October 1, 2013
Parents Speak Their Children's World into Existence

 

Dr. Laura,

I appreciated your commentary on the failure of our education system and the people coming out of it: high school, college or even graduate school today without the ability to develop and coherent paragraph. I can confirm your observation and not just in my own professional world today, but back in school too. We used to swap papers in graduate school at a semi-prestigious University in Washington, D.C. and until then, I had always been concerned that my writing abilities would never cut mustard in the professional world. Just about every paper I proofread sounded like an 8th grader wrote it and this was graduate school. Each was so bad, literally, that I thought that something might be wrong with me. I would re-read lines over and over again thinking I must have missed something.

You also said that your grades improved after having left home. I can relate. I grew up in a stressful, fanatically-evangelical, regularly hysterical, and violent single-parent home. Mom was nuts. I had to leave in the middle of my senior year of high school. If I hadn’t, I felt that I might have gone careening way off the deep end. I was coming to terms with being gay at the time you see and I knew that I had to leave for my own emotional stability; it was self-preservation and it was instinctive. I was on the edge. I had it confirmed a number of years later that my decision to leave, even with only the clothes on my back, was in fact the correct one. I would not have survived otherwise, not at that age and with my sensitivity level at the time. The revelation has been bitter sweet because, as difficult as it was to just pick up and leave everything I’d ever known behind, I know that I would probably not be alive today if I hadn’t gone. We’re talking MAJOR stress.

We never put down any roots. I was in 13 different schools because we were always moving from place to place, and from housing project to housing project. The positive side of moving so much was I never had the opportunity to become too thick with any of the indigenous thieves. You already know the negative side and it is all true. I never did seem to fit in.

One of the things I did not expect was that, as stressful as life was for me at the time of my departure, my grades soared after I’d left home. I was working full time at 17, going to high school, living with older roommates, paying my own way and that same period represents the very first time I had ever gotten straight As in my life. For the duration of my high school career I saw nothing but As.  It baffled me, yet made me really sort of giddy at the same time. I was almost afraid to take pride in it because a) there wasn’t time and b) because I half thought that it must be some mistake. I had always been under the impression that I was barely mediocre academically and was always playing catch up. I WAS always playing catch up because I was always the new kid everywhere. I didn’t know I was intelligent. I was so literally tickled and please by this phenomenon that I went to college - practically by accident too - at the suggestion and encouragement of a friend who got me the application, filled it out for me, had me sign it before he mailed it for me, to a public school that was affordable. I paid for it all myself and did very well, even making the Deans List too because I wasn’t about to have all my hard-earned money go to waste and that money was very hard earned with sweat. I’d never planned to go to graduate school until after a professor of mine took notice of me and offered me a job that would pay the tuition entirely and at the most expensive university in the country.  It only took me three days to say, "Ok, yes; I’ll do it." I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn and I wanted to be successful in spite of where I’d come from.

I wanted to be exactly who and what I wanted to be and consciously chose to believe that you can be, even in spite of what you’re told by anybody. Another one of the benefits or side effects rather of moving around so much; there are just a few, is that you don’t have to get pigeonholed into any single role or status or clique as a nerd or dweeb or jock or meathead or preppy guy which often winds up significantly influencing who you ultimately become in later life. I learned that you can pick and do and be just exactly what you want no matter what anybody says to you or does to you.

I continue to be amazed at how the very world we live in as children depends so largely on what we are told by the adults and/or family that are in our lives, for better or worse. When we are young, our parents literally speak our world into existence. Our perception is not only formed by their influence, it is entirely their creation. What they say to us or do become our reality. More folks should recognize that they are creating the very world we live in with the words that they say. They should also tell their kids to do their homework. It makes all the difference in the world.

Hugs, Dr. Laura,

Tadeu

Posted by Staff at 11:05 AM