Cobbler's Son

I met a high school history teacher recently who is married to a math one. From what I could tell they were both the kind of teachers kids would love - able to make their subjects engaging and relevant. It was interesting to hear that their own struggles with raising three kids who are now sixteen and older, are not too different from those of the rest of us. 

Being part of the school system where they come into contact with hundreds of kids every day, and being educators themselves does help as much as one would expect. He talked about his youngest son being checked out into the world of video gaming and how the computerization of school work is working against his own kids. They take every short cut they can, don't read real books, don't aspire to really learn - his youngest had not a book in all of the past year - and so on. 

If I did not know what he and his wife did for a living, none of this would come as any surprise. Almost every parent has the same problem in some variation and no one knows exactly how to fix it. A recipe that worked for one, most often does not work for the next. Kids are different, their family and social circumstances are different, the reasons they tunnel into the world of gaming, social media and generally waste untold hours online are different. There are no one size fits all solutions here. 

I had mistakenly assumed that parents who are school teachers themselves have some magical knowledge of what ails the kids and can therefore solve these problems effortlessly - infact they may not even experience the challenges that other parents do. It was very sobering to learn they struggle as much as the general population.