Monday, February 25, 2002

Wendy Mogel, Ph.D.

"Raising Self-Reliant Children: Applying the Concept of Balance and Personal Integrity to Our Students"

MS. LEE: Please take your seats. Please take your seats. Thank you very much.

I have to tell you a story that I was reminded of during Robin's talk. I was at a panel of students last week just before I came out here, and it was a panel on stress. The students were telling us how they coped with stress and what caused them stress. One of the girls, a junior, said that college was a terrible stress for her, the application process, and that the college counselor had handed them a sheet of paper, letter-sized, and told them to fill in their extracurricular activities. There was a whole sheet, and she only had four things that she really loved to do, and they were her extracurricular activities. And she said she got very close to tears in this session, and she went home and she thought about it, and what she said to herself that relieved her stress was, "It's not about filling up that sheet of paper. It's about filling myself up here."

And I thought, there is hope, you know. Our students are often very well able to cope and maybe have coping mechanisms we can't even imagine.

So with that, I'm going to turn this program over to Deborah Richman, who's going to introduce Wendy Mogel, our speaker, and there should be time for questions after she speaks. Thanks, Deborah.

MS. RICHMAN: I don't know about you, but I woke up this morning, looked outside, wiggled my toes, and was graceful to be alive and be in Napa.

Our speaker this morning is someone I have had the good fortune to work with and I think that that is true of many of you. She is very familiar with independent schools and actually has two daughters in independent schools in the Los Angeles area now.

Dr. Wendy Mogel is a graduate of Middlebury College. She's a clinical psychologist, parent educator, and school consultant based in Los Angeles. A popular public speaker, she lectures nationally to parents, teachers, clergy, and school administrators on meeting the challenges of modern family life, and we know about those.

Dr. Mogel taught psychological testing and parent guidance in the department of psychiatry at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, and has presented professional papers in psychology and public health at numerous national meetings.

This year she will address diverse audiences, including Episcopal school administrators, Jewish educators, Catholic school teachers, and parents of nursery to high school age children across the country. She serves on a number of professional boards, including the Council for Spiritual and Ethical Education, an interfaith organization serving many of the independent schools in this room.

She also writes a parenting column published in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Dr. Wendy Mogel's book, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee&emdash;and you must read it, if you haven't&emdash;was published in hard cover by Scribner and in paperback by Penguin in 2001. It's now in its sixth printing, and has recently been included in The Los Angeles Times best seller list for nonfiction.

I have known Wendy professionally now for a number of years, and I would characterize her as a

woman of great wisdom and compassion, who has an amazing ability to communicate with independent school parents. I have witnessed firsthand at my own school how she captivates an audience, and most specifically how she can say some of the same things that I have said for several years, and they'll listen to her and not to me.

So I am honored today to introduce this gracious and multitalented woman. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Wendy Mogel.

DR. MOGEL: I think it's heroic that we are all indoors on a day like this. We don't have lilacs in southern California, so I just want to stay outside and smell everything.

First, let me thank Deborah so much. Deborah's school, Turningpoint School, located in southern California, one of the hot beds of competition of the whole country, manages to hold back and think about the individual needs of children and their development in its nice, slow snail's pace, as children's development goes.

I also want to thank Harry McKay, who is partly responsible for bringing me here. Harry is the head of St. Andrew's School in Saratoga, and Harry has the disarming ability to say to parents, "If I had as many doubts about a school as you do, I would consider looking elsewhere," and they are not even angry with him.

Did any of you see Sarah Hughes skate? Sarah Hughes, for anybody who doesn't know, is the 16-year-old who catapulted herself in figure skating from fourth place to a gold medal with a magnificent performance at the Olympics. And The New York Times, in an article entitled, "Gold for Hughes is a Surprise But Perfection is a Standard," reported that Sarah said this. "I just want to keep up with my schoolwork and get in the high 1500s on my SATs."

So even this particular extracurricular activity does not seem to be quite enough for her preparation. I was talking to Fran Scoble, head of Westridge School, at breakfast and she was waxing nostalgic about Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming and talking about how ice-skaters used to resemble dancers more than the macho athleticism that we now see. And she said that in the exhibition performances they didn't fall down as much, because they weren't doing things that defy human capacity, practically. They were not doing two quads followed by a triple. And she remembered watching Peggy Fleming do an exhibition performance to the Barbara Streisand song, "How Lucky Can You Get," and the words that Fran used were, "It was so free and fun and whimsical."

And I thought about our girls. I was recently talking to a group of upper school students who said that they call their AP exams advanced psychosis. And I decided that what I really want to talk to you about today is younger children and the parents of younger children, because all of this starts very early.

I had a practice doing psychotherapy and psychological testing on the west side of Los Angeles for 15 years, and I noticed a very odd pattern in my practice. When I had good news to give to parents, what I thought was good news, which was that there was nothing wrong with their child, their child did not even need a tutor, the parents seemed to be disappointed. And I used to say to them, "There are a couple of psychologists right down the hall. If you want a diagnosis, I'm sure if you just step over there, you can get one. But I see your child as perfectly fine."

I began to think that the normal curve had died, and that every single child in independent school was learning disabled, gifted, or both. And I remembered some phrases from my own childhood that we never hear any longer. People used to talk about children as late bloomers. It's lovely. It's like a flower. Slow developers. Going through a phase. Children no longer have time to go through a phase.

Ray Michaud, who is the head of the John Thomas Dye School in Los Angeles, says that he sometimes thinks that the parents in his school wish their children to be as good as any other child on the planet in every single subject by the time they are eight years old.

I also started to talk to school faculty, and they said that they had a hard time writing the report card narrative, because they felt that they lived in Lake Woebegone, where&emdash;how does it go&emdash; every woman is strong, every man is good-looking, and every child is above average. And they felt their pens a little bit slow on the paper or their fingers on the computer, because it seemed like the report card narratives needed to be a cross between a work of romantic fiction and a legal document, and that they couldn't be frank and forthright without incurring all kinds of dangers.

I also started to hear some interesting tales from the trenches of independent school. One middle school English teacher said that he received an e-mail from one of his students, and she was contesting her grade on her English exam. She was asking for a point-by-point explanation of why this teacher had given her the paltry number of points she felt he had given her.

He said that the problem with the e-mail is that the student was his English student, so he knew her syntax and her vocabulary and her sentence structure very well. I see a couple of heads nodding. That's right. This e-mail was from her dad.

We had another dad who took a month off from his work to help his daughter with her college applications. And in part of the application where the students need to fill in their parents' names, he accidentally wrote his own parent's names, and the application went off to the college in that form.

A lower school head was conducting a prospective parent's tour of her school, and one of the mothers on the tour said to her, "Do you put streamers in trees in the kindergarten?"

And the school head had the same puzzled look on her face that you have on yours right now. And she said, "Why would we do that?"

And this mother said, "Well, at another school I visited, they put streamers in the trees to demonstrate the properties of wind to the students, and I was hoping that if I choose your school, you could kind of guarantee me that you would do the same thing."

And the school head thought for a moment and then looked at the mother and she said, "We have leaves on the trees at our school, and they do kind of the same thing. I cannot guarantee you about the streamers."

So we know that this mother did not choose that school for her daughter.

I also was speaking at a religious school recently and the teachers were telling me about a sign in the parking lot, a very large sign, that says, "No left turn." And they told me about how the parents, one after another, leave the religious school&emdash;we are assuming that they wake up these weary little children on Sunday morning for the children to be inculcated with religious and spiritual and ethical principles&emdash;and one after another, the parents make the left turn out of the parking lot.

I eventually left my practice entirely

because I was starting to feel like a tremendously highly paid baby-sitter, and that I was being asked to call psychopathology problems that were problems of character, and that they were problems that parents were in a much better position to fix than I ever could be.

When I left my practice, I studied Judaism full-time for a year. I had no religious education as a child. I was born to two Jewish parents, very assimilated, very modern, and they did not want to waste too much of my time with something quite as old-fashioned as this ancient tradition. And what I found in Jewish texts and I have subsequently found in texts across faiths is a wisdom about raising children that surprisingly applies so beautifully to the very complicated times that we're living in.

The world is very different than the world that we grew up in. Let me ask you, how many people here, when you were growing up, could play outside on a summer night without any adult knowing where you were until it was dark? And not one of your students is likely to be able to do that.

I was telling this story at one school and a mother said that her favorite thing to do on summer nights was that she and her sister liked to take their pillows and make body-sized impressions under the blankets and open the window and take off all of their clothing and sit on the roof and feel the breeze and look at the stars and the moon. And I thought about our children and how quickly the social workers would be at their houses about these naked children and the height of the roof and the lack of sleep and the fact that they weren't doing their homework at that moment.

My younger daughter used to really irritate my husband when she was about six or seven, by asking him how many minutes she could read at night. She would say, "Can I read for six more minutes? Can I read for 11 more minutes?"

And he finally said to her, "Emma, read under the covers with a flashlight and don't tell us about it." He was teaching her how to be a child.

One of the things we see is that our children are very protected and scheduled, and one of the things I came across in the Talmud&emdash;first I'll tell you my favorite, my first favorite Jewish teaching which comes from Moses Maimonides, who was a twelfth century physician and philosopher. He said that no one wants to study Torah, and you have to provide developmental incentives. He said you have to bribe very young children with dates and figs and nuts and honey. And you have to provide incentives for teenagers by offering them expensive shoes and splendid shirts. So I thought that time had not changed quite so much.

He also said that no one knows how to give a proper rebuke; that everyone in his time was rebuke skills deficient. And I thought about independent schools and what lovely, warm, inclusive communities we want to be and how sometimes we suffer from a culture of niceness. Harry is the first one who said to me that "I want children to believe in the core of their being at least once a month that it is a tragedy of earth-shattering proportion that they have been born into the wrong family; that Josh and Nicole and Christen and Max's parents are not so old-fashioned and depriving and frustrating. I want the children to feel bored, frustrated, disappointed, unhappy, and to experience longing for more than two and a half seconds. I want them to tolerate being cold and wet for a second, and maybe even being hungry."

And I think that part of our mission as school administrators is to teach this firsthand to parents, that the parents in our schools need to doubt their choice of school and tolerate the doubt. That if we try to keep them happy and be popular with them, it's a very slippery slope, and we are inviting more and more Viking parents to come in on their horses with their swords drawn, CEO to CEO, bypassing the teacher, bypassing the division head, and coming right to the head of school, with their complaint that their child is not being sufficiently stimulated every single day, every single moment.

Do you remember the little ditty, "Ten more days and we'll be free from the penitentiary. No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks."

Did I get that right? So now if a teacher says one thing ever that has even a whiff of political incorrectness, if a teacher has a mood that changes one day to the next, if every child's individual learning difference and learning style is not addressed every year, then parents begin to quake and tremble with unhappiness.

So I tell parents&emdash;and all the things I'm saying to you today I say directly to parents&emdash; I tell them that I want their child to have an unenlightened, uninspired, crabby fourth grade teacher. And I tell them that this is important because they are absolutely, for sure, going to have an unenlightened, uninspired, crabby boss someday. They are likely to have an uninspired, unenlightened crabby spouse&emdash;at least the first one&emdash;and we want them to learn how to deal with difficult people.

Independent school is not a cruise ship. This is what Reveta Bowers, head of the Center for Early Education, calls the problem of the Wal-Mart of education. That parents are coming to independent schools to get all of their children's academic, emotional, and now Council for Spiritual and Ethical Education spiritual needs met as well.

Reveta, I hope I can tell this. Yeah. The parent came up to Reveta and said&emdash;this is the pastoral role of independent school heads&emdash; "Reveta, could you tell my child that her mother and I are getting divorced?" No one better to go to than Reveta with that question.

Even though the school day is not one minute longer than it ever was, even though the prefrontal cortex of children does not mature any faster than it ever did, even though the fact that the children are magnificent wordsmiths and very sophisticated, it doesn't mean that they are any more emotionally mature. Maybe a little bit less, because they're so protected, than children ever were at six or seven or eight or 15. It is falling on us to try to squeeze every single thing in the universe into the independent school experience; and at the same time as we do that, never to give a child a grade lower than a B.

So I tell parents that it is of great advantage for them to withdraw. There are two Talmudic teachings I love. One is that it is the obligation of every parent to teach their child how to swim. This means to swim in rocky water, rocky seas and bumpy water. This is the opposite of the idea of a cruise ship.

There is also a Hassidic teaching that says, "If your child has a talent to be a baker, do not ask her to be a doctor." There is a Jewish mystical principle called tzimtzum, which means contraction. And the idea of tzimtzum is that when God was ready to make the world, God realized that God's godliness filled up the entire world and in order to make room to create people, God had to withdraw, and that's what the word tzimtzum means.

To withdraw, to allow us to have an opportunity to exercise free will. With children, when they are very small, we are miracle-makers as parents. We study everything that goes in their mouth and everything that comes out their bottom, and we create miracles on demand. If parents don't withdraw and cease from creating miracles, the children will not be able to survive on their own.

We have a phenomenon all across the country, which is that our students are getting into the top colleges. They are making it past Robin's very discerning eye and getting into Stanford. They are getting into Brown. They are getting into Princeton, and some of them are coming home again. And when they come home after six months or a year, some of the admissions folks have code names for these students. They call them teacups and crispies. Have any of you heard this? Teacups are the students who are too fragile to withstand the knocks of college life, and crispies are the students who are so burned out that they are fried.

The Harvard University admissions folks issued a report that was in The New York Times about five or six months ago, saying that some of the students resemble dazed survivors of some bewildering lifelong boot camp.

What we want for the students instead of the boot camp is real childhood experiences. I want them to have time to fart around and accomplish nothing. I want them to learn how to tolerate boredom without a screen in front of their faces. That's a Nintendo screen, a Game Boy screen, a computer screen, a television screen.

I want them to make cheap mistakes. This means that when homework is forgotten, they take it up with their teacher. This means homework is not faxed in. We have in Los Angeles forgotten lunches messengered over from the deli. We have children whose homework is so edited by parents that teachers can't figure out what they don't know how to spell. I'm waiting for the parents to start editing their diaries.

We also have students who are what I call the scholar princes. I was speaking at one school where the upper school students accidentally made a porno movie starring themselves, and it was truly an accident. Some kids were fooling around at a party, somebody else had a camera, and I had the privilege of meeting with some of the parents to discuss this situation.

And I'm always very interested in the example that parents set for their children, and the double standards between our own behavior and our expectation for our children's behavior. So we have parents who are wanting their children to read for pleasure, and their children never see them reading anything but work and newspapers. We want them to love and enjoy music. In Los Angeles&emdash;I'm going to get back to the porno movie in a minute&emdash;in Los Angeles, it's very difficult to rent a double-reed instrument, an oboe, a bassoon or an English horn, because there is the myth or possibly the reality that if children play a reed instrument, they have a better shot at getting into an Ivy League university because everybody always needs a first-chair oboe. And I tell the parents to play the damn bassoon themselves. That if children do not have an opportunity to see parents having a joyful and full adult life, there is no reason for them to want to grow up.

So I asked these parents at this meeting about their own sex lives. I did do that. And one mother, who is wonderfully open and brave, said, "Are you kidding?" She said, "We are so tired. We cart the scholar princes around to their practices and their SAT prep and their orchestra rehearsal, and we fall asleep catatonic by 9:00." I saw a lot of the other parents kind of elbowing each other and smiling.

We recently did an upper school survey, a stress survey, and we asked the students about what they thought about their futures. And one girl said, "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know what I don't want to be." She said, "I don't want to be like my parents. They seem so sad and scared and stressed."

When you're on the plane, the flight attendants tell you to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on your children. I talk to parents about putting their marriages ahead of their children. It's such a paradox in independent school. We have parents, loving, intelligent, sensitive parents, who are overly devoted to their children, who vibrate with every nuance of the children's emotional and academic lives.

I was at a meeting recently of ninth grade parents, and it was a scheduling meeting. The parents need to sign off on the student's tenth grade schedules. I have a ninth grader, and I thought, well, I think that her teachers and the school administrators can figure out what she needs to take. I don't actually think that's my job to be too worried about it. And I began to feel&emdash;and this is that virus of competition&emdash;I began to feel like a really negligent parent when I heard the questions the other parents were asking. They understood the sequence of the math curriculum with such a depth and sophistication that I thought maybe I needed to give up my work and to begin to tune in more to my daughter's education.

I also see a culture of celebration of students' every breath. So we have the bouquet of roses for the child who plays the part of a bush in the winter pageant. And I talked to one mother about this, and she said that she was going to be like a salmon swimming against the tide and resist the bouquet of roses and so she brought her daughter&emdash;this was a second grader&emdash;one long-stemmed rose. And her daughter looked at her and said, "It's okay, Mom. I understand. You just don't love me as much."

So the children are as brain-washed about this elevated bar of stuff and entitlement.

This is a little grim, so I'll tell you a happy story. There was an upper school student who was really enjoying throwing his keys on the roof of the school building and listening to them clatter down to the ground. So he did this a couple of times, and then they got stuck.

He went in to the dean and he said, "Please, can you call building and grounds immediately? Because I need my keys. I have to get to a practice that starts in 12 minutes."

And the dean looked at him and said, "You know, I can't do that." This is like the streamers in the trees. He said, "But this summer, I know that building and grounds will be trimming the drains and gutters and downspouts and I'm sure that your keys will turn up at that point. We'll make sure to get them back to you."

And the boy said, "May I use your phone, please? I need to call my father."

And he called his father, and the father asked to be put on the phone with the dean. And the father said to the dean, "Thank you so much." He said, "This boy is so entitled, and we have not known what to say or do, and I believe you are the first person to remind him of where the limit of his desires stops."

I'm sure he didn't say it in quite that fancy language, but that was the basic principle.

This is the tricky thing about how bright our students are. I see parents wishing to reach consensus with their children, and what they do is create little attorneys. So the parent valiantly states his point of view and then the child, just seconds after&emdash;they don't even listen because they're preparing their argument, and the parents then prepare their counterargument back. And this goes back and forth all day long, and the parents are so weary. And I say really old-fashioned things to parents like, "'No' is a one-word sentence."

When the children complain that things are not fair&emdash;and I don't tell the parents to say this to the children, but just to think it&emdash;that the fair is in Pomona. I was afraid that was a southern California joke. It is all right for the children not to understand our rationale for what we're doing. It is equally all right for the parents not to understand fully your rationale for not doing the entire fifth-grade composition of the classes based on who Hannah likes this week and who she's not getting along that well with.

We have very educated parents who believe that if they have an advanced degree in anything,

they know as much about the curriculum and child development as teachers. So I want parents to be

frustrated and disappointed and even confused, just as I want the children to be frustrated and disappointed and confused.

I also like to see children doing ordinary household chores. We have a little bit of a deficit of family citizenship. I was teaching a parenting class, and one mother came in literally with the tone of a 12-step meeting, and she said, "I have hit bottom with my boys." This was a single mother of two eight-year-old twins. She said, "I fell asleep last night on the couch before dinner, and the boys fed themselves dinner and covered me up with a blanket and laid out their clothes and made their lunches and put themselves to bed and got up in the morning and got dressed and fed themselves breakfast and got ready for the carpool and did not wake me up until it was time to leave."

And all the other mothers in this parenting class were drooling with envy, and this mother was feeling that she had failed. I see children of fantastically advanced ages who don't know how to mix the hot and cold water in the shower to wash their own hair, who have never used a sharp knife, who never have any time to get into wholesome trouble, who have no privacy because they are so micro-managed by their devoted, loving parents.

So this also is a principle of withdrawal, and allowing the children to make some mistakes, to learn from their mistakes, and to care for themselves.

I was recently working with a family, a lovely family, whose daughter is off in an Ivy League university. She's a freshman. And she is now down to, I think, 98 pounds. It's very easy for psychologists to get very psychodynamic about family dynamics. I think part of the problem with this girl is that she doesn't know how to feed herself, because every meal that she ever had was watched over so carefully by her family. I was talking to the parents about the things that were going on, and she wasn't sure about when and how to do her laundry. She's very bright and skilled.

If you look at the science fair, even in any lower school, you will barely see a single trace of child. You will see Power Point presentations, you will see all kinds of magnificent stuff, and I used to think that this had to do with competition, that all the parents wanted to make sure that their child's science project was the best. But my new theory is that the parents are so desperately hobby-deprived that the idea of the papier mache and the poster paint and the vinegar and the baking soda to make the real live volcano is so alluring that the parents, so weary from scheduling and carpooling and driving and worrying over what test is coming up, and being in fourth grade all over again&emdash;the messiness of the poster paint is so appealing.

We have an Association of Independent School Counselors in Los Angeles, and we had someone come to speak to us about self-injurious behavior in girls. I watched the faces of the counselors register relief at finding out that it was not just in their school, but all over, that the girls are cutting themselves. Not in any way that they were glad to hear this news, but that it was not a toxin that was only present in their school. And when you talk to the cutters, one of the things that you hear from them is that they never were able to be messy, and that the blood is messy; that the pressure that they feel on the inside gets relieved by cutting themselves.

My heart bleeds for boys in very early elementary school, because we are asking them to do things that very young boys are not able to do. We are asking them not to say rude words and poke their neighbors and make fart noises&emdash;farting seems to be my theme today&emdash;and we're asking them to sit still and be very polite to the adult woman who is at the front of the room all day long. And we are medicating some of them to make them not act like boys.

And my heart bleeds for girls in middle school and high school, because what the girls are doing is trying to do all the traditional girl things. They are trying to be beautiful and slender and popular and nice, and they are also beginning to believe that if they don't take AP physics and calculus by the time they graduate from high school, that they will have failed.

I am thrilled to see girls in science and math. I am thrilled at what we are doing about girls' education and understanding it in girls' schools. I was talking to one girls' school head recently who said that when parents come on a parents' tour and see the seventh grade algebra class, they say, "How can these girls learn anything? It's so raucous and rambunctious in there."

And this head of school said, "That's the way seventh grade girls learn math best."

So I am blessed by our progress. I am also very concerned about the girls. We did another stress survey and found out that in upper school the girls are taking more AP classes, they are studying longer hours, they are more anxious, they are sleeping less, and they feel less confident about their futures.

So when I look back at the history of my 98-pound Ivy League freshman, I remember something she said to me when she was in seventh grade. She said that she felt that if she didn't attend at least one summit conference in her life and personally solve the problem of hunger in Ruanda, she would disappoint her parents. And this girl's parents are wonderful, balanced people.

This is an epidemic that is infecting our girls. So if we go back to the teaching that if your child has a talent to be a baker, don't ask her to be a doctor, we have some insight into what to do with these girls.

There's also a lesson from horticulture that says, try to think of your child as a seed that came in a packet without a label, and you can't tell in what season it will bloom or what kind of flower you're going to get, but our job is simply to step back, to pull the largest weeds, and to patiently watch and wait.

I leave you with the words of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, who said, "If you truly wish your child to study Torah, study it yourself in her presence. She will follow your example. Otherwise, she will not herself study Torah, but will simply instruct her children to do so."

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you. I have a question and a little bit of a story. I was

a teacher for many years in independent schools, taught history of philosophy and religion. I don't know if you heard the speaker last night. Were you here last night? I was very struck, as a teacher of those subjects, by what he told in the story about Simon and the idea of discontinuity in our lives, and what spiritual or growth opportunities can be there. I didn't have time to organize my thoughts because there was so much happening as I was listening, but I was thinking about Simon as our country, in a certain sense, and I was thinking back&emdash;I'm a clinical psychologist now, myself&emdash; to the years of teaching and how I used to teach the Greek dramatists and Greek and Roman philosophers, and how we used to talk in high school so much about loss and how to prepare for loss in life, which I don't hear much about anymore. I still work in schools in a different way.

But anyway, I went away feeling how much independent education can offer in that sense to the kinds of questions that we're all facing today.

So the story I wanted to share was my husband and I went up to St. Helena to look in the stores, to go to a book shop, and get a cup of coffee.

Years ago -- 23 years ago, it turns out&emdash; I had a student in one of my classes who I was very close to. He had told a story in class that I never forgot about how he used to wear a Walkman&emdash;both his parents were physicians, very high-powered&emdash; and he wore this Walkman when he would want to sit in his room and think, because his parents got very nervous if he was just sitting there and thinking. That story stayed with me for many, many years.

About ten years ago he came to the East Coast, went to Brown, became a physician. He's a professor at UCLA now in public health. But for about ten years, he was lost, he was drinking, taking drugs. He had left the East Coast, and was trying to find his way.

Anyway, I went to the bookstore, we went across the street to get a cup of coffee, and a young African-American man opened the door to the coffee place for me, and we stood face-to-face. We stood there for about 15 seconds, just staring in each other's eyes. He had long dreadlocks. It was this student. And I just burst out crying, and we just held each other. He was there with his wife and I was there with my husband. We just stopped everything and sat and talked about what life had brought him, and he had found himself. He had called me actually after September 11th, to make sure I was all right, but he was a student who brought up that he could not sit in his room and sit and think about things without making his parents so anxious.

And now I have come to this conference and come to where we are today and what you're speaking about, and he had to go through his time of searching and loss and had to leave the East Coast and now had come to a place. It just seemed like such a circle that I wanted to share with you.

DR. MOGEL: Thank you. I think I'll say something about September 11th and Simon, as our

country. I think that's a beautiful analogy. The world is changing very quickly, and it used to be just technology that seemed to be changing so fast. By the time you get your computer home and out of the box, it is already out-of-date. And now since September 11th, everything seems so unstable. The economy is unstable. The institution of family and marriage is unstable.

I see parents wanting to armor their children with a very thick layer of skills, prepare them for an uncertain future. And this is why your young man's parents were afraid, if he sat and listened to the Walkman. It is in part a very loving impulse that the parents have. Daniel Goldman, in his book about emotional intelligence, talks about the qualities that predict adult success. If we armor the children too thickly, the one-trick ponies will forget their one trick. It is a sense of humor, compassion, resilience, the ability to bounce back from failure, that make the innovators, the leaders, the CEOs and the most exciting people in the future in our culture. It is not the straight A students, the crispies or the teacups.

So listening to a Walkman and daydreaming and even losing your path and then finding your way is a spot of much greater resilience than the dazed survivor that survives the bewildering lifelong boot camp. So thank you for your story.

MS. BOWEN: I know that you have traveled, particularly since your book came out, all over the country talking to parents and you have been able to see the geographic differences around the country, but also the commonalities. How do we as leaders of schools resist that consumerism mentality of what people have come to buy from our schools and yet find that effective balance of working with parents as our partners in the educational process and not our adversaries?

DR. MOGEL: Thank you. When I gave up my practice, one of the things I hoped to do was

preventive mental health work, and when I work with school faculty, I say to them, "Don't waste too much

time at Back-to-School Night talking about the curriculum. It's a slippery slope. If you start, you may never get to stop. Instead, talk to the parents about the perennial anxious questions you hear every year at your grade level. Talk to the fourth grade parents about that this is the first year that students will be receiving grades and what their reaction will be. Talk about cliques. Talk about what happens in seventh grade about going out and hooking up and the rumors that spread around."

Educate the parents and say to them, "You will want to call me or e-mail me about this issue, so I'm going to tell you now what I will tell you when you call me."

At the beginning of the year, as heads of schools, I think we have an opportunity to do some of this prevention, as well, and I know some schools are beginning to have a parent-school covenant, which is a document that is signed by parents on admission about standards of ethical and moral behavior for parents, so that gross transgressors can be presented with this document and reminded that they have signed it.

I also recommend to school heads and to teachers&emdash;I'm always saying this to teachers&emdash; "Don't spend too much time with the lunatic fringe. Some parents will exhaust you and suck up all of your resources."

In psychotherapy these are our borderline patients, and when you hear therapists talk to each

other, they say, "I will only have one or two borderlines in my practice, because it gets so exhausting."

So we want to spend most of our time with the best and strongest parents. I feel very encouraged by what I have seen around the country. The issue of stress, the issue of moral and ethical education and raising children to be good people and not just good at things, is on the table everywhere in very creative ways.

Somebody this morning mentioned a disarmament treaty, and I just love that concept. We need to band together in thinking about policies that will help both calm parents down and discipline them at the same time, and we run the same risk that the parents do with the children if we are too interested in satisfying the consumers. So if we are willing to be unpopular&emdash;and everybody can take lessons from Harry about the way he can manage to do this with such a twinkle&emdash;unpopular with the parents, if we strengthen our faculty to prepare them for parent-teacher conferences&emdash;I'll quickly tell you two really fun experiences I have had recently.

One was, I was working with a faculty and we role-played difficult parent-teacher conferences.

And my first plan for the afternoon was to have teachers come and give an example of doing it well. And it was a dismal failure. Nobody was willing to volunteer to do that.

So then I said, "Well, somebody come up and be the difficult parents, and somebody come up and be a lousy teacher." Everybody wanted to do that, and we spent the afternoon laughing hysterically.

And I said to the faculty&emdash;and this is different than gossip. This is different than talking behind parents' backs or making fun of them. This is lightening the load of the very difficult and serious work that we do. I said, "Take the humor with you when you go into the difficult parent-teacher conference. Rehearse it with your division head, bring support there, and don't try to be a hero and do it all alone."

The other fun experience I had was after September 11th, working with a parent group to talk about children's anxieties, and I said to the parents, "Instead of playing psychologist and trying to unearth the hidden repressed terrors and fears that your child might possibly feel, another thing you can do is think back to your own childhood experiences when you were the age of your most anxious child. Remember something you did that was wild and fun that your child has never heard? Something that might even be a little provocative? Something that illustrates the joy and excitement and danger you had in your childhood. When your child comes home from school today, tell them that story."

And all of the parents told stories to the group. And I said, "If your child likes that story, you can tell them all the other stories you heard today, as a way of introducing the idea of childhood pleasure and delight and even pushing the boundaries a little bit."

We are so serious, we are so dedicated, we are so good, that sometimes what we do is create an environment where it's difficult to make mistakes, it's difficult to confront people, and it's difficult to embrace the fullest parts of life. So instead of trying to be psychologists, instead of trying to keep parents in line, what we can do is talk about it. In Judaism this is called the Yetzer HaRa, the evil inclination. And the rabbis say without the evil inclination, there would be no cities built, no marriages, no curiosity, no

passion, no spark, and no ambition. And our job is to treasure the Yetzer HaRa, and to build the Yetzer Tov, which is the inclination for good. And we want to do that by not violating the commandment of Leviticus 19:14, which is not to put a stumbling block before the blind. And if that formulation is not too complicated, what I'm saying is that we embrace the difficulties and we also stand with very firm authority. This is why honoring mother and father is up there with the big Ten Commandments. We take our authority and we realize that it is part of the mantle of our leadership.

MS. LEE: What was your response to The New York Times article on girls' meanness, Wendy?

DR. MOGEL: You know, I really felt that the author made a good sensible point. Have you seen it? She's saying something profound, which is that girls use as their weapon their words, and sometimes I think it's because they're so hemmed in. I remember when I was growing up, I would go across my backyard to play with Shariesse Grimm. And if she wasn't sharing her Barbies in the way that I thought was fair, I would just leave, and I would go back and try again later, or if her mother served liverwurst sandwiches for lunch, I would also just hop back into my own backyard.

We schedule and supervise the children so closely that they have to find some weapons to assert their alpha dog status. She talks about the alpha girls. My other favorite source of parenting wisdom besides religious text is dog-training books, because they talk about how important it is for parents to be alpha dogs.

So I think that it is important to enlighten ourselves about the suffering that can occur when girls are excessively cruel to each other. The Internet has given them a fabulous weapon to do this. There's one special web site, just for promoting the name of the sluttiest girl. And it is cruel and enduring, some of the pain that girls feel from this.

At the same time, it seems a little bit nosy to me that if we get so deeply involved in every nuance of the children's emotional lives, we are kind of living vicariously through them. And I see that sometimes with girls and mothers. A lot of the parents in our schools are older than our parents were when they had us. And so I see mothers going through menopause with daughters entering puberty, and all kinds of&emdash;I won't even start on that one&emdash;all kinds of complicated things happen. Psychologists call it enmeshment, and also the narcissistic problems that occur.

But I don't want to butt in too much. I want to butt in the right amount in children's social lives. All of you know Michael Thompson. His new book is about social cruelty in children and the social lives of children, and I recommend it to you.

Also, if any of you haven't seen it, there's an NAIS publication called, "Finding the Heart of the Child." And Michael Thompson and Ed Hallowell wrote it. Michael Thompson has an essay in that book about our goals in raising our children, and it's beautifully written and I think speaks to all of these issues very eloquently. We want to be involved and we want to be aware. We also don't need to micro-manage. So I want to step out of girls' lives a little bit more than we are, and step into them to protect them from overburdening themselves.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Early on, when you spoke to us, you asked us to compare our own

childhoods to the childhoods of today's kids. And it occurred to me, thinking back on the situations that I find in my own school, that all of us here are of a certain age and had that childhood. But in our schools, we have a large number of young teachers who didn't have that childhood themselves, who were brought up the same stressed way, who are terrified by parent conferences because of their feeling of youth and because they don't have that. I think Joan Countryman, who's here today, used to say that she's a grandmother and she thinks that that's probably the best place for a head to come from, to be a grandparent.

Can you give us some advice about how to strengthen our young teachers so that they can handle what's coming at them from the parents and they can understand that there's something wrong with the way these youngsters are living?

DR. MOGEL: It is not just the youth of the teachers. It is also the level of education and power and status of the parents. And parents in our schools are very good at getting what they want. And we have these young teachers who have decided to enter the profession of teaching, which is noble right from the start, and when we see them bullied and intimidated by parents, it is our job to intervene. Again, this is a prevention issue.

I like to talk to young faculty right at the beginning about what they will encounter, and to give them words to use and to remind them&emdash;and I sometimes see a kind of paranoia in schools where, and it's distorted&emdash;where faculty will say to me, "Oh, I can't stand up to that parent. That's a board member parent."

Certainly sometimes that's true, but a lot of times, it isn't. And so if we can, right from the start remind them of how much support we offer them.

I was doing a large faculty workshop recently and the teachers didn't talk. They came up to me afterwards and said, "We were afraid to ask questions because our school heads are here and we can't tell you what we're really thinking."

And so to dispel some of that right at the beginning, in faculty in-service work and in orientation to the ethos of the school might do a little bit of good. It is really an issue of power and status. And this is a clinical issue. We learn in clinical practice that the most hostile patients are the most frightened. So to educate faculty that what looks like bullying and belligerence and throwing power around is fear, and to give them words to use about child development and about the natural course of things in third grade can help give them some tools to deal with this anxiety that looks so intimidating to them.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I just wanted to share what your thesis made me think of. When I was first a head, I used to get calls sometimes in the early morning, 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning from parents who were drunk, and they would call me and I would take the call, and I knew for one particular parent, a father, that this was an important call, and we actually developed a pretty good relationship.

But things have changed. Now in the evening I use AOL, and I'll be in the middle of doing something, and I'll get an instant message.

DR. MOGEL: Turn all the IMs off.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I usually don't do that. And then I get the parent the next day saying, "You didn't respond to my instant message. What was going on that you didn't respond?"

So it's a different kind of boundary. I was much more willing to talk with a parent who was really hurting and calling me and it was very interesting than I am to take an instant message if I'm on line. And I think that's interesting.

DR. MOGEL: This is an issue in our homes, as well, the permeable boundaries. Parents are very, very busy, and everybody has complicated schedules. And then in addition, we have the beepers and the cell phones and the faxes and the IMs, and so it becomes difficult to do one thing at a time and to concentrate and to get in that zone of creativity and concentration that allows us to do original and creative work.

So that parent needs to be educated about your availability. It's just such a wonderful story for me to hear, because that's one of the most extreme I have heard yet, although there was a teacher who told me that one of the students, unhappy with her grade, wanted to go to the teacher's house&emdash;her father was driving her&emdash;to discuss this grade. And the parent didn't know where the teacher lived, so they asked the other teachers to tell them, and none of the teachers would reveal this information. But they did some sleuthing and went to the teacher's house and left a note tacked to the front door saying, "Can you please get in touch with us as soon as possible? This grade was unfair and unacceptable to us."

The teacher was away for the weekend, so that note remained pasted to the front door all weekend, indicating to any potential burglar that the teacher was out of town.

I leave you with a final piece of Hassidic wisdom, which is that all of us should put in our pockets two pieces of paper at all times. And on one piece of paper we write, "The world was created for me." On the other piece of paper we write, "I am nothing but dust and ashes."

This is exactly the attitude we want the parents in our schools to have towards their children. Every single one of the children is extraordinarily talented, way off the normal curve, unusually beautiful, poetic, natural theologians and the delight of their families. They are also very ordinary citizens, they need to do ordinary things like household chores and to be helpful and respectful to their parents. There is a perfectly good college for every single one of them to go to, and at any of our independent schools they will get a good enough education even without streamers in the trees. Thank you.

MS. LEE: Wendy, thank you for giving us that delight, joy, pleasure, humor you spoke about.

It was wonderful. And I have a great story which I won't occupy your time with, but it's the best entitlement story you ever heard.

DR. MOGEL: You have to tell us now.

MS. LEE: Well, I live in the land, as you know, not only of big hair, big weather, but major occurrences. And right after September 11th, a grandfather whose name you would all know, came to visit me. He has two granddaughters in my school and he wanted to discuss with me his plan for their evacuation, should we be invaded in Texas.

So he brought to me a phone, a cell phone that you can also plug into the wall, which is directly connected to his people, and should he receive notice of a terrorist attack, he will call me in my office on that phone&emdash;his people will call me&emdash;and I am to lead his granddaughters to the back of the campus, where there will be a ladder, and I am to get those children over the ladder and his people will meet the children and drive them away to safety.

And I said, "But sir, what about the other 1,014 children in the school?"

And he said, "Well, I don't know what will happen to them, but you are the head of my grandchildren's school."

So I do have the phone in my office, and it rings to test me occasionally. But I thought about this for a while. The children used to have bodyguards, but they didn't like them because they got older. And I called him up and I said, "You know, I'm not going to do it, because I'll be patrolling the halls, we'll be worrying about all the other children, and I really think you're going to have to get the bodyguards back."

And you know what? He got them back. So they will take the children over the wall. The whole school has been walked to the wall, we know how to get them there, and we're safe. So that's my entitlement story.