Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary

Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ordinary and extraordinary lately. All year, my sons’ school newsletters were filled with stories about students winning prizes for university-level scientific research, stellar musical accomplishments and statewide athletic laurels.

I wonder if there is any room for the ordinary any more, for the child or teenager — or adult — who enjoys a pickup basketball game but is far from Olympic material, who will be a good citizen but won’t set the world on fire.

We hold so dearly onto the idea that we should all aspire to being remarkable that when David McCullough Jr., an English teacher, told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts recently, “You are not special. You are not exceptional,” the speech went viral.

“In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement,” he told the students and parents. “We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.”

I understand that Mr. McCullough, son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is telling these high school seniors that the world might not embrace them as unconditionally as their parents have. That just because they’ve been told they’re amazing doesn’t mean that they are. That they have to do something to prove themselves, not just accept compliments and trophies.

So where did this intense need to be exceptional come from?

Madeline Levine, a psychologist, said that for baby boomers, “the notion of being special is in our blood.” She added: “How could our children be anything but? And future generations kept building on that.”

More recently, parents seem to be increasingly anxious that there just isn’t going to be enough — enough room at good colleges or graduate schools or the top companies — for even the straight-A, piano-playing quarterback, and we end up convinced that being average will doom our children to a life that will fall far short of what we want for them. As Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work and author of the book “The Gifts of Imperfection” (Hazelden, 2010) said, “In this world, an ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life.”

And that’s a problem. Because “extraordinary is often what the general public views as success,” said Jeff Snipes, co-founder of PDI Ninth House, a corporate leadership consulting firm. “You make a lot of money or have athletic success. That’s a very, very narrow definition. What about being compassionate or living a life of integrity?”

Ordinary and normal smack too much of average. It seems that we all want to live in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average.

Ms. Levine said she was once scheduled to give a talk on parenting the average child at a school in Marin County, Calif. Although she usually packs in the audiences, not one person showed up.

“Apparently no one in the county has an average child,” said Ms. Levine, the author of the forthcoming book, “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success” (HarperCollins).

While there are some extraordinary children out there, the myth is that all children in high school will be like that, she said. And that, Ms. Levine said, is putting enormous stress on students.

Most people, she said, have talent in some areas, are average performers in many areas and are subpar in some areas.

The problem is that we have such a limited view of what we consider an accomplished life that we devalue many qualities that are critically important.

“We would do kids a great service if we opened the tent a little more,” Ms. Levine said.

The Toronto Star did that in March 2012 when it printed a column about Shelagh Gordon, who recently died of a brain aneurysm, with the headline, “Shelagh was here — an ordinary, magical life.” At the same time, The Star ran online interviews with more than 100 people whose life had been touched by the 55-year-old Ms. Gordon.

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/your-money/redefining-success-and-celebrating-the-unremarkable.html?_r=1&ref=education

http://www.languagecorpsasia.com

An Adult Child With Autism

Next Steps For An Adult Child With Autism.

This week began with World Autism Awareness Day, created five years ago by the group Autism Speaks as a locus for fund-raising and spreading the word. It comes at the start to National Autism Awareness Month, which was created by Congress back in the 1970s. In commemoration of both, Huffpost Parents is looking at autism through the eyes of parents all this week. Each day we will run an essay about a next stage of parenting a child with autism, starting with the moment of diagnosis, and going through school years, and teens, and entry into the adult world.

I don't know how to do this.

There's no book for taking the next step. No Fiske Guide to Colleges. No Barron's. When our son Jonathan was preparing to leave home for college, we had a whole shelf of books to guide our family.

There's no book for our autistic son Mickey, who is turning twenty. No U.S. News and World Report ranking best vocational opportunities; no handbook rating residential programs for developmentally disabled young adults. We're making it up as we go.

Graduation fever is spreading through Mickey's class. Parents and students are itching to leave the security - and the restriction -- of our public high school's self-contained life skills class. Most are opting to send their children to residential programs far away. I'm feeling coerced into making decisions I'm not ready to make; I roil with fear and uncertainty.

Petitioning the state for legal guardianship of our own child before he turned 18 was heartbreaking. Getting him Supplemental Security Income and entering the labyrinth of federal bureaucracy was nightmarish. But this step - preparing to leave high school, and the world of what the government promises every disabled child, a "free and appropriate public education," isn't just unnerving. It's terrifying.

Mickey too has caught the fever. He has been a twelfth grader for three years, and he is asking to leave. Loud and clear. "I'm not going back to high school next year. I don't want another yearbook. I'm graduating."

He has always loved his yearbooks, memorizing the name and face of every person in the building so that when he walks down the hall he can greet everyone by name. I have secretly ordered a yearbook for him. Just in case he changes his mind.

"Everyone is ready to go to college at a different time," my husband Marc and I tell him.

"I'm going to college!" he insists.

Does he even know what college means? He knows his brother and cousins have gone; he sees classmates leaving. He understands college is the step that comes after high school. "What do you think you do at college?" I ask him.

"I don't know."

"Do you go to class?" I persist.

"I. Don't. Know."

Does he think it consists of eating out, hanging with friends and watching televised sports in the student union, as we did when we visited Jonathan? Or perhaps he views it as extended sleep-away camp?

"Can we look at colleges this week, Dad?" he persists.

"Sure, Mick," Marc says. Later he tells me, "What do you think he's expecting to see?"

"I don't know that it's anything specific," I say. "I think this is his way of telling us he wants more freedom."

We say, "College." But it won't be. He's too cognitively challenged for that. "College" will be what we call whatever he does next.

Mickey is legally entitled to one more year. Parents of older children with disabilities advise us to keep him in school as long as we can. "Take whatever the public school system can still give you and hold them accountable," one advises us. Another warns us that once a child turns 21 and exits school, services for disabled adults are abysmal. "In school you're used to having people with master's degrees working with your kid," cautions another parent. "Once you leave school, you're getting people making $10 an hour."

"But they have high school degrees, right?" I ask.

She laughs ruefully. "If you're lucky."

Marc and I aren't ready to take off the training wheels yet. "Residential placement seems so permanent," Marc says. "Camp is one thing. Kids get really grubby there, but we always know we're going to pick him up and clean him up again. His voice cracks as he asks, "Would you pack a six year old off to boarding school?"

But Day Hab sounds like a dismal option. The programs are funded by Medicaid. I've heard parents describe it as "glorified babysitting." I think about the first special needs preschool class we ever visited. Seventeen years ago, and I can still see that impassive teacher who never left her chair or looked at us. How bored she'd looked. Is that what day hab offers? I picture a warehouse. Indifferent, untrained staff. Keep-busy activities. Coloring. Stringing beads. A room full of disabled adults, parked in front of a TV for hours.

Adolescence and the onset of epilepsy have made him emotionally labile. He can be belligerent when thwarted. Are these normal adolescent mood swings, or the harbinger of a seizure? We're never sure. Anger and irritability can occur hours or even days before one strikes, like the hissing whistle of a sky rocket before it explodes. We've learned how to manage him, knowing how quickly he can flare up and spin out to that angry place, and how difficult it is to reel him back. But the world isn't going to tiptoe around Mickey. It is he who must learn to control his temper.

To this end, we enlist the aid of the school psychologist. "Mickey is intelligent," he says. "He really has some insight into his behavior." It makes me teary. No one else at our public high school has ever said my child is intelligent.

Intelligent despite the terrible standardized test scores; despite profound language deficits that even now cause him to mix up his verb tenses or use scripted speech; despite three sedating anti-epileptic drugs that dull him down. We no longer question whether he is innately intelligent. We know he is. We hear it in the observations he makes, in the questions he asks, in the way he cuts to the emotional core of things. After the death of a great-aunt, he tells us, "I feel so sad. All our people are disappearing." When his class throws a party for him, he tells the teacher, "I feel loved."

And he is. Even when he isn't easy to be with, he is still lovable.

We have felt cushioned and cocooned by school the past sixteen years. We haven't always been happy - in fact we've been profoundly angry at times. But being in school has meant that we've known where he is every day, and that he is safe.

And that's the crux of our fears. We can't keep him safe anymore. We know our son needs to be stretched and challenged. But the world isn't safe. How will we protect him, when we are no longer there to absorb the blows?

Does Mickey realize that he will never be able to go out into the world unattended? Never ride a bus or train alone? He will never drive a car; epilepsy has seen to that. Living with seizures is like living with the threat of terrorism. You have to stay vigilant, because you could be struck anywhere, any time. A seizure leaves him so profoundly disoriented that he will walk into oncoming traffic. More than once I've cradled him in my arms after one of those episodes, only to have him ask me, "When are my parents coming to pick me up?"

Other parents look forward to their empty nests, to reconnecting as a couple. We have micromanaged every hour of Mickey's life for nearly 20 years. How do we ever shut off our dependency on his dependency?

Will we feel free? Or unmoored?

Then we get lucky. A space suddenly opens at an autism school half an hour from home that has a transition program. They will take him for his last year of formal schooling. They want him immediately. They will work on cooking. Laundry. Emailing. Office skills. Money management. Travel training. Our school district will bus him there. We describe it to Jonathan.

"Is this a marriage of convenience?" Jonathan asks.

"This is a good place," Marc assures him. "And it buys us breathing room."

We cross our collective fingers. Mickey glows when we tell him he has done so well at high school that he is graduating into a program that helps kids get ready for college. We make the switch.
After his first week in the new program, Mickey writes Marc an email.

-------------------------

Dear dad

Yesterday I went to gym and do volleyball. Then I went for a walk.
Then I worked on the computer. I feel great about my new class

Love
Mickey

-------------------------

When a baby is born, someone cuts the umbilical cord for you. How can we possibly loosen the thousands of threads that bind him to us? It's an endless unraveling, this process of letting go.

But we must. And we will figure out what comes next. We will do this just as we have done everything else these past twenty years. Pulling together as a family.

Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liane-kupferberg-carter/adult-child-autism_b_1390123.html?ref=education&ir=Education

http://www.languagecorpsasia.com