‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if parents had an instruction manual for raising their children, especially those in middle school?” asks Lynn Fisher, a counselor in the guidance department at Community Middle School in the West-Windsor Plainsboro School District. While it doesn’t have any such manual, the guidance department is providing a forum for parents trying to raise responsible and resilient middle school children in today’s world.
Parents from both CMS and Grover Middle School are invited to attend a presentation by noted adolescent pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg on Thursday, November 17, at 7 p.m. in the CMS Theater, titled “Raising a Resilient Child in a Stressful World.” Ginsburg, author of “But I’m Almost 13! An Action Plan for Raising a Responsible Adolescent,” will present his strategies for parents to help their children deal with stress in the teenage years. Ginsburg, who practices at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, will offer tips on helping kids cope with peer pressure, develop proactive ways to reduce stress, increase a child’s independence, and strengthen the parent-child connection.
“There has never been a generation so stressed and pressured to perform,” observes Ginsburg. “Today’s children are doing their best to be everything to everybody and to please their parents. I’m concerned about the current emotional climate where children are stretched way too thin and the long-term consequences that can have for the country.”
The doctor notes that while every generation has grown up with the perception that their world is more stressful than the one their parents knew, today’s world is indeed more stressful for today’s children — that while every generation does have its own challenges, there are more families breaking down today, there are different forms of media invading the home, and there are terrorism fears that didn’t exist 50 years ago.
Ginsburg has two new books aimed at parents due out next September, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics and built on the theme of raising resilient children. One area in particular that concerns him is the stress that both parents and society are putting on children to get into college. In fact, one of his books is co-written with Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and they have both taken on a mission of trying to shift the national conversation from building kids who are good at everything to building kids who are emotionally healthy and resilient.
“All of our kids need to be academically competent, but they need to be socially and emotionally competent as well,” says Ginsburg. “The answer to success is not just about grades, but about being able to take risks and bounce back when things don’t work out. When we pressure our kids so hard to achieve and be perfect, they turn into perfectionists, and perfectionists are not ultimately successful. They get into good colleges, but they’re not going to be the person who can look outside the box for success.”
As the father of identical twin 10-year-old girls, Ginsburg himself is part of the baby boomers, baby boomlet, a demographic blip has created an increasingly intense competitive climate because of the sheer numbers of young people vying to get into the best colleges.
“There’s this treadmill built around marketing, making money, and people saying that in order to have your kid get ahead they need enrichment activities from babyhood, things like gyms, video programs,” says Ginsburg. “So parents feel they’re being negligent if they’re not enriching their kids. But at the core of parenting is time, downtime, just the sheer enjoyment of sitting back, slowing down, and listening. All this enrichment can get in the way of family time and can harm kids more than it helps them. And yet it’s hard to get off that treadmill.”
Ginsburg says the best thing parents can do to help their children survive in today’s world is to give them a wide repertoire of strategies to cope with the stresses in society. He has developed a nine-point plan that he shares with parents that deal with four major areas: teaching children how to tackle any problem that’s a stresser, teaching them how to deal with the physical effects of stress on the body, dealing with the emotional effects of stress, and learning how to contribute to the world so children can have a clear sense of their purpose in the universe.
Ginsburg was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a homemaker. He majored in child development as an undergraduate at Penn and then stayed to earn a masters in education. He went on to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York to earn his M.D. In addition to his work in adolescent medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he is medical director of the Covenant House in that city, a shelter system for homeless and street kids. His wife, Celia, is a horticulturalist.
Ginsburg firmly believes that there is nothing more important than resiliency when it comes to predicting success. “More important than grades, more important than where you get into college, is a person’s ability to handle adversity and rise above it.” He also believes that today’s children need to get outside and play more. “Play is the fundamental job of childhood,” he says. “And children today don’t play enough.”
— Euna Kwon Brossman
Raising a Resilient Child in a Stressful World, Community Middle School, 55 Grover Mill Road, Plainsboro, 609-799-5000. Thursday, November 17, 7 p.m.
