Discipline

I just got back from a trip to the west coast. An unexpected benefit was being able to work for a day at a client's office. I have been working for this company for over a decade, but had never met them in person. It reminded me that there are many reasons that I have loved the consulting work I've done for the past 16 years: Sometimes you run into wonderful people and can make a real difference in their business, and it's enormously satisfying. Plus, it's a lot easier to make money at consulting on site than almost anything else I've done recently. So, this trip has almost made me regret my decision to move out of the mailorder technology industry. Of course, I decided to move out of the industry 10 years ago, but it keeps sucking me back.

Anyway, my clients are a husband-and-wife team who are originally from Hong Kong. They're great. They have two kids, one of whom just started at Berkeley and the other who is a freshman in high school. They were very interested to discover that I home school, how we do it, and why. As parents, they push their kids very hard -- like lots of other immigrant families I know. They are big proponents of discipline, and bemoan how their kids and their friends lack it.

Over lunch, we had interesting conversations about discipline and the fact that it's necessary to teach kids to have it. But it occurred to me on the plane ride home that we never discussed *why* it's necessary. So I started thinking about it.

By "discipline," I mean the ability to buckle down and focus on stuff even when it may not strike one's fancy at that very moment. Kids, as a rule, aren't born with a sense of discipline. So in order for them to accomplish what they need to accomplish in life, we have to teach it to them.

But HOW do we frame the idea of discipline to kids?

Often the idea of teaching kids to be disciplined is presented simply as "Make them do it even though they don't want to" because it will teach them that sometimes there are things that they have to knuckle down and do things that they aren't inclined to do at that moment. Things that aren't fun.

This is true, but there is more to it. I have a different sense of why we should teach kids to be disciplined.

See, I think we all should be in the habit of questioning why we do... well... everything. There always SHOULD be an answer to the "why." And the answer should be something better than simply, "It's good for you." The answer should be, "Because it's in the service of this specific wider goal."

With every endeavor, no matter how small, we should always know WHY we're doing what we're doing. That's the only way to assess all of our available options and spend our time doing stuff that is necessary and valuable rather than a waste. But more important, having our "eyes on the prize" means that along the way, we don't let the fact of having to do some unpleasant, dirty work drag us down.

Life is full of little quagmires, and they pop up so much that it's sometimes easier or more convenient to pretend that they're not there or procrastinate working on them. But people who are disciplined just put their heads down and push, however unpleasant, knowing that at some point it will give way and you'll be much closer to your goal.

The problem with kids is that they have a short-term focus by their very nature. They can't project ahead to a fulfillment far down the road, so it's extremely difficult for them to do difficult things NOW that have no payoff for a long time.

Adults who haven't grasped long-term self-interest at a gut level are at a disadvantage, too. Sometimes, long-term interest and short-term interest seem to conflict, and it's much easier to head in the direction of short-term payoff. Diet and exercise are the obvious examples. I regard myself as extremely hard-working and quite disciplined, but I fail at these all the time. These issues can be subtle: I shouldn't exercise if I'm really tired and it would be better for me to go to sleep...or if I'm behind on an important project and that hour would really make a difference. But I can't be using that as an excuse *every* time.

There are two things that I use to get myself out of the house to exercise is to find ways for it to be a short-term pleasure (running with Madison in the morning is FAR superior to exercising alone), and to constantly imagine two futures, one in which I'm sickly and overweight and feel really old, and the other in which I'm healthy and strong and energetic.

So I think that the key is to help kids envision the future, constantly. I try to help my kids imagine themselves succeeding at something in the future, which helps teach them to OWN themselves at that future date. Gradually, they should be able to adopt the attitude on their own that if they want a certain outcome, then they need to push through all of the steps that need to be done in order to attain it.

For example, Ella doesn't know all of the words to all of the Christmas songs they're singing in choir. She needs to know them. So today, her homeschooling list consists of just a few basics, plus learn her chorus music. She is having a really, really hard time pushing through. It's hard. There are at least five or six songs that need polishing. It feels overwhelming to her, even though I encouraged her to develop a plan of attack and she did. She keeps trying to come downstairs and argue with me about why she shouldn't have to do this today.

Well, she agreed early on that it would be a good idea to get the music done, and at the time she leaped at the opportunity not avoid all the "real work" and instead focus on chorus. But now that she's in the middle of it all, every 15 minutes she comes down and sobs at me all of the reasons why she can't be doing it now. (Her latest reason is "because I'm crying and I can't sing when I'm crying.") Sigh.

The thing that works best -- and it really does work -- is to take her on my lap and paint that picture for her of the future... of Mrs. Krogstad testing her and her passing the test without problems... singing in all of the different concerts they have lined up for December... looking out in the audience and seeing me so happy that not only is she up there creating something beautiful, but we both know that it's so much more satisfying because the work was hard.

So keeping Ella's eyes on the prize is MY job for now. That, and sympathizing with how hard it is but telling her I know she can succeed. She's only 9, and I think this will be my job for a long time... until at least mid-teens. I'm pretty confident that she'll gradually take the reins as time goes on.