The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [108]
Eli resumed playing Mario Kart. His mother followed him and sat next to him on the couch.
“I knew this would happen,” she said. “I knew when you signed up for five APs that you’d spend all your time doing homework.” Eli said nothing. His mother was bugging him about doing too much work while he was playing a video game.
“Why don’t you want to have any friends over?” she continued.
“I just want to rest and take it easy!” Eli said.
“What kid doesn’t want to hang out with his friends?! That’s weird! I just wanted you to have a normal senior year, but you had to take these five AP classes!”
Eli concentrated on his game. He would have loved to be hanging out with friends. He couldn’t say to his mother, “No one wants to hang out with me.” There was a lot he could not say.
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PARENTS AND “NORMALITY”
In my standard interview questions for this book, I did not ask students specifically about their parents; this is, after all, a book mainly about the dynamics and targets of exclusion at school. But as a considerable number of students raised the topic, I realized that if there is a single factor that spells the difference between cafeteria fringe headed for greatness and those doomed to low self-worth, even more than a caring teacher or a group of friends, it is supportive, accepting parents who not only love their children unconditionally, but also don’t make them feel as if their idiosyncrasies qualify as “conditions” in the first place. “My mom likes to compare me to the rest of society, or at least how she perceives it to be, and I just want her to stop,” Eli told me. “I want her to accept me for who I am.”
Throughout my years of lecturing at schools, my biggest surprise was a parent who, even after listening to a talk about how children’s health and happiness should be prioritized over prestige and accolades, asked me how to force her children to follow their mom’s dreams. At a high school outside of Seattle, she asked me, “What if my only dream for my kids is that they go to either Stanford or Yale?” Later, as the principal drove me back to my hotel, I told her about the encounter. The principal knew the woman. Her oldest daughter, she told me, was at Yale. Her younger daughter still attended the high school. “There’s a middle daughter, too,” she told me. The mother hadn’t mentioned her. “Where is she?” I asked. The principal named a small college. At that moment, my heart broke not only for the daughter who already was forced to become her mother’s alarmingly narrow ideal, but also for the middle daughter who knew that in her mother’s mind she had already failed.
“All parents want their kids to be popular,” psychologist Lawrence Bauman has claimed. “Popular kids seem to be a vindication of all the early years of support that parents have given and the effort they have made in raising their kids.”3 In this respect, there may be scant difference between parents who push their kids to get into a prestigious college and parents desperate for their kids to be cool. Both sets of parents, intentionally or not, restrict their children by jamming them into a specific mold. Both sets might seek some sort of brag-worthy validation of their “successful” parenting. Both sets might make their children feel as if they aren’t good enough—or worse, that they are deficient or failures—the way they are. Certainly some parents push for popularity because they want to spare their children the pain of friendlessness. But what’s tragic about students in Eli’s situation is that rather than assure children that there’s no such thing as normal, some parents are telling them that they aren’t—and then making them feel like they should want to be. Too many parents fail to understand that there is a difference between fitting in and being liked, that there is a difference between being “normal” and being happy. High school is temporary. Family is not.