As I read one news report after another about the college admissions scandal, I can’t help but ask myself where we went wrong. How did we reach the point where parents bribe and cheat to get their kids into the “good” colleges? When did the “where” become more important than “why”—why go to college-- and “what”—what you do in college?
 
I think parents frequently place more importance on where their kids go to college than the kids do—or would if left to freely make a choice. It’s one thing to encourage your child to do her best, to aim high and dream big. But when did we start equating self-worth—both our own and our children’s-- with the name of the college(s) they’re accepted to?
 
Many kids feel overwhelming pressure to get into a top-tier college, even when it may not really suit their needs, interests or learning style. And there are hundreds and hundreds of small colleges that provide excellent education experiences and may better suit your child than a “name” school. When choices are limited on the basis of prestige, it’s by-and-large, the fault of us parents.
 
Too often, we parents have our own self-worth wrapped up in our kids’ achievement, thinking that if my child doesn’t get into an ivy league school, I must not have been a good enough parent. Your child is not you. His successes and failures are not yours to own. When we forget that, we can push too hard for success in superficial terms because, consciously or unconsciously, we think it reflects on us.
 
Other parents may try to live out their own unfulfilled dreams, for instance, pushing a child to attend Harvard because they wish they could have. Or we expect our children to follow in our footsteps and attend our own alma mater, stressing family tradition more than what’s appropriate for the student. And of course, there are bragging rights. What parent of a high school senior hasn’t been to a spring cocktail party where conversation turns to college acceptances--“good” schools often elicit congratulations and nods of approval while equally good but less prestigious names are greeted with a tepid “That’s nice”. Let’s admit it: there can be a bit of snobbery going on in all this college admissions stuff.
 
Most kids want to please their parents and parental projections can be insidious, especially at a time when our students are struggling to develop their own sense of identity. We have to remember that it’s going to be their college years, not ours. And if we want their college experience to be a good and successful one, we should encourage them to choose a school based on their interests, abilities, learning style and lifestyle, not purely on the prestige factor or where we want them to go.
 
Far more important to students’ success than the college’s ranking on competitive lists is how involved a student is after arriving. According to a 2014 Gallup-Purdue study of more than 30,000 college graduates, engagement on campus is a greater predictor of future job satisfaction and happiness than the status of the school. Students who engage in campus life, build relationships with professors, mentors and friends, and get involved in projects and extra-curricular activities are the ones who will succeed—in college and in life. That’s more likely to happen when the school choice is based on your child’s preferences and needs, not acceptance rates and perceived status.
 
I can’t help but wonder how the students feel who’ve just discovered their parents cheated to get them into college. They can no longer be proud of getting in even if they might have gotten in on their own merits. They’ve been deprived of the satisfaction that comes with achievement. When it comes to college applications, we should encourage, support, ask questions about preferences but remain in a consultant role. You can offer help with editing or proofreading essays, but don’t insist. Don’t nag about deadlines. And for heaven’s sake, don’t fill out the applications or write the essays yourself! High school seniors are young adults and the process (and results) should belong to them. Let them own it.

A graduate of Stanford University, Mary Waldmann and her husband Raymond raised three children who are now independent, well-adjusted and happy young adults. Before becoming a mother, she was a successful real estate broker, political consultant and public relations executive, and worked as a part-time communications consultant when her children were young.  Mary is the author of Six-Word Lessons on Winning with Today's Media , Six-Word Lessons for Intentional Parenting, and Six-Word Lessons for Compelling Speeches.

When your loved one crosses over the rainbow bridge it hurts. Holidays are rough for the first few years. I think birthdays are painful forever. You always have the compulsion to add another year of “what ifs?” and “if only (s).” My son’s birthday is coming up in a few days and even though he has been out of his physical body four times longer than he was with me, another birthday without him still causes my heart to ache.

Cory’s cousin just crossed over the rainbow bridge three months ago. They were only a few weeks apart in age. I know Cory was there along with his uncle Terry to greet Travis with open arms. I thought of Travis on his birthday a few weeks ago. He was able to grow up and get married but he suffered from a painful disease for most of his life. That could not have been easy. He fought the good fight. My heart goes out to his family but especially to his mother. Age does not matter. He will always be her baby boy.

When my brother’s birthday is approaching I start feeling sad. I miss him like crazy but my sadness is more for his grieving widow and his children. He should still be here with them. Then, that sadness turns into anger about the crappy medical treatment he received.

A few days ago my friend’ Elle’s sweet mother Frances died. She had been to the hospital several times in the past week. Both times the hospital sent her home. The last time, she passed the very next day! That’s when Elle found out her mother had stage 3 kidney disease and stage 4 liver cancer. I am still stunned. Were they just being callous because of her age?  Did they really miss those two BIG diagnoses?

My grandson came home with a similar story about his friend’s grandfather getting blown off by the same hospital. His family was told not to bring him to the ER again, they would turn him away. Something terrible was said such as, “Get him a burger and let him die happy.” Really? Who says that to a frightened family? Does this hospital staff think that too many birthdays means people are expendable? (It sounds like a good news story. I may pass it along to a local journalist).

Yes, birthdays are hard whether the person you cared about died years ago or recently or whether the person was nine or ninety. I don’t cry anymore but the longing and the missing are still part of my thoughts and inner well-being. So, just know that when the birthday of your loved one is approaching be ready for a shift. It is normal to feel extra sensitive and sadder than you have lately. When the day actually gets here, you will marvel at how well you did and then try to tuck away those feelings until the next one approaches.

It might help to celebrate his or her birthday in some way. You can bake a cake, donate flowers in his or her name to your church if you have one, or drop off food to the local food bank, donate to a favorite charity, invite loved ones to write a favorite memory down and send to you, ask for photographs, buy a bouquet of flowers at the grocery store and gift it to a random person in the parking lot, or even just pay for the order of the car behind you in the Starbucks drive-thru.

Many of us have had the experience of watching our child fail at something: a science fair project that gets a poor grade, a failed test, a major sports loss. While it’s painful to see our child fail, they are actually receiving a gift: the opportunity to learn from failure, to try again, and to learn resilience in the face of loss. As Jennifer King Lindley reports in her article, How to Raise a (Successful) Failure (March 2019 REAL SIMPLE), this failure-deprived generation is frequently saved from possible failure by parents who swoop in to bawl out coaches and wheedle teachers for better grades. Avoidance of failure can result even from the parents’ best intentions. She quotes Jessica Lahey, author of the book, The Gift of Failure as saying, “It’s painful to watch your child stumble. You want to show your love by making a problem instantly better.” Hence the so-called “helicopter parents” who swoop in to rescue a child from failure. 
 
But we need to take a longer view, helping our children to grow from life’s setbacks when the risks are small and we’re here to support them. Resilience—not letting setbacks destroy you, learning from them, trying again—is one of life’s necessary and important skills. We don’t rejoice in easy victories, such as the soccer trophy for participation. But the hard-fought victories, where we overcome failure by learning from it, trying again and working harder, are the ones that build our confidence and self-esteem.  
 
Parents who expect perfection, either explicitly or implicitly, or set too-high standards, can also discourage the risk-taking that leads to small failures from which children learn when they are young. My parents set very high standards and I believed—rightly or wrongly—that I had to be “the best” to gain their love. As a result, I avoided trying things at which I felt I couldn’t excel. Not being very athletic, I avoided sports completely until I learned to ski in my thirties. And I think I missed out on some things I would have enjoyed. While over the years I’ve learned that it’s fine to be “good enough,” I’m still very risk-averse. 
 
But, as Lindley says, “You don’t want to just throw your kid to the wolves. (‘Good luck with choosing a college! Bye!’)”. We need to encourage our kids to try new things, to challenge themselves and risk failures from which they can learn, but we also need to serve as consultants, offering advice—but, with older children, only when asked—and emotional support.
 
See Part 2 to learn three ways to help your children learn from failure.

A graduate of Stanford University, Mary Waldmann and her husband Raymond raised three children who are now independent, well-adjusted and happy young adults. Before becoming a mother, she was a successful real estate broker, political consultant and public relations executive, and worked as a part-time communications consultant when her children were young.  Mary is the author of Six-Word Lessons on Winning with Today's Media , Six-Word Lessons for Intentional Parenting, and Six-Word Lessons for Compelling Speeches.

See Part 1 here.

Beyond encouraging risk-taking, how do we help our kids learn and grow from the inevitable small failures along the way? Start by stepping back and letting the small failures happen. Let the little one lose to you at Old Maid. She might have a meltdown, but don’t lose your cool. Say “Honey, I know it feels bad to lose and you feel awful.” If she sees that you’re not upset and that you love and encourage her, she’ll see that failure isn’t the end of the world. Encourage your child to play sports, a great opportunity for learning from failure. But don’t be the parent who berates the coach or frequently races to field with left-behind soccer gear. That defeats the purpose.
 
Above all, try to avoid seeing your child’s failures as a reflection on your parenting—that also leads to the urge to helicopter in to prevent your child from failing. But everyone fails at something sometime and failing when the consequences are still small teaches great life lessons about trying again, working harder and learning from the inevitable failures. Remember that your child isn’t you—you don’t need to own their shortcomings.
 
Second, teach your child self-compassion. Screwing up hurts. The article How to Raise a (Successful) Failure by Jennifer King Lindley, (REAL SIMPLE Magazine, March 2019) quotes Rachel Simmons, author of the book Enough as She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond Impossible Standards of Success to Live Healthy, Happy and Fulfilling Lives, who says, “We need to sit with them with those difficult emotions. Having parents take their feelings seriously is gold for kids—it is often what they most want. And they will learn that bad feelings aren’t going to destroy you.”
 
Use active listening and validate their discomfort and unhappiness. Encourage them to practice self-compassion by saying, “If your best friend was feeling like this, what would you say to them right now?” Helping them through the emotional pain helps them feel capable of trying again.
 
Third, emphasize the lessons. In the article, Kyla Haimovitz, a Ph.D psychology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied how parents react to kids’ failure, says, “Your reaction has a huge impact on your kids. Talk to them in a way that focuses on the process: ‘I’m sorry you are not happy with how things went. Could you try it in a different way? Could you talk to your teacher?’”
 
What isn’t helpful is language that suggests their abilities are fixed: “That’s OK, honey, I wasn’t good at science either” or “Don’t worry, maybe sports just aren’t your thing. You’re really good at reading.”
 
Don’t be afraid to share your own screw-ups. You may think being a good role model means you have to appear perfect, but it’s quite the opposite. Sharing your past mistakes lets your child see that mistakes are normal and so helps them to take their own failures in stride. Or talk about the struggles their heroes went through on their way to success.
                                                                     
Finally, Lindley concludes, “It’s never too late to stop running interference for your child. If you catch yourself filling out the learner’s permit form for your teen driver, be direct and say, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been treating you as the competent person you are. You can do it and I’m here for you if you need me.” And don’t berate yourself for interfering. We all make mistakes! Consider it just another learning experience and resolve to do better in the future.

When a loved one dies, grief can be compounded by how others react and treat you. It is important to be careful about what you say.

I have recently been talking at length with a newly widowed woman I know about the things people say to her. Some people try to be supportive and kind. More have the “open mouth and insert foot” disease. For example, all those folks who say, “I know how you feel.” Don’t. “You will meet someone else.” Not even a thought. “You are still young….” or “At least you didn’t have little kids.” The “at least” statements are particularly thoughtless. Anything you might want to say that starts with “at least” will only cause more pain. Stop yourself.

We will call her Camille to protect her identity. It has been weeks since Camille’s husband died suddenly. She is amazed by which of her friends have been totally absent and by the ones who stepped up to offer support. That is painful enough but the ridiculous things people have said is more surprising.

Camille ran into a co-worker who asked how she was doing. When she shared that her life was quite awful at the moment, the person replied, “still?” OMG I cannot believe how this person could think a few short weeks would be enough time for someone who just lost the love of her life to be recovered. Apparently this person has never lost a loved one or has never cared deeply enough to understand the level of insensitivity he just inflicted. Another colleague asked her how her “vacation” was going. Vacation?  She hasn’t been able to go back to work yet. She had no idea that her co-worker equates her time off to grieve as a vacation. who would want to go back to an environment where people have no compassion or understanding of how to be supportive. It makes it that much harder.

When my son died I was told that I could have more children. At least he was no longer suffering. Well, at least you had him for nine years. God never gives you more than you can handle. It’s a good thing you are so strong. And after three or four months an acquaintance who had four children of his own, was astonished that I was still sad that my little boy had died. Still? I am still bitter after all these years. to quote Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

If you are the victim of such hurtful non-helpful statements, please speak up. You will feel better and you might just teach the person a lesson so they don’t make the same monumentally awful mistake again. Speak up and let your friends and family know how their absence, lack of support or unhelpful statements make you feel. Your grief, your feelings, means you have the right to be heard.

Deliberate Practice
One more definition and we’ll move on. Deliberate practice actively and continuously is the practice of reflecting on and correcting one’s performance. Effective practice requires mindful engagement and conscious self-observation. This is how I’ve been saying it to students for many, many years: “I’m not at your house when you practice so you need to be your own teacher.” This is why having a piano teacher instead of being self-taught is so helpful. Teachers engage fully in the task of listening. We hear the mistakes and we stop and talk about how to correct the mistakes. We are not just teaching notes, fingering, counts, and dynamics. We, by our example, are showing students how to engage more in their practice time. The opposite of deliberate practice is the example I used in the previous blog (Repetition is the Mother of All Learning) where my student played through a piece and moved on to the next assignment. The opposite of deliberate practice can also be the “effortless enjoyment,” or slipping into the “flow state.” This is often where we continue practicing the same mistakes over and over until we have perfected them! It’s tricky though.

Effortless enjoyment is important for keeping up motivation and preventing burnout (mine and the student’s), but it’s like a state of diffused attention. From Dr. Cal Newport’s blog entry Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre:

Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy. “The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”
(http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/12/23/flow-is-the-opiate-of-the-medicore-advice-on-getting-better-from-an-accomplished-piano-player/)

Research tells us nearly unanimously that it’s the amount of quality (deliberate) practice, not natural born talent and skills or the number of hours mindlessly practicing, that matters most in developing expertise.

All of this – spaced repetition, interleaved practice, and deliberate practice – takes effort on the part of the teacher as well as the student. It takes the setting of goals, analyzing the music to be able to break it down into workable passages, and setting a schedule. Goal-directed practice and targeted, timely feedback is a must.

1. Set specific goals. The goal to “practice better” or “practice more” will likely not work. It’s better to be very specific, such as, “I want to do the phrasing in section A correctly, at allegro tempo, without stumbling.”
   
   
2. Continue to refine your goals. Once you have achieved the goal listed in #1, set another specific goal such as, “I want to produce a sotto voce sound using dynamics and touch when I perform section A.

Continue with the practice variables discussed in the previous blog post. Push yourself. To master a skill, master something harder. Change up the rhythms, use a different accent pattern . . . complicate it in order to master it. 
​Now, let’s see if we can look at an example in a real-life situation. I have a student, we’ll call her Christy, who is preparing for a future adjudicated opportunity. She will be performing two selections in the piano solo event and one piano concerto. She will also be taking a theory test.

When our kids were in school, they all had desks for studying. But did they sit at the desks to study? The answer was frequently “no”—they preferred to study while lounging on their beds, particularly as they got into middle school and high school. I felt that they would study, read and write more effectively, with better concentration, if they were at the desks, but I quickly gave up that battle. Despite lounging on the bed to do homework, they all had excellent grades. Was I wrong in wanting them at their desks?
 
Apparently, I was, according to Heidi Mitchell in a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “Is It Healthy for Teens to Study in Bed?” She consulted a number of experts in education psychology, sleep medicine and ergonomics and you, like I, may be surprised to hear what they said. Basically, if you’re not distracted by discomfort, you study just as effectively on the bed as you do at a desk.
 
“Lying down or sitting upright doesn’t impact your brain function—your posture doesn’t matter,” says Atul Malhotra, a physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. A study at the University of California, Davis, found no difference in grade point average between those who worked at their desks and those who studied in bed. The study’s authors concluded that the assumption that studying in one position is preferable to another is false. 
 
Harris Cooper, a social psychologist specializing in education, says, “If they are getting their homework done and It is of quality, then knowing what environments work for them will prepare then to be lifelong learners in various locations.” He suggests that parents and teens track progress over time—if they’re doing well with studying in bed, all’s fine.
 
One concern that I suspect we parents may share is that studying in bed can get too cozy, promoting drowsiness which interferes with learning. When someone reads a book just before falling asleep, and puts the bookmark on page 89, it’s common not to remember in the morning what happened on page 88 but they’ll remember what was on page 87, Dr. Malhota says. What we read as we’re falling asleep generally doesn’t register—I know I always have to read the last page or two again the next day. He suggests to his teen daughters and to anyone who does homework on the comforter at night go back a few pages or ten-minutes-worth of work in the morning to review and redo. 
 
He also doesn’t mind a little lie-in studying in the morning: “You’re often free from distractions in bed…before the day’s chaos begins.” Studying in the morning before arising may be a good opportunity to learn and retain new information.
 
Ergonomics expert Janice Fletcher emphasizes that effective studying, wherever you do it, requires that you be comfortable, not distracted by muscle fatigue or other discomfort. Among those who realize that a lot of studying takes place in bed are industrial designers who have come up with across-the-bed tables that angle laptops and books for comfortable reading, reading pillows that cradle the neck, back and arms, and even hard-top pillows for resting a laptop on. A soft light can prevent harmful glare on the eyes. If your child is a bed-studier, you might ask them if they experience any discomfort as the time passes—if so, explore some of these options.
 
For homework involving lots of papers and books, a desk or table might be more effective, but generally bed-studying is effective. So, don’t worry if your child prefers to sprawl on the bed for homework. It turns out that works just a well as a desk. And allowing your student to make choices is a good thing—learning to figure out what works best for you is an important life lesson.

A graduate of Stanford University, Mary Waldmann and her husband Raymond raised three children who are now independent, well-adjusted and happy young adults. Before becoming a mother, she was a successful real estate broker, political consultant and public relations executive, and worked as a part-time communications consultant when her children were young.  Mary is the author of Six-Word Lessons on Winning with Today's Media , Six-Word Lessons for Intentional Parenting, and Six-Word Lessons for Compelling Speeches.

If you have a teenager, you’ve probably heard, as I did, both well wishes and sympathetic eye rolls from friends, saying things like “Good luck with the teen years!” The stereotype of the rebellious, moody, risk-taking teen runs deep in American culture, reinforced by movies and television which frequently show teens at their worst.
 
But in the article,Don’t Think the Worst About Your Teenager, published in the February 2, 2019 Wall Street Journal, Jennifer Breheny Wallace challenges that notion and says that an increasing number of psychologists are pushing back against the negative stereotype, seeing it not only as inaccurate but also harmful to teens. 
 
Though they can be turbulent, the teen years aren’t necessarily a time of rebellion, conflict and risky behavior, and this is borne out by recent decades’ research, says Richard Lerner, director of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University, “It’s not that adolescence doesn’t have its problems and challenges,” he notes, “but so does every period of life, like the toddler years or aging.” In fact, I can remember saying to my newly adolescent daughter just as I entered menopause, “We need to be patient with each other because we’re both on the hormonal roller coaster at the same time.”
 
In fact, the trends in adolescent risk-taking have been positive in recent years, with substance abuse, unprotected sex, hazardous driving and alcohol use have all declined since the nineties.  “While on average, adolescents do engage in more risk-taking, experience more negative moods and are more likely to fight with parents than younger children, parents need to know that the absolute levels of those things still remain quite low during the teenage years,” says psychology professor Christy Buchanan of Wake Forest University. Dr. Buchanan says that adolescents who do display high levels of negative moods and behavior often have underlying conditions that may have been present since childhood. The danger in the stereotype, she says, is that parents may dismiss troubling behavior as simply “teens being teens” when it really is a symptom of something more serious that could benefit from early intervention.
 
Similarly, parents who believe the stereotype of adolescence is realistic may even unknowingly be contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Research indicates that teens who are expected by their parents to be rude, grumpy, argumentative, selfish and impulsive are more likely to be so. Research also indicates that adolescents tend to start or continue using illicit substances when their parents believe they are using them, even when they weren’t. The same is true for smoking. Teens may interpret parents’ assumptions as expectations and conform to them.
 
Buchanan cites research showing that parents, particularly mothers, who believe they can positively shape their teen’s behavior are more likely to use positive parenting strategies, such as greater involvement and communication, which in turn foster positive behavior. 
 
One way Buchanan says parents can lessen the hold of negative stereotypes on their teens is to counter them directly. Parents can talk with their teens about the validity of these assumptions and encourage activities like volunteering that contradict negative stereotypes in a concrete way. As Dr. Lerner says “Too often we describe the ‘good’ teens because of what they don’t do” They’re good kids because they don’t smoke or do drugs or hang out with the wrong crowd—what a dispiriting message for a teen to hear.” We owe it to our teens to write a more positive script for these years,” he says, going on to say that parents who turn their focus to the admirable things their teens do, who help to foster their child’s strengths and talents, will find that their teen has a much easier time getting through adolescence. And by extension, the parents will have an easier time of it, too.
 
So, forget the stereotypes and pay attention to the positive realities of adolescence. Celebrate the good things about your teen and the ages from twelve to twenty don’t necessarily need to be filled with stress and anger. Get to know the complicated and unique person your teen is becoming and enjoy the relationship. While our three children could be challenging as teens, we always expected the best and, by-and-large, we got it. We relished our relationships with them and do to this day.

A graduate of Stanford University, Mary Waldmann and her husband Raymond raised three children who are now independent, well-adjusted and happy young adults. Before becoming a mother, she was a successful real estate broker, political consultant and public relations executive, and worked as a part-time communications consultant when her children were young. Mary is the author of Six-Word Lessons on Winning with Today's Media , Six-Word Lessons for Intentional Parenting, and Six-Word Lessons for Compelling Speeches.