This week’s essay is based on something I wrote more than a decade ago. I’m repurposing this old essay for a few reasons:
I’ve got an emotional hangover from the holidays and found it difficult to concentrate long enough to create something from scratch last week.
I spent most of the holiday thinking about parenting (the source of the emotional hangover) and how hard it is, which brought me back to this piece.
I was updating the family calendar for January and realized that we’ve got parent-teacher conferences for our youngest, a high school sophomore, later this month (which made my emotional hangover worse). I always dread these meetings, so updating this essay is a pep talk for myself as much as it is an offering for you.
My oldest son’s first middle school parent-teacher conference didn’t go so well. When I talked to him about it later, that conversation didn’t go so well either. Ned was a smart boy and his grades weren’t bad, but they weren’t as good as I expected them to be. I have never been good at hiding my disappointment and I said some stuff that I don’t remember. (Please don’t ask Ned what I said because he might.) I do remember that the stuff I said made him cry—or at least tear up.
“Ned, I’m sorry.” I said, realizing I was being a complete jerk. “Do you know who my teacher was in sixth grade?”
“Who?” He asked.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “And do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because it’s sixth grade,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Now before I receive a bunch of indignant comments, I want to state for the record that I’m not saying grades don’t matter. For better or worse, grades matter. But not because grades are an end unto themselves. Grades are a gatekeeper. They often determine what opportunities a child will have at the next stage of life.
What I am saying is that we put too much stock in parent-teacher conferences, that maybe there’s too much feedback, too much observation. Sure, it can be helpful to hear the insight of a professional educator. And hopefully you’ll learn that your child exhibits some sort of strength in a group setting that you don’t get to see in the confines of your home. But most of the time, you know what you’re going to hear about your kid before the conversation even starts. And still, you walk out of these meetings with all sorts of harebrained ideas about how to improve your child, how to “fix” them.
I have made this mistake at every single parent-teacher conference I’ve attended, starting with Ned’s pre-K year 2004, when his joyless teacher gravely informed us that he couldn’t properly use scissors.
Look, unless you’ve been asleep at the wheel of parenthood, you already know your child’s strengths and weaknesses (academic, athletic, social, and otherwise). You know what parts of school they can coast through and which parts will be an uphill climb. Chances are, your child knows it, too. And like you, they feel an immense amount of pressure to improve—at everything.
I don’t have very practical advice about parent-teacher conferences. (This piece looks kinda helpful.) What I want to talk about is keeping the feedback in perspective.
I’ve got a high schooler, a college student, and a college grad, but I have no easy answers. I think part of the struggle comes from co-parenting. My husband is a lawyer, a profession that requires traditional academic achievement, so that’s his frame of reference. I'm a writer and editor. My employers have never asked about my grades; they simply want to see my work. My portfolio is what matters. And that’s my frame of reference (You could argue that my portfolio is good because I attended good schools, which I got into with good grades, but let’s stay focused.) The point is that he and I think differently about this.
If my memory is correct, my parents barely read my report cards. I don’t remember being rewarded or punished based on my performance or even being asked about my homework. Maybe that’s because I was a self-motivated nerd. But maybe it’s because in the 1970s and 1980s we didn’t believe parents were responsible for their kids’ academic performance.
I texted my mom to ask what she remembers.
Did you catch that? She does not recall going to a single conference. And I am one of four kids! Can you imagine? But we did get report cards. And thanks to my incredibly organized parents, I still have every one of them. Here’s the sixth-grade report card, folks:
According to this report card, my weaknesses were excessive talking, weak organizational skills, and poor handwriting. And, guess what? They still are. But, the teacher also wrote that I worked well independently and was a good problem-solver. Hell, I’ll take those skills over being organized and writing neatly any day.
This is a great exercise. If you have your old report cards, dig them up and spend some time looking at them with your children. You may see what I saw: that we are who we are. That we all have strengths and weaknesses, that none of this is news. I don’t mean to say that we can’t learn new skills or unlearn bad habits. But as Amanda Mull explained in The Atlantic, you can’t simply decide to be a different person. (Something important to keep in mind during aspiration-filled first January.)
So how do you keep the parent-teacher conference in perspective? Focus on your goals. When our kids were younger and my husband and I were worried about the choices we were making for them (Which school? Which sport? Which punishment?), we’d ask ourselves: “What is our goal?” A lot of people say the goal is to raise a happy kid, but the hard truth is that you can’t do that. Your kid is responsible for their own happiness. Eventually we decided that our goal was to raise kids we’d look forward to having a beer with once they were adults.
And oh boy do I love sitting down to drink a beer with Ned. He’s 22 now. He’s an aspiring screenwriter and director who pays the bills and bankrolls his own projects by working as a production assistant in Los Angeles. He has become an incredible writer with an indefatigable work ethic. He is a fabulous friend who is intentional about relationships and invests time and effort in the people he loves. When I think about Ned, I am reminded of the message the art critic Peter Schjeldahl once sent his daughter, the writer Ada Calhoun:
If I weren’t your dad, I’d wish I were. Or your brother or poker buddy or grocer. Anything to know you.
That’s exactly how I feel about the adult Ned. Anything to know him. Anything to spend time with the man that very average sixth-grader became.
Look, grades matter. I’ve tried—and failed—to explain this to my kids a million times. Grades are also relative. If your child is working their ass off and getting Cs and Bs, that’s great. (A mom friend who also has a child with epilepsy and a host of learning differences recently reminded me, “Cs get degrees.”) But if your kid races through their homework and spends more time on Snapchat than studying, Bs and As may be an underachievement.
So how do you fix that? You can’t. At least I haven’t figured out how. Kids have to be internally motivated. They have to care. And eventually, they will. But the thing they care about might not be grades. It might be making great films or saving the environment. It might be playing a college sport or simply being a really great friend.
I remember sixth-grade Ned as intellectually curious, helpful, thoughtful, polite, and funny. But when I saw that first middle school report card, I lost sight of all that. I let his grades and a few casual comments from teachers who didn’t know him very well change how I saw him. That’s on me.
Over the years, I’ve skipped a few conferences to spare myself the unproductive angst they cause me. (We’ve had kids attend both public and private schools with two to four conferences per year per kid.) I know what my children's weaknesses are, and I dare say that I know their strengths better than their teachers. The report cards eventually make their way to me and there are always some compliments along with the constructive criticism. Occasionally skipping these intense one-on-one meetings helps me keep it all in perspective. It allows me to see the kids’ grades as one metric, and not some wholistic assessment of their worth and potential.
And while I’ve talked a lot about my oldest son here, I think my thinking is largely informed by raising my daughter, who struggled with epilepsy for nearly 17 years. In a culture that worships at the altar of achievement and self-improvement, I couldn’t fix my daughter’s problems and I had to accept that. Perhaps that eventually made it easier for me to resist the temptation to “fix” my other children, too.
If parent-teacher conferences keep you awake at night, maybe you can sit one or two out. Maybe you and your partner can divide and conquer. That’s what we did once our oldest reached high school. Or maybe you can just listen to the advice of one of my smart friends, a mom of three who says she has a litmus test for teachers. “Do they ‘see’ my kid?” she asks. “If yes, I’m all ears. If not, nothing I say will change their take on my kid and I don’t give their words much weight.”
Sixth grade seems so important when you’re in the thick of it. But if it weren’t for the fact that I wrote a version of this essay back in 2012, I would have no recollection of how Ned performed that year. The gift of time is that the unimportant stuff fades away. Ned never became a top-tier student. But he became a top-tier person. He found the thing he loves and now he works incredibly hard at that.
As for me, I still can’t remember who my sixth grade teacher was. I had to look it up. Apparently her name was Mrs. Rohl. Doesn’t even ring a bell.
Also on my mind
Despite all the ways work has changed over the last 2.5 years, the weekly 1:1 remains one of the most sacred of professional ceremonies. In fact, it may be more important than ever. This week, The M Dash published my piece on how to make the most out of these important meetings when you’re managing remote reports.
Prince Harry’s book Spare isn’t even out yet and it’s already causing chaos. Here are the most surprising links from the memoir.
If you’re still grieving the end of the second season of White Lotus, consider a commemorative dad cap from Intentionally Blank, one of my favorite brands.
I have a tendency to dwell on my regrets (which is hard when you’re married to someone who claims not to have any). Turns out there are ways I can “optimize” my regrets to live a more meaningful life.
In this piece, Fast Company extolls the virtues of writing yourself an annual letter instead of talking about resolutions and rituals. According to Scott Simon, author of Scare Your Soul, the letter should answer five questions. “They’re not necessarily what you’re going to do in Q1 and Q2 for goals,” says Simon. “It’s deep, internal, intimate value work.”
I found Becky Malinsky’s recent take on taste vs. style extremely helpful. She articulates a liberating epiphany I had years ago, when I realized I could love a piece of clothing, but also understand that it wasn’t something I should own. You can read the full essay here, but here’s the gist:
Consider our taste as our kingdom in taxonomic rank, and our style as our individual, VERY specific species. Or in simpler terms, taste is a general category in which things you love fall into. But not everything you love needs to be something you buy, own or wear. Not everything you love will suit you. Style is more specific. It's the things you love, that you wear (and don’t wear you) and make you feel confident and distinct.
I’ve been trying to find some fun projects that don’t involve my computer so I can feel creative without additional screen time. These fabric mâché bowls were easy and fun to make. They make a beautiful centerpiece — even when empty.
Two years ago, Amy Smilovic, founder and creative director at the fashion house Tibi, started sharing very text-heavy Instagram stories explaining how fashion works — and doesn’t work. I loved them, but had trouble keeping up on IG and found them hard to read. Thankfully, she’s gathered all that great insight in one spot so you have a handy reference for topics like packing style vs. outfits and how to pull off the oversized look.
Menopause has been in the headlines a lot lately. I purposefully ignored the NYT story about the business of menopause, but the stories about emerging treatments for hot flashes and memory problems associated with hormonal changes were super interesting. (The Nat Geo story is behind a paywall. What you need to know is that the FDA is reviewing a new drug that would be “ ‘the first new class of drugs specific to hot flashes’ since the estrogen-based treatment Premarin came out in 1941.”
I was happy that pandemic restaurant dining finally gave us a good way to use QR codes, but after reading this piece about their drawbacks, I will continue to ask for a paper menu.