<p>I agree with an earlier poster that parenting is a continual process of granting increasing independence (pulling the BlackHawk a little bit further away each year). The way and rate at which we do that varies with the child. </p>
<p>Our oldest is a high school senior. If we tell him to be back by 9 or call in on his cell phone, he never fails and so we grant him complete freedom to visit friends, come back at agreed times even when we’re asleep, etc. He’s extremely bright and especially good at grasping the big picture whether it is physics, international relations, or why the teacher would be asking this kind of question at this point in the course. [I’m making this judgment, not just as a proud father, but as a former Harvard professor who has seen lots of very bright people – we have a university president and a former Harvard Business School professor coming over to dinner tonight]. However, he is extremely dyslexic and less easily labeled processing speed issues. Learning to read and write were actually physically painful for him. Reading and writing fatigue him and so he will ask me to read to him and to take dictation. I’ve used the time taking dictation as an opportunity to help him improve his writing. Does this improve the final product? Yes. Do I care? Not really, as he typically is confident he would get an A with what he could turn in without help (lots of evidence for this at this point, though not earlier in his writing career). I do care that his writing has improved significantly in part as a result of this – and being able to help him in an activity (Moot Court) in which the standards were not get an A but a higher standards – outperform the best people who’d entered. He will take next year off and he’ll work part-time on improving reading fluency and writing stamina, as well as to get increasingly comfortable with speech recognition technology and screen readers, before going to college. We’ll be working to make him more and more independent, but I anticipate that we’ll end up paying for people to read to him and take dictation during college as well. I won’t feel that this is inappropriate given his disabilities – we’re just letting the intellect come out. Both my father (who was a brilliant, well-recognized theoretical physicist who needed a secretary) and I are not organized with papers although our minds are well-organized. My father that three offices that were so stacked with papers that one organization declared his office a safety hazard. I hire an assistant who is a bit anal compulsive and her (actually there has been one him but lots of hers) whose first job in the morning is to clear everything off the desk before I come in, try to decipher my handwriting, sort it into piles that I am likely to need that day and file the rest. This helps my productivity immensely. I supplement for what would likely now be called an executive function disability and I and arguably my employees and clients and readers are better off for a sensible specialization of labor.</p>
<p>On the other hand, my daughter is a bright 9th grader who has no learning issues but lacks confidence. She is very good at the details and is not great at seeing the big picture. She is superb at foreign languages and loves biology but doesn’t really like math and physics (at least as taught in 8th and 9th grades) in part because they are more abstract. She has a habit of starting assignments and saying, “I don’t get it.” If you can explain the kind of problem she is working on, she can do the mechanics just fine, but hopes to get you to talk her through it. In her case, the concern with “learned helplessness” is really significant. Incidentally, ahoo2u, learned helplessness is the state in which a person (or animal) generalizes incorrectly from one situation in which their actions do not yield the desired responses to other situations in which their actions could yield desired responses. Thus, they don’t try because they are sure they can’t succeed, even when they could. The first book on this, Helplessness by Martin Seligman, is an absolutely superb academic book and quite fascinating. My daughter was in danger of concluding that she couldn’t do this kind of assignment. Our job with her is to back off. I may talk her through the first problem but leave until she’s done with the others. We sent her to a private high school in part because we were afraid that if she went to our very good public high school, she would set her standards too low for the quality of her intellect – she was coasting through a very good private middle school with generally very good performance. The private high school has really pushed her and she is raising her standards. Last week was first semester finals. She and another girl formed a two-person study group and they spent the entire weekend (and afternoons before that weekend) working extremely productively – they produced a 12 page study guide for biology, a 9 pager for history, a 9 pager for English (the Odyssey), and an equivalent one for French. She also did lots of math problems and wrote the essay for the history course. She came back from the first four exams and said, “They were easy. I finished early. I know I made a few mistakes but they were easy.” The fourth one, in French, was very hard. The only people who finished it were native French speakers, so I assume the teacher, who is young, misjudged it. I asked her what she learned from the experience of putting together the study guides and the paper. She said, “I can accomplish a lot if I put my mind to it.” We didn’t have to do anything except not insist she come down for meals. While we would have cajoled her to work harder if she had really been taking it too lightly, our decision to back off in 9th grade to let her overcome learned helplessness and gain independence appears to be working. We’ll keep our fingers crossed. I don’t think she’ll be asking for or needing any help by the time she goes to college.</p>
<p>Incidentally, our daughter has not been as good about coming back at the agreed time or calling in. So we put in place stronger restrictions. She couldn’t understand “You always let XXX stay out until YY o’clock on Saturday nights.” But, increasingly, she’s got it and is getting the same kind of freedom.</p>
<p>In our case at least, the backing up of the Blackhawk happens in different ways and different rates for the different kids. The objective is to enable them to develop and function on their own as adults (at least to the extent that I function on my own with the right kind of staff).</p>