Oh, really?

One of the most dismissive things you can say to someone is, "oh, really?" Every once in a while I'll read an article that prompts "oh, really"'s by the bushel. One such was printed in the Chicago Tribune on this past Sunday (here). It's titled, "Indulging our kids, ourselves," and written by a Harvard Medical School psychologist. Dr. Bromfield has finally realized that the self-esteem movement has been a disaster, and the Tribune has given him space to point that out.

One thing: I don't have any children, so I'm loath to give people advice on how to raise kids. It's a tough job, society isn't making it any easier, and it isn't deterministic (that is, the best parents can raise the worst children, the worst parents can end up, somehow, with great kids). That said, I've watched the self-esteem movement sweep across education and parenting from the late 1970s to today, and it seems to have created some real problems in our country.

And Dr. Bromfield gets it right:

Feed their esteem was our advice. Reward their every step forward, or even backward. It wasn't enough that we joyously answered their 17th question on why the sky is blue. We needed to also reward and celebrate their curiosity.

We told parents to make their children feel good about themselves. They did just as we instructed.

"What a great job you did getting dressed."

"What a great job you did getting ready for school."

"What a great job you did chewing and swallowing your three candy bars!"

The only problem is that our advice did not make children feel better about themselves. If anything, we robbed our children of some of the opportunities to grow that we had as kids.

But he gets it right about 30 years too late. Much of the concern about self-esteem training arose when schools began injecting it into the curriculum, and was duly ignored by the educationists who decided that achievement came from self-regard, not the other way around. He does have advice for parents (even as he admits that parents are as self-indulgent as their children):

What can parents do? Moving to an island or setting their time machines back would be the first choice. Most of us, however, cannot do either. Instead, we're left to plod along as best we can.

We'll look in the parenting mirror and reassess our home life. It is never too late to grow less indulgent. If we are motivated, we'll give our children fewer things, expect more of them and maybe even take back our rightful authority in the house.

We'll take care not to overprotect them from life's inevitable frustrations and limitations. After all, only by facing and mastering such experience do children grow confident and resilient. And, of course, we'll watch the examples that we set.

What's interesting is that Bromfield seems not to get that the parents were steeped in the same movement, that they were the first guinea pigs. The probability that they will be able to get a handle on a situation that is totally out of their frame of reference is disappointingly small. And that's assuming that we truly understand that there's a problem. How do we teach children to look outside themselves when Mom is already outside with the motor running?

I have written about our willful blindness to the challenges we face as a nation. Is it any wonder that this blindness has come about at the same time as the self-esteem movement? I don't think so. Despite Ronald "It's morning in America" Reagan and the many others who insist we're just fine, we're not, and ignorance and self-regard will not make everything come out OK.

Perhaps the worst part of building self-esteem is not that it magnifies current accomplishments; Junior will eventually understand that getting dressed isn't much of an achievement. No, what's worse is how self-esteem validates what's already been done, that is, everything is fine because I, wonderful as I am, did it. It's what gives CEOs the ability to claim that everything they do is right simply because, well, they did it and it made money. It's what leads politicians to their non-apology apologies: "If anyone was offended by anything that was said whether it was meant or not, whether it was misinterpreted or not, then obviously I regret that" (Hillary Clinton).

If you want to read the works of someone in education who understood that education is about an insistence on standards, not on self-love, check out one of my heroes, Richard Mitchell. This was someone who, far from being just the grammar stickler that many supposed, had a philosophy as to what education could mean in people's lives. Like the best teachers, Prof. Mitchell saw education not as a road to competitive advantage in the marketplace, but as the route to making the best of one's self. The Wikipedia link will take you to all his published work, which is freely available on the Internet, and I highly recommend it for his dose of reality about today's education system.