Sooner or later you must pay for every good deed? This may be the message one hapless boy got after he received a lecture from his woke mother — for getting an award for 100-percent school attendance. It was one incident, but it reflects a wider rot affecting our society.
At issue is a Tuesday piece written by mom Lauren Crosby at The Independent. She begins by telling us that her son came home “beaming with pride” last week because he’d won a pencil case for his impeccable attendance. Now, Crosby doesn’t mention her lad’s age or grade, but given his delight in the pencil case, it sounds as if he’s a fairly young grade-school child.
Most all mothers, of course, would give their boy a pat on the head and congratulate him. But not Crosby. She did manage to say that the pencil case was “lovely,” but then, she writes, she “quickly delivered a monologue to him about how attendance does not make a child good or bad.” And, oh, what a monologue it was.
Crosby said that her son’s triumph “isn’t something I could congratulate, because it wasn’t his accomplishment — just his luck of the draw.” Apparently she was listening in 2012 when Barack Obama said, throwing shade on accomplishment, that “you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
“‘There are kids who haven’t been in school because they have been ill,’ I told him, as he played with his prize, half paying attention to what I was telling him,” Crosby continued. “‘Maybe they have a special need that made it hard for them to make it in, or they feel sick to their stomachs with anxiety because of the work or the other children.’”
Mommy Dearest took it from there, saying that a high percentage of kids miss school
due to illness of some sort…. Chickenpox, sickness, Covid, scarlet fever, asthma, croup, and the list of possible illnesses that kids catch goes on and on. Sorry kids, no reward for you because you were ill.
Children with special educational needs (SEN) are less likely to attend school regularly…. They may have ADHD, dyslexia, autism, or physical disabilities that create barriers to attendance. Are these children “naughty” because they don’t attend school every day? Are their parents irresponsible? Of course not, but these children have said they feel shame about missing school, and parents reported consistently feeling judged and blamed for their children’s attendance.
Mom then lectured her son about how some children experience anxiety about going to school and can’t make it out the door. “‘And what about the children whose home lives are very chaotic?’ I continued,” Crosby related. Gee, lucky kid. He needn’t turn on MSNBC to get a neo-communist speech — just turn on mom with your own happiness.
Commenters at MSN.com — which in its infinite wisdom featured Crosby’s article — were quick to respond. Angela Leonard wrote, “Nothing like a put down lecture to make a kid’s day!”
John Cole echoed this. “How to alienate your child in 5 minutes flat,” he stated. “He will almost certainly remember this episode into his adult years.”
Matthew Stanford gave a testimonial as to the boy’s award’s value, writing that at his first job interview, the “piece of paper that impressed the manager the most wasn’t my GCSE or A Level results but the certificate I got for 100% attendance.”
Other commenters illustrated the flaw in Crosby’s reasoning. Wilson Cabot noted that “some people can’t play baseball because of family, money, lack of ability, or illness, which doesn’t mean we stop giving awards for baseball either.” And David Lynch wrote, “So I suppose you won’t be congratulating him when he gets his diploma because there are kids that don’t have the opportunity to go to high school?”
Of course, Crosby’s “logic” could be applied to anything. No matter the endeavor, certain people will always have crosses militating against success in it. Should we cease recognizing all accomplishment?
It is true that “life’s not fair…,” as John F. Kennedy noted. It’s correct, too, that the “only person worth feeling superior to is your former self,” as the saying goes. Yet maturity also means recognizing that others will have gifts and opportunities we don’t and that appreciating them is virtuous — and not rewarding their cultivation is folly. Disincentivizing success means a less successful society.
Related to this, Crosby made the mistake of considering her son’s award only as an assessment of him relative to others. But aside from how he measured up to a yardstick (attendance) not comprising other people, he also was better than someone else: an alternative self. The boy could’ve played hooky; he could’ve feigned illness at times to avoid school. He didn’t.
Moreover, Crosby’s leftist view of failure — that it’s a damaging, traumatic tragedy to be avoided at all costs — misses an important point: Pain can be the author of betterment.
Failure has value. It often points us away from what we shouldn’t be doing, where our gifts don’t lie, and thus can nudge us toward where they do. More significantly, failure can breed character and wisdom. Someone who hasn’t failed hasn’t lived.
Speaking of failures, Crosby could have used her son’s award as a teaching moment and pointed out that he’d exhibited diligence, which is defined as a virtue. She could’ve mentioned that “80 percent of success is just showing up,” as another saying goes. But she was too busy being “furious,” to quote her title, about his accomplishment.
It’s no wonder the boy was only “half paying attention,” as Crosby noted. In a few years he may master the art of selective deafness and may not be paying attention to her at all. One can only hope.
