As my wife and I learned in some painful ways, we were no longer listened to with as much respect once our children reached high-school age. If we told them what methods we used to survive in high school, more often than not we got nods of recognition, but not much else.
But what I think did work was just being good examples for how to have a productive and enjoyable life. We started out with a fortunate advantage. We don’t drink, even socially, so our children had no adult role models for that habit, and subsequently never picked it up, even while alcohol abuse continues to be the most serious social problem affecting high schoolers today.
I think we just stumbled into other ways that encouraged habits that helped in school. We often went to movies as a family, and talked about them afterwards; they picked up the fun of thinking about how authors make stories work.
We were interested in politics and talked about it. We read books and could introduce some of them into conversations. Our children, like many teenagers, liked to talk to us about their friends, and those conversations often wandered into themes of personal responsibility, work habits and social dangers that allowed us to send messages without lecturing our kids about any of their own habits.
And we had the kind of jobs, and very limited social calendars, that allowed us to be home at night, ready to advise on any homework assignment and available to handle crises. They still didn’t talk to us as much as they did to their friends, and we grew accustomed to that. But we are happy with the young adults they have become and think we had something to do with that.
Jay Mathews, the parent of three children, writes the education column for the Washington Post.