The Toxic Allure of Tiger-Mothering (Part 2) Motivation

In her January 8th, Wall Street Journal essay, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, Amy Chua presents an all-too-familiar problem every parent faces. Kids left on their own lack the self-motivation to do anything beyond what comes naturally or with hardly any effort. The solution she claims is Tiger-Mothering, her version of how conventional Chinese mothers raise their children.

There are many aspects to Tiger-Mothering which Chua packs into her essay. Her memoir provides even more detail but also discloses how she does not always hold to her own ideal. Nonetheless, the Chua essay has generated a significant amount of debate. How much should parents permit their children to follow their natural impulses? How much pressure should responsible parents put on their children to overcome their inertia? And more importantly, what tactics should responsible parents use to ensure their children do not fall victim to their own lazy nature?

Chua accuses those she describes as conventional Western parents as being “lazy” whenever they do not push past their children’s resistance. While parents who never push their children are lazy, Chua and those who follow her Tiger-Mothering principles are also lazy. By creating a zero-tolerance zero-exceptions policy, Chua and others like her bypass an uncountable number of interactions with their children that take time, thought and effort at the expense of their kids’ emotionally healthy development. In the most simple terms, an extremist position like the one Chua advocates takes very little thought and only occasional time and effort.

Additionally, Chua applies little to no moral or ethical compass when it comes to pursuing her narrow objectives. She threatens to take back gifts and cancel celebrations. She denies her daughters bathroom breaks and advocates any use of fear, shame, guilt or manipulation. She never appeals to her kids’ own sense of values. She simply stands upon her own totalitarian parental authority. Perhaps the only thing Chua does not do to achieve her ends is give her daughters physical beatings.

My own position is not the opposite, but relies heavily upon my own moral and ethical compass. So to begin with, fear, shame, guilt and manipulation are toxic. Leveraging these toxic drivers is a counterfeit producer of desired behavior because the desired behavior is either short-lived or soon joined by a different set of undesired behaviors that are the fallout of physical, emotional and psychological abuse. And this kind of abuse is generational. Adult children of such abuse are inclined to inflict the same kind of abuse on their own children, and justify that abuse to themselves and those around them by the subset of outcomes that are desirable.

But I do not advocate the opposite extreme. While I do not behave in a manipulative manner or manufacture fear, shame or guilt, I do not completely shelter my children from normal life situations in which these kinds of feelings could in theory come into play. A very emotionally healthy person can feel these emotions, especially guilt, when they violate their own moral or ethical compass. And while my kids are still living under my roof, I put a lot of effort into ensuring they build their own moral and ethical compass and have the tools to continue doing so long after they leave my home.

A key part of the equation is goals. Successful, emotionally healthy adults set challenging goals for themselves. Left on their own, kids won’t set challenging goals for themselves. But to merely set goals for them is a fallacy of Tiger-Mothering. This is where negotiation comes into play. Chua insists her kids play either the piano or the violin. In fact, it looks like she chose the piano for one and the violin for another. Either way with so few choices, Chua’s girls did not get to set or even negotiate their own goals. They had to either pick or have one chosen for them. The correct thing is to drill down into the actual objective. Perhaps Chua wanted her each of her girls to excel in something artistic that required physical action with concentration. If so, nearly any musical instrument except perhaps the kazoo would suffice. Certainly, it would be more than two. Once an instrument was selected the exact goals with that instrument in question could also be negotiated. These are the kinds of interactions lazy parents bypass.

In our family, sports was one such subject of negotiation. We wanted both Philip and Chloe to be physically active, to gain physical confidence and develop some team skills. When Philip got sick of baseball, we required him to find something else and we helped him find lacrosse. When Chloe got sick of soccer, we required her to continue with basketball and to find a replacement for soccer which turned out to be volleyball.

But once a goal is selected, kids will still resist whenever the going gets difficult. It is here where Chua is willing to use whatever means necessary to ensure her kids’ inertia gains no foothold. But is there another way that is better? I believe the answer lies in consequences. Consequences play a large role in how I have dealt with both goals and behavior. Because kids are naturally sheltered from nearly all of life’s consequences until they are adults, parents need to create consequences that are more immediate. The consequences must be situation-appropriate, be clearly stated in advance if at all possible, and most importantly the consequences must actually be carried out.

I am amazed at how many parents threaten huge consequences they would never deliver upon and for such a small infractions. Chua told her daughter that she would have “no birthday parties for … four years” if she did not learn how to play a piano piece called The Little White Donkey “perfect” by the next day. In my home, I deliver on all my threats and as a result I rarely need to deliver. I can only achieve this by making threats on which I would actually deliver. At one point before Philip was even ten years old he was fascinated by my grandfather’s fraternity paddle from the 1930s. As such when a particularly egregious behavior manifested I told Philip that if he ever did that again, he would get one firm slap on his bare buttocks with the fraternity paddle, and ensured he agreed in advance that it was an appropriate punishment. It turned out to be the biggest threat I have ever had to carry out. When the behavior repeated itself, I looked at him in astonishment. But I had meant what I said. I asked him if he wanted the punishment immediately and he did. It hurt. Philip cried and I held him and told him it was over. And it was over: On both sides. Philip never manifested that behavior ever again.

Working with your kids to set their own goals and to set consequences for failures and wrong behavior takes work and requires several adjustments as they age. It requires delivering on all threats when necessary and making sure every threat is something a responsible parent would actually deliver upon. It has taken a lot of work and we are still not done. Sometimes, I can see the appeal of the zero-tolerance zero-exceptions policy. But I’ve learned there is a better way and in this last stretch of parenting, I plan to stick to it.

Popular Teens: How Do They Gain and Maintain Their Status?

Now that my formal education is long since over, works published in academic journals do not normally catch my attention. The February 2011 issue of the American Sociological Review proved a very interesting exception. In it Professors Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee of UC Davis empirically verified something we generally know about popular teenagers but also discovered some things we do not generally know.

Is anyone surprised to learn that popular teenagers are mean toward other teenagers? If we have somehow forgotten our own teen years, the entertainment industry is there to remind us with movies like Mean Girls, American Pie, The Clique and Odd Girl Out as well as television series like Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, Pretty Little Liars, and Degrassi.

Faris and Felmlee use the word Aggression to describe three types of behaviors that increase among teens as they become progressively popular: physical aggression, direct verbal aggression and indirect verbal aggression (spreading gossip). These findings stand in sharp contrast to psychological research that attributes aggressive behavior to teens who are social outsiders, not social insiders. And then there is one finding that shatters the stereotype completely. Their research shows teens at the zenith of popularity (roughly the top 2%) are not mean or aggressive at all. If we think back hard to our own teen years, perhaps many of us can remember these kinder, gentler highly popular teens and anecdotally confirm what has only been recently documented empirically. I certainly can.

While I have not conducted any kind of study that would qualify as viable research, I believe my anecdotal observations can explain some of these findings, fill in some gaps, and paint a more complete picture. Most importantly, since being more popular in and of itself is desirable and as long as a teen does not attain his or her increased popularity through acts of cruelty or leverage his or her popularity for destructive ends, its pursuit should be encouraged.

While I agree that popular teens behave aggressively toward other teenagers according to the pattern Faris and Felmlee outline, it is not the first thing I have noticed about their social behavior. Instead what is most noticeable is how much effort they put into validating other teenagers. As teenagers become more popular, acts of validation become almost an obsession. They want to pair themselves off with nearly everyone in photographs. They post all kinds of warm, friendly messages to others on social networking sites like Facebook and Formspring. And regarding the school sports teams, they are the ones who provide constant praise to the high performers and constant encouragement to the under performers as both teammates and fans on the sidelines. When Philip’s birthday rolled around, the first two people to wish him “happy birthday” on Facebook were Noah (the most popular guy is his class) and Erica (the most popular girl in his class). Their posts both appeared before seven in the morning and were followed by scores of other birthday notes, most of which were from other very popular students. On the other side of the spectrum, when a man in the community died in a motorcycle accident, it was the popular kids like Noah who led the charge in showering his son (a junior at Hermes High School) with words and acts of love, kindness and support and who actively urged others to do likewise.

There are many factors that play into the equation to determine teenage popularity and obviously these differ between boys and girls. These include extroversion, mature youthful features, stature, muscular development, humor, friendliness, personal grooming, intelligence (but not actual academic performance), confidence, speaking skills, financial resources, athletic prowess, social ambition, and (perhaps not last) an adeptness at using aggressive behavior shrewdly.

Here in my mind is the difference between the aggressiveness popular teens exhibit and the aggressiveness marginal teens exhibit, and why Faris and Felmlee’s findings differ so radically from the findings of most psychological research. Put yourself in the shoes of an average teenager and ask yourself who’s aggression would make you feel more victimized: the crazy kid with no friends or the starting quarterback with a beautiful adoring girlfriend? A small public cutting remark from the quarterback would have far more impact than a tirade from the crazy kid.

In my observation, popular teens tend to use aggression with deliberate ends in mind more than they exhibit impulsive acts of aggression, though I have certainly observed the latter quite often. These deliberate ends include testing, self-defense, assertiveness, maintaining the social hierarchy, and (admittedly) entertainment. Here is one example of this kind of deliberateness that I observed from the bleachers. The Hermes lacrosse team was taking a water break. Philip had just finished drinking and was putting his gloves back on. A short distance from Philip, Conrad was holding one of those water bottles that let him squirt water into his mouth without needing to remove his helmet. After drinking up, Conrad aimed a quick squirt of water at Philip. Philip looked up, saw Conrad’s beaming confident smile, and gave Conrad a warm smile and quick laugh in response. Then Conrad squirted Philip a second time. Philip stared back at Conrad with an annoyed look of disapproval while Conrad continued to smile like the Cheshire Cat, and then squirted Philip a third time. Without hesitation, Philip used his lacrosse stick to knock the water bottle out of Conrad’s hand and deliver a few punishing jabs before Conrad got hold of his own stick and was able to successfully parry Philip’s stick-thrusts. Conrad made one attempt to jab Philip back and his attempt was likewise deflected before both smiled and halted their altercation.

It was a very telling exchange. Both Conrad and Philip are popular. Conrad is perhaps half a notch above Philip in the social hierarchy. Conrad’s initial actions served multiple purposes. They were a test, a way to maintain his social position relative to Philip’s and a means of entertainment. Philip’s initial self-restraint and subsequent aggression first validated Conrad and then asserted Philip’s own social position. By the end of the exchange both Conrad and Philip looked impressive to all observers and perhaps their joint status within the overall social order had increased.

Teenagers have varying social ambitions and varying means to achieve their social ambitions. While some things (like height) are completely out of their control, other things (like behavior) are very much within their control to the degree that their maturity can override their impulsiveness. The best steps a parent can take to help their children enjoy the social aspects of their teen years are encouraging their teens to be friendly and validating of others while simultaneously teaching their teens to be shrewdly assertive. Both will normally take effort because most teens are socially cautious by nature. But the effort will be well worth it.

The Toxic Allure of Tiger-Mothering (Part 1) Introduction

As a proactive parent, I pay attention to the ideas about parenting that garner a large following. Today, the descriptive phrase attracting both praise and vilification is Tiger-Mothering. It started this past January 8th when the Wall Street Journal published Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior by Amy Chua. The essay was excerpted from Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that was released just three days later and has been ranked in the top five in the non-fiction category by the New York Times for four consecutive weeks now.

I read Chua’s essay with fascination and awe. So many individual lines jumped out at me and inside I would respond with a resounding “Yes!” because her words resonated, especially when she challenged the Western parental tendency to accept mediocrity. I was eager to keep reading to see if I could learn anything I would want to apply and was very curious to understand why her strange-sounding parental rules like not permitting her daughters to ever be in a school play might have some merit.

Early in our parenting days, Amelia and I had found a gold mine of parenting wisdom reading about the parenting practices of another great ancient culture: The Jews*. Perhaps Chinese culture also offered values and practices Amelia and I would want to embrace. Philip’s first semester grades had been a disappointment and perhaps behaving more like Chinese parents was just what Amelia and I needed to reverse the situation.

While I understand that Chua’s complete memoir disclosed Chua questioning her conventional practices from time to time and even easing the pressure on her younger daughter, the essay—which is what everyone has read—yielded no ground. So despite Chua’s noble effort to defend the model she mostly embraces, I am disappointed to report that I found nothing of any true value in Chua’s essay. Instead what I found was what I would describe as counterfeit wisdom. It is counterfeit because it seems so very right unless examined critically. Chua’s so-called wisdom is like the most dangerous lies: the lies that contain a significant amount of truth. Each time a resounding “Yes!” bubbled up inside me when reading Chua’s essay, my passionate agreement was evoked because she was describing a real problem. And her general descriptions of her solution looked very promising. Consider the following paragraph from her essay.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Standing alone, the above paragraph earns mostly high marks and nearly all parents would do well to heed Chua’s general counsel. The problem exists with what Chua actual means when she uses words like fortitude, properly, tenacious, excellence, excel and confidence. By the end of her essay, the reader knows what Chua actually means and many readers may wonder if Chua’s solution is the most guaranteed way to rise above mediocrity. Some might conclude that it would be better to accept mediocrity. Others might embrace Chua’s recommendations. And there are those already practicing what Chua advocates who will feel validated by her essay and redouble their efforts.

While I have many friends I like and professional colleagues I respect whose upbringing probably closely matches what Chua advocates and who are likewise either practicing or planning to practice these same techniques with their own children, I still can only conclude these practices are wrong. I am not going on the offensive to defend the mediocrity-enabling practices Chua sees as her lone alternative. Instead, I want to present superior solutions to the problems she correctly identifies. So let me begin as Chua herself began.

Chua began her essay by stating “A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.” While I neither like nor advocate the use of stereotypes, they can be useful in making a point. Chua wants her kids to be successful kids because she believes that successful kids become successful adults. So what is the stereotypical Chinese-parented adult? Is this adult stereotype the model of successful adulthood? Compare that stereotype to the stereotypical Jewish-parented adult. Without hesitation, I would say the latter is far more successful. With a world population that is roughly one percent of world’s Chinese, Jewish-parented adults emerge with greater frequency as leaders across a broad spectrum of professions than Chinese-parented adults.

If one is going to embrace the parenting practices of a distinct culture, Jewish parents run circles around Chinese parents. Ironically, Chua’s husband is Jewish and both have grown up to be successful professionals. The stereotypical Jewish parent is also strict with the goal of raising a successful adult, but it is a very different kind of strictness. Somehow in Chua’s household, two highly intelligent parents selected the conventional Chinese parenting over the conventional Jewish parenting. Clearly, the allure of Tiger-Mothering is high and its supporting arguments are ancient, deep-rooted and like all forms of abuse have great but subtle power.

I am neither Jewish, nor have I embraced all that I have learned about Jewish parenting practices, and I am certainly not trying to raise either Philip or Chloe to resemble a stereotypical Jewish-parented adult. That said, I have embraced many Jewish parenting practices and combined them with other successful parenting practices, common sense and a willingness to do things differently than all the other parents around me.

Unfortunately, a one thousand word rebuttal to Chua’s essay is insufficient, and I value excellence in parenting too much to tolerate such insufficiency. As such, this is the first in a series of rebuttals targeting Chua’s specifics. Beginning with the topic of Motivation, I will clearly state the problem, critique Chua’s proposed solution and propose a healthy effective alternative that any parent willing to put in the effort can implement. Stay tuned.


*The book in question was The Jewish Phenomenon: Seven Keys to the Enduring Wealth of a People by Steven Silbiger.

Parents and Teachers Surf the Social Networks Too

The other evening I indulged Chloe by watching Easy A with her. In it, the movie’s protagonist, Olive, a high school senior girl who is perpetuating a false image that she is promiscuous, is shocked to learn that her favorite teacher Mr. Griffith not only knows about all the rumors circulating about her, but also knows just how pervasive those rumors are. How does Mr. Griffith know so much? Mr. Griffith tells Olive he reads his students’ Facebook posts.

Today, parents and teachers tend to fall into one of two very distinct tribes when it comes to the social networking revolution. There are the cyber-reactive and there are the cyber-proactive. The first group observes little more about their teens and their world than previous generations. The second group observes at least a hundred times more, albeit through a distorted lens. Likewise, teens fall into two very distinct tribes. There are the cyber-dabblers and there are the cyber-broadcasters. And there are many more cyber-broadcasters (especially among teen girls) than one might expect.

In his famous work 1984, George Orwell envisioned that hierarchical totalitarian governments would leverage emerging recording, networking and communications technology to forcibly pull very private details about individuals online for an elite few to observe. Orwell never would have guessed that this technology once mature would actually have the converse effect. Private information is pushed not pulled and the pushing is voluntary not forced. Cyber-broadcasters quickly and efficiently promulgate both gossip and their own very private information. Online, a parent or teacher can easily monitor the pulse of the goings-on among high school students thanks to these cyber-broadcasters.

Orwell’s Big Brother government was clearly doing something unethical because it was observing people’s private lives against their will. In contrast, there has historically never been anything unethical about observing what was broadcast in the public domain. But given how much seemingly private information and gossip one can now observe on social networking sites like Facebook and Formspring, are teachers like the fictional Mr. Griffith and parents like me violating an emerging ethic by proactively observing?

I recently struggled with this question. To be fair, I think there are many teens at Hermes High School who would be as shocked and disturbed as the protagonist in Easy A to discover just how much I have observed about them by simply browsing what they and their peers have disclosed online where I can easily see it. If their parents would object to these teens putting this private information online (as many do) would they likewise object to teachers and other parents reading this private information once it appears in the public domain? A recent interaction made me ask myself these very questions.

There were perhaps fifteen parents including me sitting at a large table at a Hermes High School event for parents of students entering the honors program. We were discussing the social networking revolution, how it was affecting our teens and what we were doing about it. One mother said she permitted her daughter to use social networking sites but required her to friend her mother. Another mother said she required her daughter to give her mother her password. And a third mother told the group she knows and uses her daughter’s passwords without her daughter knowing it. When the topic of Formspring and cyber-bullying came up, yet a fourth mother told the group she did not permit her daughter Oleta to use Formsping.

Yikes, I thought. Whether Oleta’s mother knew it or not, Oleta was a serious cyber-broadcaster who had a very active Formspring account that I browsed from time to time. I discovered Oleta’s Formspring account roughly eight months earlier. The chatter about Erica losing her virginity had just started to die down when Erica worked her way back into the center of online and offline gossip by hooking up with two separate senior guys at the same party. While Erica’s hookups on that evening were tame enough to be filmed for a PG-13 movie, they brought Erica a new wave of notoriety. And with that wave, more detail about that evening’s shenanigans emerged. The same two senior guys also hooked up with a second freshman girl: Oleta. And if that wasn’t enough fuel for gossip to embarrass Erica and Oleta, the scope of the girls’ bad judgment was highlighted further when one of those two senior guys was arrested for a felony just two weeks later.

Erica and Oleta’s Formspring pages lit up with cyber-bullying. Erica shut down her Formspring account for months. But Oleta decided to stay online and fight back. And I was extremely impressed with how Oleta fought back with tenacity, courage and grace. She admitted to exercising bad judgment but also made clear her recreational exploits that evening—though wrong—had been quite tame. Oleta further posted that she believed she had learned a valuable lesson from her own error and hoped others would learn from her mistakes. She seemed to never tire answering each anonymous and signed post to her Formspring account from the most judgmental to the most supportive. And over time Oleta’s efforts seemed to pay off because the supportive posts began to far out-shine the judgmental ones.

I expect it was around a month after the actual hookups when Oleta’s mother saw the posts, experienced her own Yikes moment, learned a little bit about Formspring and then forbid Oleta from using Formspring. But Oleta never actually shut down her Formspring account. Instead she simply went silent for a few weeks. Once she got back on, Oleta resumed her cyber-broadcasting lifestyle. I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Oleta’s posts on Formspring because she’s displayed an unusually high level of depth and insight, and she’s proven in my eyes that it isn’t just in made-for-television movies that a victim of cyber-bullying can emerge stronger and more confident. When chatting with her mother, I could see further evidence of her daughter’s admirable qualities for stepping forward to participate in the honors program.

Oleta and others like her are the reason cyber-proactive parents like me and teachers like the fictional Mr. Griffith see one hundred times more (albeit through a distorted lens) than today’s cyber-reactive and all previous generations. While I wouldn’t advise a teenager to gossip or disclose so much private information online, a lot of it was already out in the open in the traditional gossip-laden public domain of High School. Formspring provided Oleta a way to gain some editorial control of the gossip in a venue where she could defend herself on a level playing field and emerge triumphant.

Since thinking, Yikes and hoping my expression did not give me away at the parent meeting, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not violating any emerging code of ethics associated with the social networking revolution. If it is online, associated in some way with Hermes High School or my son’s peers and I can get to it by clicking hyperlinks, I will probably read it. If it is relevant or interesting, I will probably remember it. And if it provides an excellent illustrative story to reflect on teen life at this moment in history, I might even publish an anonymous blog post that includes it. On the other side of the equation, I’m teaching Philip and Chloe to be very cautious about what the post online or even text to a friend, because I know I can’t be the only cyber-proactive person out there.

With all that said, not everyone agrees with me. Some would violently disagree. While Oleta’s mother is developing into a very good friend to me and proving she is a great parent to her daughter, I don’t plan to tell Oleta’s cyber-reactive mother that I read her daughter’s online posts any time soon.

Formspring: Cyber-Bullying and Cyber-Fighting-Back

I wish I could remember the name of the made-for-television movie that ended with the bullied teenage girl holding the microphone at an all-school assembly defending herself and effectively saying “shame on you” to all the bullies who had harassed her and the many other bullying victims at her school. In the movie, the act served to empower not only the protagonist but also all of the other victims. Today, real-life heroines and heroes who have been victimized by bullies don’t need a school assembly, nor do they need to develop public speaking skills. The victims now have an excellent platform online on which they can defend themselves with valor.

Yes, I am actually talking about Formspring. Youth advocates and the media have been keeping a close watch on Formspring. By allowing users to post anonymous questions and comments to someone’s active Formspring account, a lot of the bullying that once happened offline has moved online and Formspring has become a significant cyber-bullying hub. Across the print and online world, one finds no shortage of writers firing off warnings to parents about the dangers of Formspring and encouraging these parents to protect their tweens and teens from the toxic allure of this emerging social networking jaugernaut.

Formspring has received a significant amount of bad press because it enables cyber-bullying. But there is more going on than merely cyber-bullying. What normally gets missed in these assessments is how Formspring empowers the victims to fight back. This important part of the story is only recently coming to light.

Before I proceed, I am aware that I am at great risk of being misunderstood. So I need to clearly state my position on some key issues. First, all forms of bullying and harassment including cyber-bullying are wrong. Second, teens and tweens need to be educated on just how wrong these behaviors are and how much real damage these behaviors cause. Victims of bullying and harassment suffer greatly and the most vulnerable go as far as committing suicide. Third, laws and school policies are woefully behind in addressing the problems and challenges that emerge as a result of the changes brought on by rapidly emerging technologies such as social networking. There need to be clear punitive consequences for bullying and harassment so that the victimizers will face justice and would-be victimizers will be deterred. And lastly, I realize that some teens and tweens will be so challenged by the online bullying that the empowerment this platform offers cannot offset for them the additional harm it enables their tormentors to inflict.

With that said, I believe most teens are savvier than we give them credit. Reading a recent blog post by Danah Boyd who researches youth online, I learned that Formspring staff now know that “a number of vicious questions were posted by the Formspring account owners themselves.” Is this rare? I don’t think so. Formspring cannot measure this behavior precisely because they can only observe it when the account owners post the “anonymous” messages to their own account when logged in. Logged off, the anonymous messages are even anonymous to Formspring. But the numbers are large enough that Boyd rules out hacking as a reasonable explanation.

It did not take me too long to find my own anecdotal proof of this seemingly self-harassing behavior. On the Formspring page of Brenda, a freshman at Hermes High School, a long raging post degrading her for having “huge, ugly, sagging nipples” appeared. (My version is much, much cleaner than the actual.) However, the person who wrote the post failed to notice that she hadn’t clicked the box to make the raging post anonymous. It was Brenda who wrote the cruel post, answered it and then published it to her own Formspring page.

Why would Brenda or any teen do something like that? Boyd suggests three reasons: A cry for help, a way to look cool, and a way to invite complements. Certainly, there are probably some self-harassers who are publishing such posts as a cry for help. As well, I have certainly observed that any time a teen publishes a particularly derogatory post, favorable posts (most of them not anonymous) soon follow. And lastly, Boyd correctly points out that teens can look quite fly (fly is the new word for cool) simply being un-intimidated enough to publish even the cruelest words that arrive on Formspring.

But I see something deeper. The words Brenda published were carefully crafted. I think they were meant to sound like someone in particular. Perhaps Brenda was even quoting the exact words that had been directed at her in the girls’ locker room. Using the anonymity of Formspring, I think Brenda and others like her e-personate their real or assumed offline tormentors and thereby create a platform where they can defend themselves and effectively say “shame on you” to gossips and bullies who may never have done any actual cyber-bullying. And on Formspring it is there for everyone to see. Brenda might have had even one more item on her agenda. She might have wanted the post to draw boys’ attention to her chest so that they could draw their own conclusions. The point to take away is that Formspring gives account holders (especially savvy, creative teens) a huge amount of power to influence how they are viewed. Account holders can delete the posts they do not want published and answer the posts they do want published, even if they need to author the anonymous posts themselves.

For parents who want to protect their teens and tweens, requiring them to shut down their Formspring accounts may be the right decision or it may merely take away the best defense they have against the gossips and bullies. For most teens and tweens, I think it would be the latter. Merely having a Formspring account is a way for victims like Brenda to say to every bully and would-be bully “bring it on” and in my mind that is pretty darn fly.

Boys Pick Up Where the Medications Leave Off

With the exception of a few polite greetings, I have never personally interacted with Philip’s peer, Ophelia. But I have interacted a lot with Ophelia’s mother. Ophelia’s mother is part of my extended network of proactive parents in the greater Hermes area. Among those she trusts, Ophelia’s mother openly discloses Ophelia’s basic struggles on both a short-term and long-term basis and occasionally provides specific details.

Inspired to Connect the Past to the Present

Back in September, I started a new job with a new company. I went from primarily working out of my home office in Hermes to working at my new company’s regional office in Riverdale. It is a fifty minute commute. The office building is walking distance from the shops and restaurants in historic downtown Riverdale and even closer to an office building where I worked for six years when Philip was a small child.

The other day I walked past that old office building during my lunch break. There was my former office’s window looking down at me: Second floor, second window from the left. I could see the shade was lowered about one third of the way. My former company had been sold to a larger corporation and operations had been scattered to other locations. Someone I probably did not even know now occupied my former abode. The art work that once occupied the walls inside that office was now hanging from the wall of my home office in Hermes. Still, the second window from the left on the second floor looked virtually unchanged. It was enough to fill me with a flood of memories from that time.

The old company had relocated me and my family from another state to San Geraldo in order for me to work there. That six year job stint took me from the days when Philip couldn’t even pronounce his own name to the first half of his second grade year of elementary school. It included Chloe’s birth and the first three years of her life as well as our move from San Geraldo to Hermes. So much had been packed into a little more than half a decade.

It is funny what memories take hold for us to cherish. For me, one such memory dates back to Philip’s early days in preschool. I had taken the train to work that day. Young Philip loved trains. “Twain – twain,” he would say pointing whenever he spotted one. Amelia had plans to have dinner with a friend in Oxford Hills. We decided she would take Philip to my office for me to bring home. It would be his first chance to actually ride on a train.

Philip and Amelia arrived in the late afternoon. The train home would arrive forty minutes later. I wanted to make Philip’s rare visits to my office special. On that day I began two rituals which I would repeat each time he visited my office for the rest of the time he was in preschool. First, I took him to the office kitchen for a can of root beer from the refrigerator. Going forward, “Rooph Beer” was all he would get to drink in my office and we refrained from serving it to him in any other venue. The other ritual was drawing a picture. With my green highlighter pen and copy paper, I would draw “Dexter the Dragon” which was a children’s ride at the San Geraldo Zoo. Those rituals played out on perhaps twenty visits to my office over the next two years, always at Philip’s request. During some of those visits, Philip would get to ride the twain again.

Walking through downtown Riverdale the other day was an experience somewhere between stepping through a time portal and getting a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past. Some things looked exactly the same. There was still the hair salon run by an extended Vietnamese family that provided a fantastic men’s haircut for a fantastic price. Two coffee shops, two Irish pubs, two Thai restaurants and an upscale deli were still thriving businesses. Other things had changed. The Microbrew had changed its name and ownership. My Hungarian tailor had retired and a tanning salon had replaced his little shop. My favorite Mexican restaurant had gone. And the Armenian shoe repair shop had expanded business to include luggage repair. A lot is the same and a lot has changed in some eight years. What can be said about downtown Riverdale can also be said about my family.

Tonight, our whole family along with Chloe’s friend Patty will spend the evening enjoying a New Year’s Eve Ball. Guys will be wearing blazers and ladies will be wearing dresses. Amelia and I plan to watch from a distance as Philip dances with one elegantly dressed, lovely teenage girl after another while Chloe and Patty share dances with younger boys. On Sunday, Philip will take part in a lacrosse scrimmage under the lights at Cabrillo High School involving the area’s high school and college players. I plan to plant myself in the bleachers and soak in the pleasure of watching Philip holding his own against MCLA lacrosse players.

So much time has gone by. The adolescent Philip who ballroom dances and plays varsity lacrosse seems so different from the little boy who drank rooph beer and wanted to see another highlighter drawing of Dexter the Dragon before riding home on the twain. But every so often, something as simple as the sight of a second story window brings all those great memories back and connects them to the great memories that are being formed in the present.