stinking time.
One of the biggest tasks that junior high sets before kids is the development of executive function skills. They have to meet the expectations of multiple teachers, along multiple timelines, while navigating a messy social landscape (<-euphemism alert). They have to do this at a time when their bodies are sinking a lot of energy into physical growth and development. They need a lot of sleep at a time when it's cool to pretend you go to bed at midnight. They need a lot of food in a season when classmates feel free to shoot off their mouths about their food choices and the shapes of their bodies. Junior high is hard enough. My whole goal with parenting junior high kids is to create a soft place for them to land, a place where they are loved exactly as they are, where they can leave all of the nonsense behind.
I said to Stella, "Before I decided that you deserved negative consequences at home for a bad grade at school, I would need a lot more information. Did you get a bad grade because the grading was weird and arbitrary? I'm not going to punish my kid because a power-trippy teacher is assigning points in a way that doesn't make sense. Did you get a bad grade because you genuinely didn't understand something and you need help figuring it out? That's a terrible feeling, when you think you're behind everybody else. The last thing you need is for someone to punish you because something is hard for you."
I have posted before about giving kids enough room to feel their feelings, and it remains valuable in junior high. Getting a zero in junior high is an extremely useful life experience, I think: watching the math unfold in the gradebook shows you exactly how hard it is to come back from a zero. If I swoop in and shriek "A ZERO YOU GOT A ZERO DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO COME BACK FROM A ZERO?!?!" I will only interfere with the process by which a kid says, "Huh, I don't want to do that again. Better figure something out for next time." I will absolutely help kids with writing respectful emails to teachers about whether it might be possible to make up assignments. I am 100% available to strategize about homework alarms or calendar skills. But I want those things to arise from a child's desire to do better and not from my own opinions about the importance of academic success. One thing I have learned from sending five children to junior high is that I can't create that desire to do better -- I can only make space for it to unfurl on its own. If I bring down the hammer I offer myself as a lightning rod for the negative emotion; a kid can say, "Oh, I feel crummy because my mom is so mean!" instead of "I feel crummy because I did something careless and I need to learn how to do better next time."
A key component of the work of adolescence is saying to one's parents, "I am separate from you; I am different from you." It is normal for kids to look at the things their parents value and say, "What if I don't do that? What if I root my identity in something else instead?" The message I want my kids to hear is that they are loved forever, loved unstoppably. It's okay to mess up; it's okay to get a bad grade. They never have to hide from me. They should never be afraid of me.
I told Stella that I could imagine a narrow set of circumstances in which I might take away her phone as a consequence for a bad grade. If she were repeatedly defying a teacher's instructions about phone use in class, and if her choices led directly to a bad grade, then we would need to think about putting the phone in timeout. But I would still frame it differently; I would say, "You are having trouble regulating yourself, so I'm going to do some external regulating while you figure out how you can be more respectful and attentive in class. You tell me when you're ready to try again." This is the same philosophy I wrote about when she was small, because it is still true: kids need help learning self-regulation. The long-term goal is autonomy. If I am punitive and controlling, I only interfere with the long-term goal.
You guys, I feel a little shy about posting this because I have been SO LUCKY with my teenagers. We never get into dumb arguments; they never yell or sulk. I have been blessed with kids who want to do what is right, even when it is hard. I will never know how much of that is blind stupid luck and how much of that is because my ideas about parenting are solid. But I feel reasonably certain that my choice to avoid harsh and arbitrary punishments does mean that my home is more peaceful than it would be in other circumstances. If you have a typically developing junior high kid and your oversight of the gradebook is making one or both of you unhappy, close the tab! Step away! Be free! It is ultimately their responsibility; you will not be able to make them do the work in college. The sooner you both figure that out, the better off you will be.
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