Parents: Set Expectations and Create the Environment

When I lived in Germany for three years, my two sons were in high school. Throughout the summer, most of the kids on the base were out from 8 am to 10 pm. For them, it was a fourteen hour day of play.

Not my children. They owed me two hours of study from Monday to Friday. They studied the subjects they would study in school that fall. I am in favor of allowing children to be children, but I thought that playing outside 12 hours a day was enough. My children were expected to be successful and I put in place a plan to help them be successful. No one had the slightest doubt that the Ballard children would do very well in school. And they did, because the environment around my children allowed that success to happen. Not only did my children study alone during the summer, I used travel, athletic leagues and other clubs, as well as other adult influences to adequately complete my children’s education.

My wife and I did this because we never hold the school responsible for the education of our children. We were fully responsible for their education and school was just one of the tools we used. That is probably a different way of thinking than most parents.

Recently, the Indianapolis Star published an article on the fate of 21st century scholars. These are disadvantaged children identified as early as the seventh grade as capable of completing college. They are given the financial means to do it, but still 75% of them cannot finish university. It’s disheartening. Why is this happening?

I believe that these young men and women are fulfilling their destiny as they see it. The cultural ties that keep these young men and women from success are much stronger than the formal programs designed to help them achieve success. In short, your environment does not support your potential.

Formal programs help, but if family or other cultural influences are sending different signals, then it becomes almost impossible for a young man or woman from an impoverished background to be successful. At school, they hear “You are smart and you are lucky, you have been given this opportunity.” However, you may hear at home from a parent: “It was good enough for me, it should be good enough for you”, or from a friend “Come join us at work. Earn your money now and party! with us on the weekends. You don’t need college to earn money. ” Most likely, these children will never get over their current circumstances.

It could have been one of these children. My father was kicked out of his home at the age of 16. Perhaps that was a blessing since my grandfather was not a role model. We were far from the middle class and frankly, as far as I know, all the other kids in our neighborhood were never close to accomplishing more than they knew as kids.

If it weren’t for the intervention of two people in my father’s life, my whole family would still be poor and struggling. They changed my parents’ expectations of their children and expanded our supportive environment. They probably never knew the influence they had on me and my siblings, but I do.

Alice Brown, an English teacher at Tech High School, apparently saw something good in my father and helped him get a job at Eli Lilly. To say that my father thought I was unworthy of the job would be an understatement. After my father retired from Lilly, I can remember him crying like a baby remembering the time when a Lilly manager just talked to him. Not the CEO, not a vice president, but a simple manager who deigned to speak to my father. He did not think it was worth having such an important person as a manager speak to him.

Due to his level of education and inadequate skills, my father was never on the path to senior management at Lilly, but his employment there provided him with stability at home. It might be very difficult, but he was only doing what his father and the other parents he had observed had shown him. At heart he was a good and decent man. Alice Brown must have seen this while few others saw it.

When he was still a healthy young man, my father played fast pitch softball with a man named Jim McLinn. He grew up in the same poor neighborhood as my father, but Mr. McLinn attended Cathedral High School, a college preparatory school. He walked to the Cathedral every day of his high school career. In some way unknown to me, he influenced my father to send me and my siblings to Catholic elementary schools and then to the Cathedral.

Like poor children today, we did not know that we were poor; we just did what our parents told us to do. Going to the Cathedral was one of those things they told us to do. It was not a public school vs. private school affair; it was simply a sign of the change in expectation. However, it was our parents, not the school, who changed expectations.

In hindsight, this must have been a huge financial burden, with four children born six years apart (a sister arrived a few years later). I don’t remember my parents talking to me about it, but I know that when I went to college at Indiana University, it was obvious that I had a lot less money to spend than anyone else I knew. Five dollars used to last about a month.

However, the main point is that we all went to college. That was the expectation. We were the only ones in our neighborhood who went to college, my parents were the target of some ridiculous for even considering sending their children to the cathedral or college. Our parents had to wait to do this; certainly our environment would never have led us to this conclusion on our own. Our family ended up with two law degrees and other advanced degrees. We have been business owners and officers of the Navy. All of my parents’ grandchildren are on an almost unimaginable path just fifty years earlier.

No child can discover the path to a successful life alone. A supportive environment with expectations of success is needed. They need to hear not only that they can do it, but that they must. They need to know that they are worthy. They need encouragement from people in authority, including their own family. They shouldn’t hear feelings like “Know your place. Who do you think you are?” or “If it was good enough for me, it should be good enough for you.”

It’s easy to visualize the path my brothers and I would have taken without Alice Brown and Jim McLinn in my father’s life. It is the same path that 75% of 21st century fellows are now following.

It is necessary to wait for the success of the child. The environment must support this expectation. Then the child can be successful.