Your mandate, to him as well as yourself, is to do as well as you can and certainly to recognize your flaws and work on them, but also to understand that certain problems may not be solvable and that doesn’t make you a failure. For kids in particular, certain problems that may not be solvable this year may be solvable in the future as their brains grow and mature. In any case, acknowledging limits is necessary for restricting the damage of caring too much about flaws and failures that can’t be helped.
So don’t look too hard for bad choices, either yours or his. Be careful to note the things he does well and the things you’ve done right as a parent. Don’t assume he’s unhappy or doing poorly because of something you didn’t notice or didn’t take care of. The only thing you may have done wrong is having unprotected sex with your spouse wherein the one wonky egg or gas-huffing sperm won the day, thus transmitting some difficult genes that are hard to live with.
Just because educators are there to help you on your quest to improve your child’s self-esteem doesn’t mean they don’t share your sense of overresponsibility and thus the need to search for what and who’s to blame for whatever’s wrong. Meetings start out friendly, but then get tense as everybody finds faults in the other guy’s performance. Don’t go down that road or react to teachers who are caught up in that negative process.
The best way to team up with teachers, instead of being sucked into polarizing discussions about what should or could have happened, is to note what they’re doing well for a problem that many people haven’t been able to solve. Give them the same protection from blame as you do your child and yourself.
Of course, embrace reasonable responsibility for trying to control whatever you think can be controlled; there are rules for bad behavior that you can enforce with incentives, even if no one knows how your child will respond, and there are procedures you can follow to track homework and provide extra help. There are also procedures for setting limits on bad impulses and eating disorders. If they don’t work, get advice and try something else. In any case, stop frequently to take pride in your efforts, your child’s efforts, and the strengths you take for granted when he’s doing well. For instance, notice what your child does well in spite of obesity, not just what goes wrong because of it.
By recognizing your efforts as a parent, regardless of results, you can prevent frustration and helplessness from poisoning your parenting and your hope for your child’s future. At least until he’s eighteen, when the law says your kid and his self-esteem are no longer your responsibility.
Quick Diagnosis
Here’s what you wish for and can’t have:
• Power to shore up your child’s confidence
• Confidence in your own ability to protect your child from depression and self-dislike
• Access to treatment resources that will do the above
• Knowledge that things won’t go sour tomorrow
Here’s what you can aim for and actually achieve:
• Get to be a pretty good parent
• Know what you can and can’t do for most problems
• Get reasonable professional help and judge whether it’s worthwhile
• Know when pretty good parenting and other help just aren’t enough
• Keep up morale when nothing is working
Here’s how you can do it:
• Through reading, watching others, and/or your experience with your parents, create standards for being a pretty good parent that don’t depend on anyone’s being happy
• Using the same methods, develop reasonable procedures for managing tough problems
• Accept the notion that kids can suffer lots of misery, including not liking themselves, even though everyone is doing their best to do their job, including your kid
• Always remember the good things you and others are doing, despite a bad situation
• Never assume that a lack of progress means that someone has failed to do what they could have and should have done
• Never assume that your child’s lack of self-esteem is a personal failure or that it necessarily requires more work and attention on your part
Your Script
Here’s what to say to yourself or a worried third party who wonders why your kid is so unhappy and lacking in self-esteem.
Dear [Me/Relative/Teacher/Shrink/Angry Social Worker],
I share your concern about my child’s [misery/bad grades/bad behavior/status as a human black cloud] and have for some time. I think my spouse and I and [insert list of professional helpers] have come up with some good ideas about how to help him/her, and some have worked, but not enough. Right now we’re considering a new [psychotherapy/home-based care/change in meds/military school]. We see some positive signs, but it’s still touch and go. We appreciate the good help we’ve received.
No matter what popular psychology tells you, don’t pay too much attention to self-esteem, as nice as it is to have (and as often as the plea for you to like yourself comes with a pitch for a product to help you do just that). Develop your own objective methods for determining whether you or someone you care about is doing a good enough job and rely on the facts to tell you whether you should hold yourself responsible for whatever is going wrong. In almost every situation you can think of, there are commonsense procedures for defining a good-enough effort and seeing how you measure up, given whatever it is you don’t control. Then, regardless of whether your self-esteem is too low or too high, you can figure out how to make the best of bad situations, take pride in your effort, and have confidence in your ability to do the right thing. You can like what you do with your choices, even if you don’t love yourself.
Seeking justice and valuing fairness are supposed to be ideals worth pursuing, especially if you believe books by politicians, movies starring guys in capes, and shows involving law and/or order (not limited to Law & Order). Unfortunately, while justice makes for a good motivation in fiction, it’s a dangerous goal in real life.
Since movies, TV shows, and a politician’s ramblings are mostly fantasy, they can get away with depicting a world that is fundamentally just. The world we actually live in, however, is basically unfair, so seeking justice can become an excuse for pursuing unattainable dreams while ignoring important but much less satisfying obligations, like getting to work, making a living, and doing all the boring stuff, like taking out the garbage and paying the cable bill, for which capes are totally unnecessary.
Admittedly, experiencing personal injustice leaves lasting scars and a strong desire not just for revenge but for that better fantasy world where unfair acts aren’t allowed.
That’s why the need for justice and fairness is not just a philosophical notion but a deep craving that easily blinds us to consequences and the existence of other priorities. We spend our leisure hours watching criminal things happen to innocent people, just because it satisfies a deep need to see the bad guys get identified, kicked, and permanently trussed in the end.
A willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of justice is what turns you into a crusader and martyr, caped or not, but the fact that most cartoon crusaders often