By Hal E. Runkel, LMFT
(a reprinted article from February 2005)

On a recent trip to LA to promote our book, ScreamFree Parenting, I received a great text message from my wife, Jenny. I had missed my daughter’s soccer game and my son’s t-ball game, and Jenny was texting me the highlights. While it hurt to not see how well Hannah and Brandon were playing, I was thrilled to hear the news and imagine the scene. Both teams won, both played great for their respective teams; Brandon even got the game ball.

My text response was very typical. I asked her to show them this message: “Hannah, Brandon, I am so proud of you!!.”

Simple, common parent language. Words we long to express, knowing that our kids love to hear “I’m so proud of you.”

That’s what’s behind the bumper sticker craze, isn’t it? Honor students and all-stars get the whole world to know how proud we are. But I have a question: Am I really proud of my kids? What does that mean anyway?

I’ve always been a little confused by the expression because for years I was also taught that pride was a sin, the mother of all sins. “Pride goeth before the fall” and all that. You’re not supposed to be proud, right? Well, maybe it means that we’re not supposed to be proud of ourselves, but it’s okay to be proud of someone else. If we’re proud of ourselves, I guess that means we’re asking others to recognize us, focus on us, and validate our accomplishments. To be proud of ourselves must mean we’re overconfident in ourselves, bragging in some sense.

If that’s the case, then why is it okay, even commendable, to be proud of our kids? Wouldn’t that mean that we’re somehow taking responsibility for their accomplishments, asking others to notice us, to focus on us because of the success of our kids? If I’m proud of them, isn’t that even worse than taking pride in myself? Now I’m taking some sense of credit for Hannah’s soccer skills, and I want her and everyone else to take notice!

Well, I can hear some of you saying, it’s not really like that. We’re not taking credit for them, we’re just expressing our joy about watching our kids grow and succeed. Then why don’t we say that? Why do we say we’re “proud” of them? If our neighbor’s kid won the game ball, would we still say “I’m proud of you”? That feels a little awkward, because she’s not our kid. The word “our” implies that we take some sense of ownership, some responsibility for our kids and their performance.

And that flies in the face of one of the bedrock principles of ScreamFree Parenting:

I am not responsible for my kids and their behavior; I am responsible to them for my own behavior.

In this section of our newsletter, we have Hal answer a direct question asked by one of our ScreamFree Parents. Today's question looks at the battle that never seems to end--the struggle over homework.

Hal,
My nine-year old child doesn’t seem to make doing his homework a priority. Sometimes he misses deadlines on assignments. I just want to sit there and watch that he completes his schoolwork. Is this the best strategy?

Not if you want his homework to become his priority. The homework battle seems to plague every house in the world. This is because we as a society put so much stock in the education process. But the problem has very little to do with school. Homework just happens to provide a very convenient territory on which to battle for control. Who’s life is this? That’s the real question here. We parents are reluctant to give over this area of life to our children because we fear they will never take it as seriously as they need to (or we need them to).

We then allow this fear to shape our vision of the future, wondering if they’ll ever get an education, if they’ll ever get a job, and so on. So, we think, we had better nip this lack of motivation thing right in the bud, right now, by forcing them to do homework and get good grades, even if it means hovering over them every night until they’re eighteen! What inevitably happens, however, is that we actually prevent them from ever adopting their education as their own.

As long as we feel responsible for them and their education (which we equate with their whole future!), then they never feel responsible for themselves. But when we can calm our anxiety about their school, then we can be responsible to them in new ways. This means offering to help but only if they request it. This means inquiring about progress but in the same way we might ask a friend about how their job is going. This means pursuing our own life and our own continuing education.

And remember to take care,
Hal

Want to read all of Hal's past "Ask Hal" replies? Check out the new Ask Hal Archives page here.

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