kids - the roy way

Tomorrow my daughter will be celebrating “5th grade day” at her school. It starts with awards ceremony and then lots of fun events the rest of the day. Each grade has one during this final week of class.

I realized this weekend that I’m expected to attend the entire time as an involved parent. We were happy to attend the awards session in the morning, but kind of amazed at the expectation of committing a whole day to lots of other events. I must have missed an earlier memo, but maybe not. Generally the parental involvement expectations seem to be driven more by the core team of volunteers who seem to live for this. I don’t doubt their sincerity or motivation, and thank them for spending so much time making sure the school has organized support, but sometimes they forget not everybody is able to divvy up their time the same way.

While we are lucky to be in situations that allow us to go ahead and attend this event, many parents are not able to easily take a full day off of work, and must weigh the option of potential negative consequences at work with the disappointment of a child comparing their parent to all the others. The same goes for all the school birthday party events and other class parties that seem to think everybody can easily just go spend money on a bucket of treats. However, we live in a community where that’s not entirely true. Just because it’s easy for me to go grab a big fruit salad at Publix for a class party does not mean other parents can just as easily make that happen.

The peer pressure of typical PTA-style organizing and fundraising is really where I start to turn off – once there is a sense that participation is mandatory for any given optional event, I want to just avoid it out of spite. I dislike any communications that focus on guilting parents into contributing. Anything that publicly lists the parents who are helping can be a potentially horrible message to the children of parents who aren’t able to do so. I have enough friends with kids who live paycheck to paycheck to know that it’s not always that easy – and time/money spent at school does not represent how much they love and attend to their kids at home.

Just needed to rant a little…

We went to a friend’s place recently for a party and they had a bouncy house set up for the kids.

When first approaching the empty attraction my son was quick to climb up and then a bit hesitant as he adjusted to the springy floor. Soon he was going all out jumping around joyfully. His sister soon appeared with a couple other good friends. He continued smiling and bouncing around.

Then the new kids showed up. The strangers.

He slowed down and moved to the side, observing how the new participants were going to interact, judging their impact on the expanding collection of people bouncing around. There were more accidental collisions and a few intentional ones. But all in good fun. With the coast clear, he slowly moved back into the mix and resumed his bouncing.

I realized then how closely his personality is beginning to match my own. I tend to avoid conflict and take a lot of time to get comfortable with new people. We have a protective shell.

At the time, I was telling him that he should just have a good time. But really I need to give myself my own advice. When situations make me feel like moving to the side to observe, that means it’s time to just jump in and have fun. Who cares if it gets a little bumpy?