As summer vacation rolls along friends have been sharing pictures of the past school year – preschool graduation, Kindergarten graduation, 5th grade graduation and so on. I have a continued sense of unease with such ceremonies.
It used to be that graduation was a special event marking the point in your life where you are finally on your own, with some accumulated skill and a degree to help you get a job, a symbolic leaving of the nest marking transition to adulthood and hence an event worth celebrating. Bigwigs come to lecture you about their wisdom and you listen in your funny hats and archaic gowns, feeling pride and an amazing sense of hope. Somebody somewhere decided to spread that around - why not make it special for everyone! And now I have to sit through a kindergarten graduation! By the time a child reaches college she has already been through a dozen so-called graduations with much pomp and ceremony, and the graduation from college means nothing. Yeah, the president is speaking but I am going to show up in my bikini! In the process of making little things special we have destroyed the importance of a truly special event. I am guilty of this too because by letting my kids ice cream whenever they want, I have robbed them of the childhood joy of going out for ice cream.
Even if my own child is in KG, the graduation ceremony at the end still means nothing to me. The kid has barely started and has not yet achieved anything. I am all for praising children and providing positive feedback, but I do say “great job” when a great job is done otherwise “good” will suffice. If I fawn over them with “great great” with every step they take, what am I going to say when they truly do something “great”?
Raising kids in a non-native environment while constantly worrying about striking the right balance.
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