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By Robert Rosen
Hometown Weekly Staff
On Tuesday, March 1, students in grades 9-11 at Dover-Sherborn High listened intently as Dover-Sherborn graduate Jessica Lahey spoke about her bestselling book “The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed” and explained the importance of having parents back off their kids so they will do better in school and in life longterm.
“When I figured out I was overparenting and rescuing my kids too much I went looking for sort of a whoa nelly, how do we turn this ship around kind of thing and it just didn’t exist out there,” Lahey said after her presentation.
“I needed a very how to what motivates kids, what motivates kids to learn without us pressuring them all the time and then I needed very specific how tos about homework, sports, how to back off around homework, how to back off around sports, how to back off around grades and that’s what I ended up writing. I wrote the book I needed to read because it just didn’t exist out there.”
Lahey graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law but while she was in law school she realized she didn’t like law school and that she didn’t want to become a lawyer. That’s when she decided to become a teacher.
What Lahey has found, though, is that she loves the students but “parents drive me batty.”
She told a story about how she caught a student plagiarizing in her class. The paper the student turned in clearly shared no similarities to any of the student’s previous work. When Lahey went online to investigate, she found the paper was cut-and-pasted from three different websites.
Lahey told the mother of the student that the student would receive a failing grade for that assignment, but the mother said her daughter shouldn’t fail because she had written the paper for her child. The mother did not understand that she hadn’t written it either, or even if she had it would not have been okay.
One thing Lahey points out is the amount of pressure put on students by their parents and how many parents overcrowd their children and don’t let them do their work independently. She told of how she often saw young middle school girls crying in school outside the locker room about their homework. She suggested to one set of parents, who usually sat with their daughter to do homework, to try going in another room so she can do it herself.
She also expressed it’s important to get the kids to work hard and to not let things come easy.
“The more we tell kids they’re gifted the lower their self-esteem goes,” Lahey told the students. “By telling kids they’re smart they want it easy. Forty percent will lie about their scores.”
Lahey was introduced to the students by K.C. Potts, the head of the English department who is in his 39th year at Dover-Sherborn High. Potts was one of Lahey’s teachers in the 1980s and she considers him a mentor and friend. Along with retired teacher Don Cannon, they are two of her biggest mentors for her career.
Lahey said she quotes Potts in the book and has also quoted him in other articles she has written. She credits Potts and Cannon with teaching her how to write. It’s because of teachers like these that she came back to Dover-Sherborn High to speak to the students.
“The big takeaway for me is we as parents get so wrapped up in the moment-to-moment, day-to-day anxiety ridden details and the problem is parenting is a longterm job,” Lahey said. “Are we raising adults? Are we raising kids well enough so they are ready to leave our house?”
Lahey was to speak to parents from Dover-Sherborn and other communities that night, and she spoke in Natick the following night.
“I’m going to get parents to back off,” Lahey told the students. “I’m going to get them to give you a break. If you don’t step up, though, they’ll freak out.”
Robert Rosen is an Editor at Hometown Weekly. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter at @roberterosen.
