School Family

Every year, the parents in my neighborhood kick up a fuss about the middle school bus stop. The elementary kids get picked up every few houses, but once they enter 4th grade, they have to walk to a single stop. The stop is about a half-mile away from the farthest point.

When my oldest entered middle school, I asked the bus company and the school superintendent to add a second stop so she wouldn’t have to walk so far. They refused, saying it would take too long and throw off the entire bus schedule. Now I’m watching other parents making the same arguments I did about safety and convenience, but since I read about a town that eliminated its buses almost entirely, I’m feeling less outraged by my children’s 10-minute walk to and from the bus stop.

It seems that every year the voters in my town have to decide between paying higher taxes or chiseling away at our schools. Last spring, a tax override barely squeaked through. For now, I feel fortunate that I can put my kids on the bus each morning, no matter how far they have to walk to get to it.

We made it through the first week of school and so far, so good. Except I lost the fight to convince my 4th grader to start the year with a fresh notebook.

I knew it was time to give up when, after the first day of school, I found him taping blank sheets of paper over the page dividers of last year’s spiral-bound notebook. I asked him what he was doing. “Covering up all this stuff I drew in 3rd grade,” he said. “The pictures are just so…you know, bright. And this way I’ll have plenty of room to write down the names of my new subjects.” What he wasn’t saying was he thought his old drawings were babyish and he didn’t want any of the other kids seeing them.

I considered pointing out that he wouldn’t have to bother with the cover-up if he’d just let me buy him a new notebook, but in the end, I kept my mouth shut. My son has 10 months ahead of him of having to do what he’s told. The least I can do is accept his decision about what notebook he uses. So what if it’s not something I would start the year with? That recycled notebook is a statement of his own values, not his mother’s

Well, this is it. School starts this week, and for the first time since I myself was in school, I’m not cheerily tacking up “bon voyage” banners and breaking out the champagne. Dare I say it? I think I’m actually going to miss my kids when the school bus carts them off in a couple of days.

I took my 4th grader to his new school the other night to see his classroom and enjoy a movie courtesy of the PTO. Since then, I’ve been moping around like I’m the one who’s about to start classes. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but I suspect it’s because my kids are older and therefore more fun to be around. For the first time, I didn’t spend the summer fixing lunches, cleaning up, fixing snacks, cleaning up, admonishing the kids to eat the popsicles outside, wiping up the drips. This year they got their own food and (mostly) cleaned up after themselves. I broke up a few sibling fights, but not as many as in the past. When my youngest was bored, I’d send him off on his bike in search of a friend to play with. Last summer, he was still too young to go off on his own.

Now I know what other parents mean when they say summer is too short. Hopefully the adjustment back to school will be a smooth one for all of us.

When my 14-year-old started talking about the style of backpack she wants for school this year, I felt that buying it for her would be aiding and abetting the destruction of her posture. The backpack was
perfectly fine—it’s the combined weight of the books it will be holding that has me seriously considering homeschooling my children just so they’ll never have to leave the house with 75 pounds of textbooks on their backs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says backpacks shouldn’t exceed 10 percent of the student’s weight. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that last year, my daughter’s backpack weighed more than she did by 10 percent. I’d be thrilled if she’d agree to a backpack on wheels, but those haven’t been acceptable since she was a 4th grader and all the girls towed their books down the hallways like tiny flight attendants. People have always been willing to sacrifice comfort for fashion, but overloaded backpacks on growing bodies aren’t just uncomfortable, they’re a health risk. There has to be a way for kids to study at home without paying for it with lifelong back pain.

What is it about some grownups that they can’t get within 10 feet of a child during the month of August without reminding the kid that school will be starting soon?

The other night, we were at a student art exhibit where my daughter’s work was on display when a man spied my 9-year-old son sprawled on a couch in the lobby, examining his thumb. My son put himself on the couch in a sort of protective custody after realizing he had just exhausted his parents’ patience by asking for the sixth time in approximately six minutes when we’d be leaving. So there he was, safe from my short temper, inspecting his thumb for any changes since the last time he was mortally bored, when a pleasant-faced man on his way out the door called over his shoulder, “So, what do you think of all those commercials on TV telling you school will be starting soon?”

My son, realizing the man was addressing him, sat up straight and asked the man what he’d just said. The man repeated himself. I watched my son’s expression rearrange itself from one of polite curiosity to acute anguish. The man might as well have approached my child with a pair of pliers to remove his fingernails.

I don’t believe the man was purposely being sadistic. But it would help if people like him remember what it’s like to be a kid in August, clinging to those last free days with the kind of frantic joy that comes from knowing each one is numbered. It’s hard enough to be a kid (what with being dragged out to your big sister’s boring old art exhibits and having your parents get all grumpy on you when all you want to know is when you’ll be going home). The last thing you need is some adult ruining your day by cheerfully reminding you just how soon those numbers will run out.

Argh! They got me. I swore I wouldn’t be sucked into the back-to-school shopping hype until the first day was clearly in sight. But then I saw an ad for 10-cent notebooks.

Just one dime for 70 spiral-bound pages! I just knew the offer would be gone by Aug. 27 (which, in my town, is the day before school begins and which, if past years are any indicator, is when I would have started my back-to-school shopping).

My personal weakness for notebooks propelled me to the store, where across the aisle I spotted boxes of 24-count crayons for 20 cents each. Now, if I took all of the barely used crayons in my home and laid them end to end, they would circle the earth seven times. Yet at 20 cents for 24 crayons (that’s less than a penny each!), I felt it would be irresponsible not to buy a couple of boxes. Then I spotted the glue sticks….

I prefer to delay back-to-school shopping until the last possible moment. If a school supply enters my thoughts before the end of August, I lose my ability to sustain the illusion that summer will last forever. When a school-related television commercial comes on, I mute the sound and pick up a book. On Sundays, I pull open the newspaper, scoop out the stacks of flyers, and dump them into the recycling bin. But despite all of my precautions, that ad for the 10-cent notebooks slipped through. I’m already feeling the chilly fall air.

The start of school is five weeks away, and already I’m waking up with night sweats over what to pack for lunch. I barely made it to the end of the school year last month without cracking from the pressure of having to fill my kids lunchboxes day after day. Those last few weeks I’d haul myself into the kitchen at night, flip open the lunch boxes and stare into the void.

My kids are like human roulette wheels when it comes to food. Whether my son will want what I pack for him—a tuna sandwich, for example—is more a matter of chance than preference. Sometimes I’ll hit a lucky streak. My daughter told me last year that she liked cold rotini pasta, so I packed it every day for weeks. But I guess I overplayed the pasta because she got sick of it. I could kick myself for ruining a good thing by not quitting while I was ahead.

If I were wealthy, I’d give the kids money to buy lunch every day. But at $2.25 per meal, I have to limit them to two hot lunches each per week. I should have plenty of time between now and when school starts to think of some good, healthy lunches that my kids will eat. But I won’t. The night before the first day of school, I’ll be staring into two brand-new lunchboxes, wondering what the heck to put in them.

When I was a kid, I’d sprawl out on my parents’ bed each morning before kindergarten to watch Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. I loved Mr. Rogers. Not so much the show, which creeped me out a bit (particularly the puppet Lady Elaine Fairchild). I loved the man. He was handsome and soft-spoken. He would smile gently and tell me I was special. He wanted to be my neighbor, and that was OK with me.

Now it turns out that Mr. Rogers may have unwittingly contributed to a kid-centric culture that nurtures its children on empty praise and breeds narcissistic adults with an inflated sense of entitlement.

Jeff Zaslow, in his July 5 Wall Street Journal column, quotes a Louisiana State University professor who, puzzling why so many B and C students demand A’s, ultimately blamed Mr. Rogers and his unconditional acceptance. “Fred Rogers, the late TV icon, told several generations of children that they were ‘special’ just for being whoever they were….What often got lost in his self-esteem-building patter was the idea that being special comes from working hard and having high expectations for yourself,” Zaslow writes of Mr. Rogers.

Children who are told endlessly how wonderful they are by adults who never demand anything of them grow up to believe the world owes them. Worse—tragic even—are the children who eventually realize that they’re not special “just because.”

As a parent, I know my children are special. But I’m not naive enough to think they’ll believe it without hard and fast proof. And the only way they’ll get that proof is to probe the depths of their abilities, to make mistakes, and to live through them. Kids need to earn their rewards and then bask in their own pride.

I still love Mr. Rogers. But I can’t help but think I would have been better prepared for the real world if he were just a bit critical and demanding. Maybe while he was asking to be my neighbor, he could have set a condition that I keep up my yard. Wouldn’t want property values to slip, you know.

Since my oldest child started on solid food (a little more than 13 years ago), I’ve been feeling guilty about how rarely our family sits down together for meals. Those first few years I worried that we were missing an opportunity to teach our kids good table manners, putting them at risk of great public humiliation should they someday be invited to dine with the queen.

Then a few years ago I read about a study that found that teens who have dinner with their families five or more times a week are more likely to earn A’s and B’s in school than teens who have dinner with their families fewer than three times a week. Not only that, but the kids who don’t eat with their families are more likely to smoke, drink, and use drugs.

My husband’s schedule keeps him at work long past dinner hour Monday through Friday. Worse, my kids are involved in so many activities that many nights, we eat in the car or while racing for the door. Any wonder I have guilt? Between my husband’s job, gymnastics, piano lessons, Cub Scouts, Hebrew school, baby-sitting, and ski club, my kids are on their way to mediocre grades and afternoons spent chugging cheap wine behind the liquor store.

Lisa Belkin addressed the topic of family dinners in the New York Times recently and came away with a more measured assessment. Belkin’s family, like mine and so many others, can’t get it together at dinnertime. But unlike so much of the reporting about the family dinner study, Belkin offers the nuanced view that, yes, nightly dinners bring families together, but it isn’t the only place where that happens. Parents and children connect in the car, while watching television together, at bedtime, and in all of those in-between moments during the day.

Students entering 4th grade have to pick two books from the summer reading list. I’m worried. It’s my son’s reading habits. He has none. He won’t pick up a book unless I force him.

Oh, I’ve tried to make reading fun. We’ve had charts and we’ve set goals. I’ve given him rewards and prizes; I’ve bought him interesting books. Captain Underpants, for instance. I figured he’d appreciate the cartoonlike drawings and the mildly subversive message. He read the first book, so I bought him two more.

But last night when I handed him Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets, he said he’s bored with the series. I nearly pulled out my hair. (I really wanted to pull out his.) I mean, come on! Two boys who hypnotize their school principal into stripping down to his skivvies and flapping around like a superhero? Rampaging toilets that eat the lunch lady and assorted other school personnel? What could be funnier? Honestly, I don’t know where I went wrong with my boy.

I desperately want him to love to read. I surrender hours at a stretch to good books. My daughter absorbs Newbery Award-winning books and trashy teenage novels indiscriminately. My husband falls asleep with a book on his face every night. My parents read. My brothers not only read, they also listen to books in their cars. This is what we do. We read. It never occurred to me that I would have a child who could open a book and not be hooked.

I hope my son will eventually stumble onto the joy of reading. I guess the only way that’ll happen is if I continue forcing him to pull out a book every night. But really, I don’t know where to go after Captain Underpants. That was my ace in the hole.