A trap for the earnest—and three ways out

Becoming the parents and teachers we want to be without burning out

You don’t completely agree with the way you were parented. So, you aim for something wiser, maybe gentler, more attuned to your child. Great move — right?

You’re a teacher and you know so well that lecturing from the front of the room is a poor learning method. So, you shift your classroom or perhaps your whole school to something more student-centered. You see students not as empty vessels to fill but as complex, whole people with rich emotional and social lives. Great move — right?

There is a flaw — not a fatal one but a pretty brutal one — with both of these moves. It’s not about the direction of change. Wiser, more attuned parenting and more student-centered schools feel so obviously the right path of evolution, for reasons explored elsewhere.

The flaw is that in making these moves we are taking on more, in fact immensely more, without letting go of other things or seeking new help. The result? The gentle parents and the progressive educators of the world are some of the most burned-out people you can find.

Why is this? Imagine you’ve trained to be a baseball player. You were brought up to be one, you instinctively know the moves, even as you increasingly dislike the game. Finally one day, you’ve had enough. You toss your baseball equipment aside and declare yourself a soccer player from here on out. Someone passes you a soccer ball and off you go! Only the catch is — you’re still on the baseball field. Most people around you are still playing baseball and expect you to play too. It’s hard to ignore them, especially when the rules of baseball are so deeply familiar to you. You kick the baseball instead of throwing it, throw the soccer ball instead of kicking it, and now you’re exhausted and questioning your choices. You intended to leave one game, but you’ve ended up with the impossible task of playing two games at once.

That may sound a little overdramatic, but I think it sums up what many of us have experienced. As a school leader, I work continually to explain how we’ve chosen a different set of rules and goals for ourselves as a progressive school, but often when push comes to shove, we feel that we have to win on the traditional goals and the new goals in order to survive. That’s playing baseball and soccer at once, on the same field.

I think much the same applies to progressive parents. We want to listen deeply to our kids, to follow their lead more and coerce less, to be more playful, to nurture their unique talents. It’s beautiful! But, chances are we’re working way too hard professionally. We’re living outside of a close-knit, multi-generational community and so trying to take on most or all of the parenting ourselves. And we’re not immune to the traditional fears about our kids’ futures, so we still want our kids to play nicely in the ways that school demands, and we worry that if they are not suitably disciplined or flexible, that some kind of economic or other long-term reckoning is coming down on them.

The result of all this is burnout.

It is not inevitable, though. We don’t want to give up on the ways of teaching and parenting that we know will raise freer, wiser, more creative people. So what is one to do?

First, a caveat. I’m working on this myself. I’ve experienced burnout in intense ways on my path. I’m not speaking from some enlightened other-side of this problem. I’m in it, trying to untangle the knots in myself and in some of the systems I can affect around me. With that said, here are three suggestions:

1. No more one-stop-shops. No parent or combination of parents are enough for one child. No school can offer enough activities or be excellent in every domain. In the wider community, you can find all forms of excellence. But it’s not a reasonable goal for one family or one school. Educators, what if you thought less like a teacher and more like a resource librarian? What if school was more about directing students to the right resources, groups, and people, and less about trying to control most or all learning in a child’s life?
   
   Parents, what if your role, especially as your kids get into their adolescent years, is more about being a bridge to the world, rather than attempting to be their world? In other words: don’t do this alone. The “nuclear family” ideal of two parents in a family house is a trap — we need aunties, uncles, cousins, grandparents, family friends, neighbors and others to be active forces in our children’s lives. In an ideal world, when a child has just had it with us, they can storm out and go straight to their auntie to vent about what foolish parents they have, and then forget about all of it while caught up in a new interaction.
   

2. Stock the field with people who are playing your game. If you’re not going to try to be excellent at everything your child or student needs, then you’re going to need other people. Ideally, people who are playing your game. Back to the metaphor of ditching baseball for soccer — let’s get some other soccer players on the field! We need the camaraderie, the sharing of practical advice, and the permission to focus on one game — say, being a great project-based teacher, or being a parent who grants more freedom and responsibility to their kids. The homeschool and unschool movements have some great examples of this in the support centers and social media groups that form to share advice and create social opportunities for both kids and parents.
   

3. Be honest, even bold, about what game you’re playing. You can’t please everyone. Make it clear you’ve chosen a different game. Nope, soccer will not help with your baseball swing, sorry about that. But it’s a fantastic game that will offer many skills, even many that will cross over to baseball and to life in general. If you try to promise the moon — our students will do 10 AP’s while becoming passionate, self-directed learners — you set yourself up for failure and exhaustion. Schools get caught up in the same scarcity mindset that makes parents excessively fearful about their kids’ futures. Don’t try to appeal to every family. And parents, don’t expect your kids to be wonderfully obedient schoolchildren if you’re also trying to raise them to question things and to explore their creative passions.
   

I remember visiting Finland some years ago to see their famous schools in action, and hearing that when they made a national shift toward project-based learning, they realized they had to cut approximately half of the content from their national curriculum. I don’t know if that was an official statement, but from people on the ground, it was obvious — if you want to do awesome, interdisciplinary projects, you can’t also memorize the dates of a hundred different battles, just to use one example. They were honest about how they couldn’t play both games. And they were bold in declaring the old game — memorizing and regurgitating a bunch of facts — no longer helpful in our world, compared to the skills they could develop.

So too with this work. We need to let go of some things, not claim to be the best in both the old and the new games of education, or to be the parent who knows how to navigate every situation a child might face. Let’s acknowledge that we each have some specialties. That quirky school has amazing care and learning but a terrible sports program — so be it, that can be found elsewhere! Or maybe you’re the parent who can help not only your kids but also your friends’ kids find a love of the outdoors — wonderful! Now your partner and your friends don’t have to also be masterful campers unless they love it too, and you can offer your gift for more than your own family. You get the idea: less isolation, more connection.

Photo not representative of food I actually know how to make — but someone in the community probably can!

In my own family life, I’m lucky to have some close friends and family nearby, but we end up stuck in our American suburban houses far too much, and we only see each other when we schedule “playdates” or get-togethers weeks in advance. I want my kids to be able to tap into the genius of all these other parents, and I’d love to offer my skills to my friends’ kids. My dream is to have a closer community where casual, regular get-togethers are the norm. You plan in advance if you can’t get together. Otherwise, see you at dinner.

One last story — I once visited a group of educators who had started a phenomenal, progressive public high school in Colorado. They were building not just a school but also a community. It amazed me to learn, while staying over at one of their houses, that they had literally built each other’s homes. Each teacher had found a speciality. One did all the roofs for everyone’s homes. The other did all the electrical work. Another did all the plumbing. And so on. No superhuman requirements here, the kind that educators and parents all too easily take on. You don’t have to be good at everything. “Good at everything” is not a goal for any person or school — it’s a function of a healthy community.

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In Other News…

• The Book: Lately I’ve been enjoying doing more podcasts, as a chance to talk playfully about the ideas in my book, Finding the Magic in Middle School. If you’re into podcasts, check out this one from On Boys, called Middle School: Misunderstood or Magic?, or this one I did with David Richards from Changemaker Edu.
  

• Summer Teacher Institute: This July, I’m working again with my wonderful co-facilitator Abigail Henderson to lead the SEL Advisory Facilitation training. It’s a three-day intensive in San Francisco, followed by ongoing coaching via Zoom, to help educators of all stripes shift from instructors to facilitators. In particular, to make advisory into a place for safe and brave conversations, where adolescents learn social and emotional tools through experience and in a supportive group of peers. More here if you’d like to join us.