THE BRIDGE TO COLLEGE
YOUR KID IS WASTING TIME … CONGRATULATIONS?
So many parents worry that their kids are not doing the things the world proclaims are necessary for college admissions. I’ve said so many times, colleges are not seeking one particular profile. As parents, maybe we’re vexed about the activity when we should be paying attention to the student.
This month, I present Aiden, who has learned so much from … video games?!
“Video games are the only topic I've seen parents get riled up about more than politics. There's a constant debate between ‘these games have value’ and ‘they waste so much time.’ I think both views are misplaced. They're answering the wrong question.
“Let’s consider ‘Daniel,’ a kid playing a game on his phone. His parents just spent a long day at work, drove home, and had to cook dinner. They finally finish, but when calling their kid to eat, Daniel doesn’t respond. This repeats and repeats until the fed-up father searches and finds his
kid so checked out that he doesn’t even notice his parents are trying to feed him.
“Mom and Dad have every right to be annoyed, but on the other hand, Daniel doesn’t like getting yelled at, so his response regurgitates the usual points about hand-eye coordination, motor response and social interaction. He may even mention that some scientific studies back up his points.
“In this conflict, everyone takes a side about whether video games are good or bad. And in doing so, we fall into an ageless trap. Fighting over the value of video games is like asking whether books are good. Good compared to what? Which book? For which kid?
“Simple yes-or-no questions lead to oversimplified answers … about the game, not the child. Let's re-examine this kind of thinking by traveling back in time to one hour before the parents got home.
“Daniel has just finished a long day of school, so he looks for respite. He is on a massive tilt (meaning he is losing a lot of games in quick succession), but further playing is really his way of figuring out what he is doing wrong. By trying to get better, Daniel is focused on self-improvement.
“Now, before you say, ‘Daniel could be doing the same thing with something more valuable,’ ask yourself this: in how many scenarios will kids embrace failure just to get back up, try again, and adapt to their problems?
“Unfortunately, by focusing on the activity, parents see video games as worthless without seeing that Daniel is building a tolerance for difficulty. By worrying about the game – not the child – they are not considering Daniel’s growth, choosing instead to mislabel his concentration as squandered opportunity.
“I am a real-life example of this. When I was younger, I played Spelunky Classic, which kills you constantly and sends you right back to the start. Because of its sheer difficulty, it took me fifty (50) hours to beat that game. But I was learning persistence.
“Did my ‘learning’ translate elsewhere? Come eighth grade, I started running cross-country. As someone who hated running, I thought I wouldn’t make it for two months. But if I could spend 50 hours trying to beat a game, I could spend a few hours running. Over time, my ‘never say die’ attitude became a key to coping with my most arduous tasks. Failure tolerance is valuable.
“The truth is that video games are neither good nor bad. Their value depends on whether they are played thoughtfully or not. For me, a game helped me learn to address challenges. For someone else, that same game might mean nothing but play time.
“Maybe Daniel really is wasting his evening. Or maybe he is 50 hours away from something that outlasts the game completely. But how would his parents know if they jump into conflict without conversing with their son? In a world overburdened with checklists, perhaps before judging an activity, we should check in with each other.”
Well said, Aiden. I remember my own father not understanding why I repeatedly played solitaire on the floor instead of reading books. He never learned what I was trying to do: by playing the simplest game, I was trying to develop my thought processes to succeed in impossible scenarios.
When Harvard accepted me, it wasn’t because of my prowess with Solitaire card game, but it also wasn’t because of those books I didn’t read. If you were a college admissions officer, wouldn’t you be impressed with someone who tries to teach himself life lessons?Robert LeVine is the founder and CEO of University Consultants of America, an independent educational consultancy assisting students around the world with applications to colleges, universities and graduate schools. For more information, call University Consultants of America, Inc. at 1-800-465-5890 or visit www.universitycoa.com
FAMILY MATTERS
Communities and Milestones
By Anu Verma Panchal
A few months ago, I had the good fortune to stand by my parents’ side as they celebrated a significant milestone, their golden anniversary. One of my favorite parts of the event was that in addition to uncles, aunts and cousins, we had with us their closest friends, the extended “framily” that had helped my parents recreate a sense of home and family when they were thousands of miles away from the place of their birth.
Circa 1980, with a toddler and 6-year-old in tow, my parents moved to a little town in Zambia called Kabwe. They knew no one and nothing about this new country beyond my dad’s offer letter and one phone call with a relative who had once lived in Africa.
But on their very first evening, there was a knock at the door. It was a young Malayalee couple with two little boys our age. Hearing that a new family from Kerala had arrived, they had stopped by to welcome us. From that one introduction, my parents were immediately absorbed into a group of friends.
The same thing happened every time we moved towns. The news of our impending arrival reached before we did, and we were pulled into existing Malayalee social circles. Our weekends were spent at each other’s houses, uncles in safari suits swilling whiskey, aunties in sarees holding deafening conversations while we ran around and played. As the years passed, my parents grew into the veterans who welcomed new families and organized the elaborate cultural events that gave the community a sense of home away from home.
And all around town – and across the South Asian diaspora – others were doing the same thing. In Tamil, in Bangla, in Hindi, they created communities that served a familial function for each other. Community building seems to be in our genes. Or, as a friend once told me, “We’re like goats ... we can only travel in packs.”
During the college years and in my early 20s, plugging into the local desi community was nowhere close to being a priority; in fact, I reveled in the freedom from it. It was irritating, even, to see the insularity that I imagined permeated those associations. Why move to another country and only hang out with the same people? Why not at least try to assimilate?
It was only when I became a parent that I found myself searching, maybe even yearning, for some small level of connection. I wanted my daughters to learn Bharatanatyam like I had, wanted them to celebrate Hindu holidays and go to the temple occasionally. Does that mean that I want my communities to be restricted by ethnicity, language or religion? Certainly not. I am blessed with close “framily” from many backgrounds, and I enjoy Gasparilla as much as I do Onam and Navaratri.
Yet I am grateful for the generations who came before we did and established everything from the Tampa India Festival to the India Cultural Center so that we now have the option to dip a toe, an ankle or our whole selves in cultural life if we so desired.
A week before my older daughter was due to leave for college, I took her on one of our habitual visits to the Hindu temple here in Tampa. By a happy coincidence, the pujari on duty that day was the same one who had presided on the day that we had taken her on her first temple visit when she was a 6-month-old baby. “You’re the one who carried her to the front of the room when she was born, and now she’s starting college,” I told him. He beamed. “Look at that!” he marveled.
Look at that indeed. That kind of continuity doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of hard work from a lot of people who came before us, many of whom we’ll never even know. The roots they put down gave us the luxury to pick and choose how much we want to hold on to, because some variation of it has been preserved here for us.
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