Borrowed Problems
Another family’s decisions don’t have to become yours
My daughter doesn’t go to Russian School of Math after school. Who cares? you might ask. But you should know that basically every other kid at PS6 goes. So, naturally, I’ve debated signing Eleanor up this fall.
For the record, Eleanor is doing fine in math. Her report cards look good, and her Acadience screeners look even better. She’s happy to play math games at home. She’s eager to get ahead on learning her times tables. Her teacher isn’t remotely concerned.
She also has a jam-packed after-school schedule complete with piano, religious school, chorus, tennis, run club, and ice skating. She doesn’t want to add anything, but she’s not willing to drop anything either. One could reasonably argue that she’s over-scheduled already.
So while there’s no actual problem, I have spent actual time and energy wondering whether I should go solve one.
I call this a borrowed problem. Borrowed problems are issues that have very little to do with our own kids and experiences, and instead, we pick them up from the people around us. Someone else’s kid is doing more math, so maybe mine isn’t doing enough. Someone else’s kid is comfortable being put to bed by a babysitter, so maybe mine should be too. Someone else’s kid reads chapter books, or goes to sleepaway camp, or eats sushi, or whatever, and suddenly something that wasn’t bothering us at all starts to make us feel like we’re screwing up.
In fairness, other parents generally make perfectly good decisions. I bet RSM is great, and plenty of kids love it. But it’s a mistake to assume that if something is right for someone else’s kid, it must be right for ours, too.
So before I take action or make a change, I’ve been going back to the four questions I wrote about earlier. (1) Is this actually a problem? (2) Whose problem is it? And then only if the answer to both of those is yes, (3) Who has the power to fix it? And (4) What's the smallest possible intervention that might help?
With RSM, I didn’t get past question two. Eleanor is, thankfully, perfectly good at math, and she is happy with her after-school schedule. So what am I actually solving here? Fine, some kids go to RSM, but that’s not Eleanor’s problem; it’s a borrowed one.
Parenting is full of this garbage. We know way too much about how everyone else is raising their kids: what enrichment they’re doing, what reading level they’re on, which camps, which sports, which therapies. It’s too easy to interpret “different” as “wrong.”
But, honestly, there’s no such thing as the correct way to raise a child. There’s no correct way to make them independent, or athletic, or social, or academic, or adventurous, or organized, or whatever.
Of course some differences need attention if and when they really do get in the way of a kid’s life. But before we start fixing and optimizing and intervening, ask yourself whether what you’re looking at would even register as a problem if you had no idea what was going on with anyone else.
If the answer is no, there’s no reason to borrow the problem.