I, Too, Became That Parent

Before having any, my wife and I spent a lot of time talking about our hypothetical children. We were not one of those couples that had in mind these perfect children following this narrow path to success we scrupulously laid out for them. Nor were we one of those couples who looked at other parents, endlessly declaring how they were doing it wrong and we would do it so much better. We were prepared for a lot of outcomes, but nobody is actually prepared for their actual child.

One of the things we talked about was education. We are both the products of public schools straight through college and proudly so. Our experiences were somewhat different, though. She was soaked up into a gifted and talented program at an early age and in high school accepted into the state leadership academy where she lived, at a state boarding school that didn’t even rank their students because they were all the cream of the crop. I, meanwhile, stumbled in my earlier years and my parents had to fight to keep me out of the remedial track. I had turned myself around by the end of middle school, but it was too late to hop the tracks from regular to advanced and honors courses. I was smart enough to be in those classes, but not to make the leap from where I was to get into them.

I thought it was great. In regular classes, I was one of the five smartest kids in any given classroom that moved at the pace of the fifth slowest. I could get my homework done in the first ten minutes of class and spend the rest of the time goofing off. The only thing I couldn’t do very well was read. Possibly due to an undiagnosed learning disability, reading was incredibly painful for me even when my grades was good. My eighth grade year I made straight As and also had to take remedial reading because I failed the state standardized test. My grades fell to merely “good” in high school because it’s harder to get good grades when you can’t really read the material. I taught myself to read in the proper way ¹ in my twenties. At least, I learned to focus when I need to (like for jobs) and slog through.

My wife is horrified by this story. She believes me to be a smart guy and that if I had these kind of difficulties it is almost certainly due to having an undiagnosed learning disability. She was further horrified by the possibility that our child might have the same and wanted to make absolutely sure that if she did they would not resolve the issue by simply lowering expectations as my parents had.

When I was substitute teaching, I ended up with a lot of special ed classes. My theory is that most of the people before me on the call list turned them down, so I’d get them. I got to know a couple of kids. One of them you would never in a million years guess had a disability of any sort. He was charismatic, articulate, and the kind of kid who seemed like he was going to go places when he got older. Until he tried to read, write, or do very simple arithmetic. Another kid was the exact opposite. He was put into special ed for no other reason that I could see than that he had a speech impediment that made him sound dumb. He was in the sixth grade and reading very long books on World War II. His presence in a class that was learning how to differentiate the elbow from the wrist was kind of painful in a way. I think of each of these kids often – they’re kind of mirrors in a way – but especially the latter.

In short, and in our own ways, we have spent a lot of time thinking about how our child might be left behind where they should be. This was reinforced when our daughter was very late talking, lacked basic fine motor skills, and was generally behind in four of the five metrics the state tracks toddlers on for intervention. Every parent believes this, but in the case of talking and socialization we always believed that she didn’t lack the skills so much as kept them locked. We called this “Can’t vs Won’t” and believed, except in our most vulnerable moments, that it was “Won’t.” Meanwhile, the state was busy filing early intervention paperwork and my wife’s family was practically starting an intervention of their own to wake us up to our kid’s obvious disabilities and do something so that maybe she could someday live a normal life.

For her last year of preschool before a kindergarten that she might not be ready for, we switched her over to a Montessori program. And that was pretty much when everything changed. There was a degree of attention she needed to excel, and it was one that her previous school couldn’t give her. It wasn’t that the other school was bad; it’s just that it was less staffed and had a model less conducive to her way of doing things. Her first year at the Montessori program she came out of her shell. The second year she learned to read, write, and became something of a class leader (she won their presidential election!).

This gives us quite a dilemma. She’s graduating out of the Montessori school at the end of the year. We’d never been people to consider private school, and yet there is a private school that would be something of a natural successor to the school where she has thrived. We’d considered homeschooling before private schooling, but while homeschooling is a fine option for a lot of kids (including our hypothetical ones), it’s very much not right for our daughter. The private school is. Secondly, we really do like our local elementary school (she had speech therapy there) but our area buses kids around – often away from their local school – and there is a better-than-even chance she’s going to end up going to school further away than that and a non-trivial chance she will be sent to the next county over. It’s a crapshoot and you don’t even find out until late summer (one parent found out three days before school started).

Lastly, she is six years old and she’s reading and writing fiction and telling stories and learning multiplication ². We’re worried about the ground that she’s going to lose by switching over. Every single parent we’ve talked to about it has said that it’s a struggle and they all report lost ground. It would be really nice to avoid that. The teachers (at the Montessori) have talked about skipping her a grade, but even after all of the advances, maturity is a concern.

The counterarguments are simple, though. Money is among them, but not necessarily what you would expect. Her grandparents (having seen her progress over the last two years) are not only willing to pay for it but are encouraging us to do it. Still, money has been really tight and my ability to be a stay-at-home dad is uncertain and my job opportunities are pretty limited with transportation time blocked off.

We also just cringe at the idea of private school on a rather basic level.

And lastly, there is a sense that maybe we are just spinning our wheels here. She can’t go to private school forever. This school ends at the 8th grade but we won’t be here that long. There is a feeling that our desire for her to go to the private school is a desire to shield her for as long as we can in a way that we ordinarily don’t approve of. In this case it’s not shielding her from the consequences of her actions or non-wealthy people or whatever, but shielding her from the unpleasantness of the regular world. Of being the cog in the educational machine.

Which… up until recently… we had always been fine with.

Parenthood leads a person to ask some very unexpected questions.

{Title a reference to Vikram’s unrelated-but-also-related post.}

1. By which I mean “reading words in order to make sentences, sentences in order to make paragraphs, and paragraphs in order to make sections or chapters. Otherwise I generally keep scanning words until a paragraph makes sense and then move on to the next.
2. Please note that if you’re hearing the tone of the satisfied parents of the overachieving kid… no. Keep in mind for most of her life she has been behind and some people were looking at us like we were delusional. We are actually quite humble here.