Raising a Strong Sense of Self
On this first week of summer for my kids, marking my middle child’s official end to her elementary career, I am reflecting on the first time we lived through this major transition from elementary to middle school. It’s a time that pushed my controlling tendencies to a whole new level, and I learned a lot from it. When my oldest started sixth grade a couple years ago, I watched her separate from us (literally, she never wanted to be in the same room as us for a while) and I felt like I was suddenly living with a stranger as she took on a new chapter, and a new self.
I realized I was facing the ultimate control dilemma: how do I let my child be who she is without sending her the message that she’s the “wrong” person?
This, my friends, is the heart of autonomy-supportive parenting. More than the science or theory or strategies that one could write a book about (ha!), the grand finale of it all is to raise a child who knows who they are.
It’s a tricky mission. Although the verb form of the word parent derives from Latin roots meaning “to breed” or “bring forth,” we are not done once the baby has been bred and brought forth, are we? To parent is to shape and influence, to teach and coach, to raise into adulthood—and continue to support throughout adulthood.
But the greatest balancing part of this act of raising a child is allowing them to explore their own sense of self with autonomy and freedom without projecting our ideas of their identity onto them.
As I watched my first-born transform from tween to teen, I had to work on letting go of who I thought she was (studious and shy like me), and maybe even who I thought she should be. There were several forms this emerging discrepancy took, but perhaps one of the most common that other parents grapple with revolves around school identity.
I remember when she entered middle school, this child who had been socially reserved from preschool through fifth grade now spent significantly more hours on FaceTime with new friends than studying. As an academic over-achiever and one of the shy kids myself, I couldn’t relate.
I adored school. I was intrinsically motivated to learn and work hard from the beginning. I identified as a “top student” from the youngest years through my unfaltering, tunnel-vision pursuit of a doctorate degree. Learning in a school environment gave me joy. And here I unearthed yet another parenting assumption I didn’t realize I had until I bumped up against it: my kids would love school like I did. In fact, this is often the drive for unintentionally projecting our identity onto our children: we want to relate to who they are to feel connected.
As you can probably guess by now, my eldest can at least tolerate school and find parts she likes, but it’s far from her happy place like it was mine (true for most kids). Of course, her father and I expect our social butterfly to do her work and actively participate in her education, but she doesn’t have to be the student I was, or even who I thought she was when she was younger.
In elementary school, she used to show a love of writing and reading that felt reassuring to me as quite familiar to my own sense of self. But this faded as she aged, which doesn’t mean it’s gone forever, but is an example of needing to recalibrate our sense of our child’s identity as they do their own changing and experimenting. Your version may come in a different package, like the sporty parents with a kid who suddenly decides to pursue the bass drum instead of baseball.
We talk about transitions as our children develop, but these transitions are often transitions for us parents, too. My daughter wasn’t the only one changing, our relationship needed a readjustment to match, like the shifting growth plates in her maturing body finding their new configuration.
In this readjustment process, I took seriously the need to check my controlling impulses and be intentional about supporting her autonomy. Here are a few ways I did that when it came to the school part of her developing self:
I stopped regularly checking Power School, the online record of each assignment and class grade.
I re-formulated my own biases that a “good” student gets all As. (A large part of the bias came from my past, but it’s not helped by our hyper-competitive academic culture.)
I articulated growth mindset concepts in my discussions about school with her, focusing on her effort and study habits instead of her grades.
We inserted values into these discussions, too, such as respecting teachers by openly communicating with them and exploring how education serves my daughter in her own life goals.
When she faced a challenge with an assignment or a teacher, instead of me jumping into “fix it” or directing her how, I talked through why it would be a good idea and the steps to take and let her take it from there.
Throughout this process of shifting from controlling (“shouldn’t you be doing homework?”) to being autonomy-supportive, I noticed how our relationship benefited. At the start, my daughter refused to look at her grades with me, likely expecting judgment and pressure. Now, not only does she openly share progress and challenges in her classes but when I suggest the occasional glance at PowerSchool updates, she easily hops on PowerSchool with me to look together.
We don’t discuss this enough, this parenting challenge of recognizing our child’s separate self and refraining from projecting our own idea of who they are, yet it’s so crucial to raising our kids. The core of autonomy-supportive parenting is that we are raising our child to be who they are (and to know who that is), and not who we want them to be. It sounds so obvious, but can still be helpful to repeat this mantra to ourselves when we feel frustrated, "my child is not me."
Now, as my middle child prepares for her big transition to sixth grade, I get to do it again. I may feel a little less blindsided this time. But then again, she is not her sister. We will discover new wrinkles, challenges, and triumphs in our readjustment. As my studious middle has seemed to be more similarly wired to me when it comes to a natural love of school, this readjustment may come in a different form. Just to keep me on my toes.
One of the gifts of separating our ideas of who our child is from their growing sense of self is how it opens us up to see more clearly what an impressive person they may be in their own right. As an almost-eight-grader, my oldest daughter continues to astound me with a profound self-possession and comfort in her own skin that I’m still working on. Good thing she’s not exactly like me, even if she doesn’t love school. For now.
**You can pre-order my book Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent, Confident Children on Amazon and Bookshop.