Normal Children

"All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst .. . This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that "exceptional" is the new normal. And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty damn insecure and desperate to feel "exceptional" all the time."
- Mark Manson, author, on markmanson.net

Manson's sentiments struck a chord with me. Since I was six, I felt that I had to be exceptional to be worthy. Normal was a bad word; only the top 1% would do (this was long before the phrase "top one percent" became a negative.)  In the last ten years I finally realized that this pressure was making me miserable. Striving for exceptional caused an artificial separation from other people, and sent the wrong message to my children: that they too, had to strive for the unattainable.

When I saw the thought process passed from parent to child I felt sick. I don't want that pressure, that loneliness for my kids, but it's tough to turn off the message that we receive from society. In this age of uber-parenting, parents are told that our kids need to be "more, better, best." Jeffery Kluger notes in his TIME Magazine article, "In Praise of the Ordinary Child," (link)  that the reason we push our kids might have economic underpinnings:

"The stock market swings of the 1980s were followed by the tech boom of the ’90s, which led to the tech collapse of the aughts, which was followed, finally, by the great, tectonic crash of 2008. Through all that, the American middle class grew smaller and smaller while the rungs on the economic ladder grew ever farther apart. If their kids were going to get ahead, many parents felt, they would have to be bred to be failure-proof."

And so we push towards the exceptional in school, test scores and sports. We fear the normal, even though the odds of Ivy Leagues or Big Leagues are infinitesimal. We sometimes - God forgive us - fail to see the unique miracles perpetrated by our children every day, and we forget that allowing children to fail and teaching them how to get up, are some of the most important lessons in life.

Thinking of my kids as 'normal' was a mind-bender at first. The children aren't ordinary to me or their father. What of Aden's budding artistic ability, her amazing pictures of flowers in the sun, her kindness toward strangers? Or William's sun-bright smile, his singing voice accompanying a favorite song on the radio, his loyal friendships? And Daniel's passion for reading comics, his joy in sharing funny lines announced with "now hear this!" and his Space Invader stacks of books? These traits can't be measured by grades or test scores but they are intrinsically valuable.

Our children might be normal in the eyes of the world, and that's just fine, but they should know that they are unique. No winning result could make them more special or loved. They should also know that success requires hard work and healthy striving; it also requires the ability to fall and get back up. They should know that no matter how "normal" their class rank, their band seat number, their place on the team, they will find a way to build a healthy and productive life, surrounded by friends and family who know that life is not built out of exceptional moments, but by the common ones in between.