Doing School

Occasionally my daughter’s school will offer lectures on parenting. Raising kids anywhere is hard, and living in LA gives no exception.

Denise Pope, the author of Doing School came to give a lecture. She currently works at Stanford University, and aside from being a mother of 3 children (which in my opinion qualifies her for being an expert in the field), she also works on The Stanford Success Project. The seriously oversimplified summary of their mission is (and, to put it bluntly): TOO MUCH STRESS!! Our kids are under a ton of pressure to succeed and are completely stressed out about it, so their mission is to figure out ways to help our kids deal with it in a healthy and productive way.

What struck me the most were the statistics that had come out of their study (These are only my cliff notes from Denise’s lecture so please grab her book. It’s worth every second you have to read it).

Questions surveyed…Define Success:

Parents: be HAPPY, achieving goals, handling failures and roadblocks in a healthy way, emotional intelligence, being HAPPY…oh yeah, that one came up more than a few times.

Kids (180 public and private schools surveyed): Winning. (Ouch. Talk about a disconnect. Parents are thinking success comes from an internal place, or so we like to profess, and kids are focused on external. Not a good place to start.)

Average amount of homework per day:

Middle School: 2.57 hours, High School: 3.11 hours

(also note only 20-30% of students thought homework was useful)

Extra-curricular activities during the week days (weekend not included):

Middle School: 7.23 hours per week, High School: 10.3 hours per week

(Another big ouch. When are our kids getting to just be kids?)

Recommended sleep each night that a growing kid needs is 9.5 hours. Here’s what on average kids actually get..

Middle School: 8.03 hours, High School: 6.81 hours

It is a known fact that lack of sleep can lead to the following…lack of resilience, anxiety, depression, drug use, compromised immune system, bullying at school….the list goes on.

Did you know that regarding teenage drivers insurance companies are more concerned about sleep deprivation than drunk driving? I didn’t know.

Percentage of kids that DON’T cheat:

7-8^th graders: 5%, 11-12^th graders: 10%

Kids view cheating as a means to survival. They feel they have to do it to get to the right school…blablabla…

Which leads to the last (and my favorite) part of the lecture. Denise spoke a lot about Ivy League schools and the misperception that attending them was the only ticket to true success (she did note that on the graduate school level Ivy League schools were more relevant to success). Everyone in the audience got quiet. I could tell most parents didn’t want to hear this because it went against every fiber of their being. Their kid was going to attend one of those schools, darn it. And really? Harvard wasn’t critical to my kids success?

Immediately after Q & A started. The first question out of a parent’s mouth was, get ready for this…“So how are you connected to the admissions process at Stanford?” Really???