Spoon Feeders & Helicopters
Many years ago I remember directing a school show. I remember late in the rehearsal process, giving a speech that went something like this. “Okay, you guys. This is serious. This show isn’t where it should be and you are likely to go on stage unprepared and look stupid.” What I really was saying was, “Okay, you guys. This is serious. You’re going to go on stage and I’M going to look stupid.”
The young people in the cast had without my awareness become an extension of my own ego. As a result of this I called extra rehearsals, worked overtime and made all sorts of other personal sacrifices to ensure the young people succeeded. My sacrifices were of course applauded by all. But I wonder whether they should have been. There’s a fine line between helping young people to achieve their best and doing it for them.
You see, it’s a slippery slope. A slope that I see a lot of others sliding down right now. And you can see it too. You can see it every time a teacher spoon feeds a student and you can see it every time a parent runs helicopter style defence strategies for their child.
The spoon feeding teacher wants to guarantee the child’s (short term) success by ‘scaffolding’ student success, by teaching to the task, providing the opportunity to submit three drafts, conducting a revision test with the actual questions from the real exam, or straight up and down ‘giving them the answers.’
The outcome is, of course, great results in the short term. Good exam results. Great NAPLAN results and Awesome OPS. Often the ends are thought to justify the means. Those results just got them into the course of their dreams.
But this dream can quickly become a nightmare when the scaffold is pulled and you haven’t actually built the person behind the OP. This is not in a young person’s best interest at all in the long term because the lesson of looking after your own life and being responsible for your own actions and results, has been delayed by adults who would prefer the real learning process become someone else’s responsibility further down the track.
If you think I’m having a dig at our education system, I am. But you can understand why they do it, right? When the child brings home poor results, the parents first response is often to tell the teacher they should work harder. Not their child.
Helicopter Mums and Dads are indeed on precisely the same flight path. Fixing every little thing, managing every little issue for their kids so as to keep drama to an absolute minimum and the appearance of success to a premium. The problem with this is that the child or young person is deprived of the formative learning opportunities in how to navigate and negotiate the world for themselves. Again, when the safety net is removed the young person still has the lessons to learn. But now they have to learn them completely by themselves. No school. No teachers. No parents. We did our job right?
Our job as adults is to support the learning of young people, so that they learn the essential skills to enter the world. Our job is not to do things for them, not to put out fires they have lit, not to own their issues as our issues. When we do these things, we don’t enable young people’s long term success and happiness, we disable it. When we do things for them, we implicitly say, “I’m doing this for you, because you’re incapable.”
Otherwise, why would you be doing it for them in the first place? What a disempowering message from those the young person most respects. The needle needs to move back towards, “You can do that for yourself, because you’re capable and I am here if you need my support.” And that won’t include ‘giving you the answers’ or ‘putting out your fires.’ Not because I don’t care but because I do.