“If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.”
– Carol Dweck

In the spirit of Carol Dweck’s quote, it is important to address the role of parent-teacher associations (PTAs) in today’s schools because they can exponentially improve prevention of depression, anti-social behavior and suicide among children.

Our kids, ages 8 and 14, have been through several schools in the past five years. This is because of our family’s relocation from the United States to Hong Kong in 2012 and our subsequent return here in 2017. Our eldest, in particular, just finished an academic year at his sixth school.

Like most parents, my wife and I feel very invested in our kids’ future. We demonstrate this through engagement with their schools’ PTA. This engagement includes monetary contributions, serving as chaperones during trips, “mystery reader” appearances, and participation in social functions. We both are very keen observers of human behavior and enjoy every opportunity to do this. Observing PTA activities is of great interest to us — especially of late because we can see a huge change in the needs of children, both in education and in parenting. Mindful of this change, we are alarmed by the shallowness of PTAs as a function in today’s schools.

Everywhere you turn, conversations about depression, social-emotional difficulties and suicide among children are trending. If you are raising a teen, the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, which centers on audio tapes a high school suicide victim left her to explain her killing herself, has probably entered your awareness lately. Psychologists are raising concerns about the effects of tech-related dopamine addiction and its correlation with all aforementioned issues. The intersection of parenting and education is exactly where experts are pointing relative to problems as well as solutions.

Sadly, PTAs — located at the same intersection — don’t provide sensible solutions through cooperation between parents and teachers or introduction of third-party resources.

While collectively achieved framework and methodology are needed, a simple change for the better can start with a very simple name amendment – from “Association” to “Ambassadors.”  The level of bureaucracy in this is minimal because decisions stay at an individual school level.

Why “Ambassadors”?  Because this function corresponds with three important objectives:

• awareness
• accountability
• action

Being an ambassador into minds of our children will help communicate care, congruence and closeness. It will also help reframe the function of a PTA from shallow facilitation of events and fundraising to a circle of support and protection – where our children could turn to for meaningful resources.

Why resources? Because it is naive to assume all kids turn to their parents and teachers for support. Often, they seek that among peers and external influencers. What ambassadors could do is understand children’s needs, interests and concerns and, in cooperation with educators, offer genuine help with developing social-emotional skills and overall resilience – sometimes by using their own abilities and occasionally seeking help from third parties.

To conclude, my wife and I genuinely believe that a PTA can disrupt some of the core threats to children’s well-being. They just need to transform from stagnant “Associations” to proactive “Ambassadors.” Let’s reframe our thinking and actions!

Here are some resources for consideration of Parent Teacher Ambassadors:

• Social Thinking
• The Mehrit Centre: Shanker Self-Reg
• Carol Dweck: A Summary of The Two Mindsets And The Power of Believing That You Can Improve
• Video: Teaching for Adaptability, Richard Davidson

Author’s note: This article was co-writing with my wife, Dalia.  

We were a team, a collective. We had an excellent coach (Vincent Pandoliano), and gave everything we had to each other and to the sport. Our game was passionate, honest and exciting. We always got the same feel from the sidelines – loud and proud support.

That explains some of the heartfelt disappointment felt by me and my son, now 14, with his youth soccer academy here in New York.

No skill but lots of spirit

We relocated here from Hong Kong in July 2017. Years before, my son picked up soccer over there. His first team sssssssucked! They lacked basic skills, individually and collectively, and got punished for it repeatedly.

What struck me, however, was the camaraderie among the boys on the team. They did everything together. The sport connected them and, little by little, they improved. Because of this strong team spirit, my son was eager to go to practices, learn soccer skills, and support the team as well as he could – in losses and wins.

He eventually landed on a team at the Hong Kong Football Club. It was his earlier perseverance that helped him get selected out of a group of more than 30 boys. He experienced failure early on, learned from it, and relentlessly worked on his skills. I was superbly proud.

This new team was wonderful: great coaches, friendly and talented players, amazing team spirit. That team spirit carried them to several unlikely victories and, ultimately, to season’s championship. Notably, the boys didn’t really care about individual accolades. They, instead, made numerous rounds of congratulating one another – something no parent was expecting from a bunch of seemingly selfish teenagers. I felt like I was reliving my volleyball days. It was heartwarming.

Smirks, scorn and youth soccer players

This is why both of us were so terribly disappointed when he started playing on his current youth soccer team in NYC.

We took the risk of committing to this program because there were literally no other similar options available given the timing of our arrival in the city (all tryouts and selection are completed in the spring). The uniform and related gear took more than three months to arrive – all because the academy made an agreement with an incompetent “mom and pop” vendor and didn’t have reserve stock. My son ended up borrowing bits and pieces of the uniform from fellow players – only to receive smirks and occasional scorn from them. Smirks and scorn! I kid you not.

Smirks and scorn very quickly became a team trademark of sorts. My son would often return from practices bewildered and sad. Why? Teammates chastised him for making mistakes. The coach seemed to either pay no attention to or encourage this behavior. He’d appear right before the practice and disappear immediately after. No feedback, no individual attention, no care. To date, he hasn’t responded to a single email I’ve sent requesting a meeting.

The clique culture on the team was most disheartening. Boys were friendly only in small groups of 3 or 4, and this was evident in their game on the field: “passing to friends.” Before games, players wouldn’t even greet all of their teammates. I was completely blown away when my son told me that one of his teammates called him “the worst player on the team” after “taking a poll.” When I shared this issue with the program director and asked for a meeting he told me he was “going on vacation” and delegated the task to the head coach. The head coach’s reply was generic and bureaucratic.

My wife and I are very lucky to have a resilient boy. He is able to find joy and friendships in various places if not on the soccer field. What’s more, to his teammates’ and coach’s surprise, he shined in an indoor 5-on-5 tournament recently, helping his team win first place.

What about kids who are not as resilient? How would they be affected? What would they learn in a year’s commitment? Will this atmosphere defeat their aspirations in this sport?

Recently, my son’s friends who play on other academy teams started asking him to try out and join them. I’ll be very happy when he does. He still loves soccer.

Learn from my mistakes

A few takeaway points for parents looking for youth soccer or other sports programs:

• Don’t just seek general feedback from other parents and community members about a particular sports program before you sign up. Most don’t monitor the actual team dynamic and other important nuances in organization and coaching.
• Interview the head of the program, head coach, and the specific coach who will work with your child when possible. Ask to observe a few practices and pay attention to interactions on the field (from the coach and among players).
• Talk to your child in advance about various tactics of dealing with pressure and conflicts. Monitor their moods on the field and after practices or games. Be present with your unwavering support.

Youth soccer photo by Isaiah Rustad on Unsplash

“Daaaaaad! Stooooop! Let me finish!”

My son turns 14 in a few weeks. In the last few of those years, my wife and I have noticed an unpleasant trend: the more time he interacts with any sort of digital content through his laptop or mobile phone, the more difficult it is for him to control his negative impulses.

Of course, the word “addiction” didn’t cross our minds for most of this time. After all, one of these toys – his laptop – was mandated by his school for “educational purposes.” But all parents these days have heard the debates about screen time limits for children, pro and con, and it’s difficult to reconcile what to do given prevalence of technology in our everyday lives.

Then I stumbled on a book about a year ago called Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter, a professor of marketing and psychology at NYU. It offers some stark warnings about personal technology designs such as how interfaces in our computing/mobile devices are saturated with constant lure. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. He also offered concise thoughts in several interviews, which are available on YouTube.

My wife and I feel very lucky to have caught this addictive technology issue early and to have accepted the reality of the gadget-saturated world we live in. We consider ourselves lucky because we understood the negative influence of “smart” devices on our kids’ behaviors early enough to be able to actively curate it – as best as we can. We’re even more lucky to have enough stoicism when setting rules for use of tech in our house and listening to our son — and now our daughter, who just turned 8 — lament about restrictions. (No, we’re not saints. Not even close. I am quite susceptible to pings, buzzes and beeps of my work and personal phone. I also use the LinkedIn business app as my digital newspaper and thought leadership channel – all through my devices.)

Combating addictive technology everyday

Based on our experience, we can see two clear bright spots:

• We never stop talking to our kids about the dangers of addiction to devices. We also set passwords and time limits as an additional layer of control. Begrudgingly, they have come along. This helps them develop stronger emotional core.
• We make it a point to get our kids involved in extracurricular activities like sports and arts – anything to make them do and feel things in the real world. In parallel, we try our best to curate their consumption of digital content. We don’t kid ourselves – it doesn’t always work. Just recently our daughter was watching what we thought was an innocent YouTube video of someone playing Minecraft. I was lucky enough to be near when I noticed how the character decided to …. amputate his arm!

It’s not and won’t be easy in the foreseeable future to manage our children’s exposure to technology. The pace of innovation in that field is far outpacing our cognitive abilities and ethical design is only now coming into focus. So my final word of advice is this: Pay attention and be addicted to a balance in your kids’ engagement with tech.