Blog

LISTENING GROUPS

Students are starved for listening, to have experiences where they are invited and encouraged to share and to be understood.

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Raising Resilient Students

Julie Lycott-Haimes, while Dean of Students at Stanford, noticed that incoming freshmen were less resilient to handle the challenges of college life.  In her book, How to Raise Successful Children:   Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success, she describes how the over-helping done by parents and by educators, too, has crippled our youth so that they are less able to “#adult.”    Helicopter parenting has morphed into “snowplow” parenting in the winter, “lawnmower” parenting in the summer, describing how parents remove any obstacle in their child’s journey to adulthood.  The college admission scandal is an example of this level of parent interference. Of course, they are doing it out of love, not realizing that they are robbing their child of

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YOU’RE NOT RAISING CHILDREN; YOU’RE RAISING ADULTS

This  title is a somewhat unusual way of thinking of our roles as educators and as parents in raising our children, our students. Every organization has a purpose and vision – their North Star – toward which they labor.   A family, a classroom, a school are all organizations and, like a business or a nonprofit,  it helps to be clear about its North Star.   What kind of human being do we want our children to be when they are adults?   What kind of human being do we want our students to be when they leave our school? What kind of employee will serve our global family? My daughter asked me when she was 9 years old, “Mom, what do you want me to be?” 

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