My Own Report Card
by Vanessa Kroll Bennett
As the school year comes to a close, it’s not only my children who are getting report cards. I’m also giving myself a final evaluation for the past year. If kids are constantly being assessed in various aspects of their lives for how well they perform, frankly, we adults should face some scrutiny of our own. However in our case, the assessment is not tied to test scores and grades, but another set of standards entirely: how faithfully we stick to our values in guiding the kids in our lives.
If I’m being fair, I think I did pretty decently this year, not amazing and not terrible. Which as so many psychologists tell us is the formula for our kids to turn out okay. Essentially the goal is for parents to do well more often than we don’t. What would that performance earn us on a test? It depends on whether there’s a curve, but probably about C. As parents, that’s doing well — a C average.
If our kids came home with a report card full of C’s how would we handle it? Likely we’d be none too pleased.
We often hold kids to impossibly high standards, while the target for caregiving adults is simply to screw up less often than we do okay. If the tables were turned, can you imagine that heart-to-heart with a kid? Hey kiddo, on balance just try not to mess up most the time. Not the most inspiring pep talk.
Aiming for average as adults might imply a kind of bare minimum commitment on our parts, earning us a low effort grade on any report card. But in fact, the opposite is true when it comes to caring for tweens and teens. It’s the most demanding job out there — for parents, teachers, coaches, and all the other trusted adults. You can put your whole heart into, work harder at it than anything in your life, and still come out doing, well, fine. Because supporting kids this age is like trying to hit a bull’s eye while the dart board is constantly moving. If you’re lucky, you hit the board somewhere, sometimes. When it comes to guiding adolescents through this tumultuous stage of life, average is pretty darn good.
Making peace with being “good enough,” I like to think more about how well I have practiced what I preached through the ups and downs of this year. My yard stick is gauging how successfully I lived the principles that (ideally) steer our family’s life. No easy feat to measure the qualitative intangibles of manifesting lifelong values. It might be a fool’s errand to determine how often I stuck to this one message: your worth is rooted in your development as a whole human being. But I am always trying to quantify the unquantifiable.
No doubt my kids would be thrilled to provide a formal review of how successful I have been at consistently putting this guiding principle into action. They love the opportunity to assess me and other adults. But unbeknownst to them, they did just that at my most recent birthday celebration.
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A couple of weeks ago, I received a verbal report card over dinner in the form of my kids’ birthday toasts. And their speeches boiled down to this: they feel seen, they feel heard, and they feel loved by me. I had confirmation that on the whole, I was actually doing what I set out to do: making sure my kids feel valued for exactly who they are.
But even more, one grade on my report card stood out more than the rest. One of my children told me that I was really good at admitting when I’ve made a mistake, owning my imperfections, and always trying to do better. When he said that, it was like getting an A+ because owning my fallibility and working to repair my mistakes has honestly been one of my greatest parenting goals. It might not seem like a big deal, but for me it meant everything for him to see that quality in me and even admire it.
So when you have a second to breathe this summer, consider what values underlie what you do as a parent. Give yourself a chance for some honest self-reflection about how well you’re achieving that goal. If you’re brave enough, maybe even ask your kids for their thoughts. And remember, living your values is truly a daily slog where you will fall down nearly as much as you move forward. But if you’re getting a C on that report card, in my grading book that’s pretty fantastic.
