I started writing this 6 months ago like this:
"I had a meeting with a student & her mom today (May 6, 2019) and want to write about it while the meeting's fresh in my head. The part that sticks out to me is near the end of our meeting, when the mom asks why her daughter is bad at math. She goes on to add that she has paid for Kumon from 2nd-8th grade, and now is paying for a tutor at $30/hr for a couple hours a week.
It got me thinking"
... and then I never finished writing :(.
Anyway, what's driving me to come back to this topic is a meeting I had with someone's dad yesterday (Nov 18, '19). He came in maybe 20-30 minutes after school and asked why his son was doing so poorly. His POV can be summed up as: where I come from, teens are either working full-time or working on top of getting their education. My kid just has to focus on school - I cook for him, I make sure he has nice things - so why isn't he doing well?
In hindsight, I guess I could have posited that there's a line between spoiling and providing for a child, but at the time, I just felt one part awkward and four parts terrible. Here's the stereotypical immigrant parent - left their home country for a better life, working hard at a (likely crummy) job for their kid to have better opportunities. & he came, in part, griping about how easy his kid has it. A kid who, at least on the surface, doesn't appreciate the sacrifice (at least, not enough to tangibly do anything about it).
So my deal is...what is the responsibility of the kid in this situation? Nobody asks to be born, and we certainly don't get our choice of parents. But is it too much to ask of a kid to respect the sacrifice of their parents and ...get a high school diploma, maybe a degree? Especially when, at the end of the day, those things benefit the child more than they benefit the parents.
Obviously I feel some type of way about it, considering my siblings and I all got degrees. Am I speaking from a place of privilege? I don't think so... how much privilege did we have, compared to our fellow children of immigrants? A stable home situation, sure, but plenty of (failing) kids have that. Our parents didn't have the cultural/institutional knowledge to help much when it came to college. Definitely no or not much extra money to speak of. So what's the deal...?
I don't want to come off as morally superior or anything like that - I'll be the first to tell you my work ethic is sketchy. At the end of the day, though, I still took care of business in school. & the weird thing is - while I definitely remember my parents reminding me of things I grew up with here that they didn't have - I don't actually remember thinking "I need to succeed to make my parents proud," or "My parents didn't leave Vietnam just so I could be a screw-up," or anything like that. In fact, I feel incredibly selfish when I think about my higher education and even my profession - I didn't keep my parents in mind when I picked what I wanted to study or what I wanted to do. I just thought of myself - the major I found interesting, the grades I considered acceptable, and the job I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
After the conversation we shared, I felt a sense of profound empathy for the dad. Not as a parent that ever had to sacrifice (obviously), but as a son that saw his own dad in this conversation. & for my student, I just felt conflicted, mostly. I don't want to be accusatory, but I do wonder what the deal is with kids when they don't hold up their end of the deal, as it were. I also find it hard to relate - I might be lazy, but I've always achieved according to the standards I've had for myself. It just makes me wonder... how the heck could these kids have such low standards for themselves?
So, what's this all come down to? Is it on parents for not being harder on their kids? When do kids reach the point where they own their educational experience? How many years will it take before I craft a satisfying answer to this question?? How responsible am I in getting kids to see the sacrifices their parents make?!? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
