Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to Insightful questions, the podcast that's all about getting to know Eastside Prep's new head of school, Sam Uswack. We're diving into his vision and bringing together voices from all around EPs in cool monthly chat. Get ready to dig deep into what leadership and community really mean.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Ikerd, and I'm excited to be Sam's guest in this episode of Insightful questions. Hi, Sam.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hey, Michelle. Thank you so much for joining me here today.
I'm really excited to be able to chat with you and even more excited that we're going to be able to host you on our campus on May 15 for a discussion on your new book, eight setbacks that can make a child a success.
But before we get into the topic of that book, maybe you can tell us a bit about yourself and how you started writing books to help parents.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Sure. So I have been doing this work, broadly speaking, for about 20 years. My kids are now 21 and 23, but they were teeny tiny, two and four when I started this. I have always been really interested in the idea of how we help kids cross the threshold from childhood to adulthood. What are the things we do well in this area? Where do we need to improve? And so this sort of started for me as a leadership camp for kids in middle school, teaching them how to get through the tough social situations that crop up in early adolescence. Like, what about when my friends don't talk to me anymore? Or what if I have nowhere to sit at lunch? So it started at that kind of micro level, and from there it grew into books for parents, and one book led to two, which led to three, and here we are now.
So that's me in brief. Tell me about you and how you're recently in this role. Right. As head of school.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Right. So I started in this role on July 1. I've been here at Eastside Prep. This is my 15th year, and I have now been teaching since the year 2000. And I think what has 20, I would say over the last 910. Eleven years, the importance of the partnership between the school and the family just becomes more and more important to me that if we're aligned in approach, if we're aligned in values, if our parents and guardians feel connected to the place that has such an important impact on the experience that the student is having. And I don't think that's always the case in all schools. I think sometimes it feels like, no, we don't want you involved, or, and sometimes it's not even intentional. It's just kind of like a sense. But I have. And as I've grown older and I've worked with my own kids, I recognize how lonely parenting can be as an act.
It takes a lot of vulnerability to go to another adult and say, I don't know what I'm doing. And so we try to create.
So I think that's an important role schools can play for the adults in the community, is normalizing and talking about parenting and thinking about. And one other piece to that, the layer to put on which you speak about so well in your book, is making sure it's appropriate to the typical arc of adolescent development.
You know, if we expect a five year old to read between the lines and abstract a beautiful piece of literature, probably not going to see the behavior we want. Right? So anyway, those. And so I'm just thrilled that in my role as head of school, I get to work directly with families. I get to set the tone that this is important for our community and then create experiences to help educate, like the one you'll be participating in in May.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: I love that. So, so much of what you're saying is reinforcing for me the vibe that I. That I told you about before we even started this podcast, which is, it feels like Eastside Prep is a really special place. Like, it just feels like everyone I've spoken to on the staff and the teaching team is really interested in the kids is, you know, and in their entire well being, not just in their academic success. So I'm excited to come and visit and meet everyone in person and talk about this new book.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Well, it's so rewarding to hear that. That's the vibe you're picking up on? Because I think one of the great joys of working here is there's a fervent believe in the promise of youth.
We tell our kids that sometimes you have to help adults unlearn, and I think you touched on this in the book. You have to.
You have to help them unlearn their impressions of teenagers.
And we want to help you do that because we see it on a day to day basis.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: So, yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I love adolescence and the weird, wacky, awful, amazing, wonderful things that come up during it.
And one of those things is failure. So we might as well be talking about it out loud.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: So we talk a lot about that here. We talk a lot about how it's okay to fail, but I think that is. And parents nod, and then I think that's really easier said than done.
So why don't you tell us more about your latest book and kind of, you know, we'll take it from there.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Sure. So I would take your statement, it's okay to fail, and I would inflate it to say, it is great to fail. Really? The concept of the book, based on my interest in how do we help kids go from childhood to adulthood, is that the sort of missing piece in rites of passage for kids, in helping kids become adults? The missing piece in our society these days is failure. We are so worried about our kids screwing up that there are a million terms for the kind of parent you can be to keep your kid from avoiding failure. You can be a lawnmower parent. You can be a helicopter parent. You could be a tiger parent. You can be all of these types of parent who try so hard to make life easy and painless. And when we do that, we rob kids of the opportunity to royally screw up, to feel embarrassment and regret and maybe even a tiny bit of hurt and pain. And that is where we grow in those. It's much like exercise. If you gave your kid one pound weights and said, work out with ease every day, yeah, they'd be working out, but they wouldn't be getting stronger. Kids need to tear and repair muscle, and they also need to tear and repair sort of emotionally in order to build resilience and figure out that by the time they're ready to leave your school or your home, they can cope. They know that when they experience pain, it doesn't tear them down. It actually is a moment where it hurts for a while, then they get over it, and then they say, gosh, I'm stronger than I was before, so I want kids to fail. As odd as it sounds, I think it's really good for us all.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: So, to me, that's gonna look differently again, following that arc of adolescent development. Right. And I think sometimes by the time we start having the conversation that it's great to fail. The kids are old enough that it's gonna feel a lot more intense than if they'd been experiencing that along the way. Is that your experience?
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Yes, I think that's totally correct. And it's almost a well, they're too big to fail scenario. They're like, thanks. And we think we can't let them fail now because it would involve posting something on social media that the world would know about, or it would involve not getting into college that they've worked so hard for, or it might involve, you know, serious mental health crisis. And so we really worry about the ramifications of failure on that scale as kids get older.
The truth is, anytime a kid fails before leaving your home is a good time to fail, because life will continuously get bigger and get harder, and the stakes will continually rise. And so we need kids to learn and practice, and practice is messy, and it's uncomfortable, and it can be painful, but we need them to have that experience so that when they leave, they don't feel it for the first time. Our instinct, there's tons of research to back this up. Our instinct when we feel pain the first time is not to fight against it. It's to endure it. And we don't want our kids to just say, well, I'll crumple up in a ball on this dorm room floor until this feeling goes away. We want them to say, gosh, I have felt this way before. Embarrassed, regretful, hurt, you know, whatever. And I did something about it, and I got better. So I know that this time, if I do something, if I take some action, I'll feel better eventually. That's better than laying here in a puddle of my own misery. And we want kids to learn that early, even if the stakes feel high.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Michelle, can you think of an example, either from your own parenting or in working with so many different parents? Can you think of an example of sort of a classic we let our kid fail moment so that we have something concrete to work off of?
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Yep. I can think of a million. I can tell you that for this book, I interviewed parents from across the country. I whittled it down to 30, who I sort of synthesized their stories into the book and put them into eight archetypes that I created based on what are the sort of universal screw ups that kids experience? So that could be. And these are all failure types in the book, that could be a failure to connect with peers like your kids, really struggling to find their friend group. They feel alone, they feel disconnected and hurt. And that hurts as a parent to see that happen. Or it could be a way more extreme. My kid was binge drinking over the weekend and had to be taken to the hospital for that. So there's a wide range of ways in which kids experience these various failures. If we take, for example, a social failure, let's say that a kid is really struggling to find friends at school, parents tend to get hung up on that one, and they will continue to press the bruise unintentionally with that. They're so worried about the pain it might be causing their kid, they talk about it nonstop. So they say, hey, did you talk with anybody today at school? Did you meet anyone new? Was anyone interesting? How about that girl Kate, from your math class? She seemed like she sounded nice. And they go on and on and on, and the kid is receiving a message over and over that says, I can't do this on my own, or, this is a bigger concern than even I think it is. My parents are now unhappy because of my unhappiness. I'm causing them pain on top of my discomfort. So it's so important that we remove ourselves and we remove our emotions when our kids are having these experiences, because if it feels like we're conflating their pain with our pain, it makes it ten times harder for them.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: That resonates with me in our household. One of the you. You list a number of different kinds of failures in the book, and the one, the failure to show concern for others is one that jumped out to me, you know, and it manifests in so many little ways, you know, so when I get up, when I get excited about something that maybe the family is going to do, last night, because it was a beautiful day in Seattle, you know, just like a day you've waited 80 days for, and, oh, I'm excited because we're going to go out and go on a hike, or we're going to go explore something. And it's just met with utter ambivalence at best. Best. And, like, scorn on the other side. And I have to sort of stop and check myself and understand that, you know, some independence is being exhibited in that moment, some agency, which is what I eventually want, but maybe not during this particular case study because I want to go hiking. Right.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: I think that's very common. And that that particular failure to show concern for others is definitely the most common. That's every teenager. That's the, like you said, that's the phase that they are going through. They're individuating. They are learning who they are apart from you. And that is not an easy thing to figure out. And so it often comes across as defiance or rejection or anger or dismissiveness. And, you know, a certain amount of that is to be expected and is par for the course. And we can say, yeah, okay, I get it. This is developmentally where you are, and then sometimes it crosses a line, and we feel like, well, we still, you know, despite all of this, love you and want to spend time with you, and when will that ever happen, right. Sort of force the family fun sometimes. So we do kind of thread the needle there with letting our kids be independent, but also occasionally having to say, this is a team, we are a team, and this is a team activity. And everybody's going to do x today. But there are plenty of times when you don't have to opt in. This is one, you know, with plenty of notice. This is one where we expect everybody to show up for the team.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: I think when I think about working with students as opposed to my kids and I'm working with them and, you know, something's gone sideways, how important it is that the relationship is not just based on that one moment and, you know, that I arrive and there's an intense moment and then I go away.
So what I gained from through reading this was how key it is to set up the relationship and then maybe more importantly afterwards, maintaining relationship letting. Right. So can you say more about that?
[00:15:13] Speaker A: That's huge. I'm so happy you brought that up.
Yeah. I think a lot of times, parents in particular, and certainly, you know, school staff experiences this, too, but the parents I work with sometimes get really hung up on making sure that their kids have learned a lesson. If their kids have screwed up in a certain way, they are so worried that their child will go on and be a repeat offender, they will continue to do the same thing over and over, or they will hurt someone or continue to get hurt, and parents will sacrifice their relationship with the child in order to teach or in order to be right. And that is shooting yourself in the foot unintentionally. Because, you know, if you're grappling over this issue and you need to, you need some sort of proof that the child has learned from it and processed it and is able to move on and incorporate it into their future, then that kid's not going to keep coming back to you. And the thing that you are responsible for more than anything else, in my opinion, as a teacher and as a parent, is keeping the door open, you want that kid to keep coming back to you no matter what they're feeling, particularly if they're suffering. And if they're suffering and they feel they can't come back to you because you're going to keep on just beating that lesson, right, beating the dead horse, then they're going to keep it to themselves or they're going to find someone else to entrust their problems with who may not be a really good advocate for them. So I think it's key that we put aside the need to be right, put aside the need to teach our kids, even in order to maintain and nurture the relationship.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: One of the things that was really helpful. And maybe folks should just read the book, but you have a very specific set of concrete steps to follow when engaging in this. Could you outline those?
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Sure. So there are three steps, easy peasy. And no matter what the failure is that your child is feeling, these three steps are going to work. So they are contain, resolve, and evolve. And I want you to picture it like a tennis ball going back and forth on a court. So contain the balls in your court. You notice that there is a failure here, or a failure very nearly on the horizon, and you need to contain the problem. That could mean you've got to contain the kid because they're making dangerous choices. So you say your world is getting really big, really fast. We're going to stay in this weekend and talk and kind of figure out what our next move is. Or that could mean your child has really done nothing, but they are being dangerous coming at them. Maybe someone's harassing them online, for example. So you may need to put up a technical boundary, but in any event, you're taking the lead there and you're saying, we're going to contain this so the problem doesn't grow. Then the ball bounces to your child's side of the court for resolve. Your child needs to take some action. Again, this is related to that research I really briefly touched on. Our first instinct, when we feel discomfort and pain is learned helplessness. We sort of shrivel up and say, if I wait, this will pass. That's not what we want to train into our kids. We want them to discover that if they do something, they can feel better. So there's a menu in the book of things your kid could do, actions your child could take, so that they begin to learn that they are resilient and that when things are bad, they don't break, they. They bend. So they take an action to do something. Could be that they apologize. It could be that they do more research because they're uninformed about something. Could be that they have a conversation with someone, whatever it is, and then the ball bounces back to your side for evolve. So contain, resolve, evolve. And that's where you put this, in the rear view mirror. This should not be the headline of your kid's childhood. It should not be the thing that you talk about in every spare moment. You can essentially say to them, this was hard. I'm proud of the action you took, and now we're going to put it behind us and move right along. But your child doesn't want to feel like you see them as that failure every time you see them.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: That's so important.
I think this connects.
If you're always bringing that up, then that's the only topic the child perceives. That's all you see in them. And, you know, to me, it's like you get in the car after a practice, and the first question is, how was practice? You know, it's like, not the right time. How was school? Not the right time. It's like, you know, you have to not harp on it if it's truly resolved. If it's not resolved, there's more work to do. Right?
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And the truth is, most of us don't learn and resolve things the first time through. Most of us need several trial and error moments. And so even if it's not fully resolved, it may just take some time to marinate, you know? And you asking about it over and over again is a distraction more than it is a moment of epiphany. You know, your child isn't going to say, on the fifth time you say, how's it going in that class? Oh, I suddenly realized I should be doing x, y, or z. Right. They need some quiet time in their brains to be able to have an epiphany on their own. And if you're filling their brain all the time, they don't get that. So if you can again think about the relationship instead of what you want the end result to be, but here, now, in the moment, what can we talk about that's pleasant and neutral and interesting that's probably going to serve your child better in many, many ways than trying to drill down to make a point.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: I think we have time for one or two more. So one of the things I'm really fascinated about is the degree to which our experience in youth impacts our parenting and how much we're aware of that and how much maybe we're not. And so that's something I'm just curious about and talk with parents quite a bit. And so I was intrigued to read about response style and thinking about, okay, so the thing happens.
What's going to manifest, not necessarily from my very carefully articulated, beautiful parenting philosophy that I've been working on for so long, rather what might surface from my own experience as a youth?
[00:21:54] Speaker A: Yes, I think this is fascinating. I am, like you, very curious about this.
So in the book, I write about response style because it is, as you said, more impulsive than we'd like it to be. And so something happens to your kid, not to you, but let's say you find out that your child is being teased on the soccer team and so you are just like, alarm bells are going off for you. This reminds you of the feeling you had of being alienated as a kiddo. And so you're really upset. What are you gonna do? And we tend to go to the sort of four typical responses that everybody knows about, but fight, flight, fear, freeze and fawn. So fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. And that would look like this. In that scenario, if you typically go to fight, you find out people are teasing your kid, you are calling that soccer coach, you're going down to the next practice, you are making sure that people are aware and this doesn't happen again. And you're fighting for what your kids kid needs are if you are flight, you are googling other teams that your kid can join. We are looking for community teams. We're looking to see if you could be on a rec league or a travel league. You don't have to be part of this one anymore. If you are freeze, then you don't want to do anything. Maybe this will pass if you just play possum. And so you're going to wait and hope for the best. And if you're fond, you're baking cookies and you're bringing them to the next practice, and you're saying, I just want everyone to know that these are from Dylan, and he just wanted you guys to know how happy he is to be your teammate.
So you're just, you're choosing this. You're not even choosing. You're impulsively selecting this reaction based on what served you well as a child. When you were a kid, what did you need to do around your own house when you felt like things were chaotic or threatening or unhealthy or whatever, emotional. So just because that tool worked for us once doesn't mean it's still the best tool to use. So we have to sort of have gratitude that it served us well and then say, is this still the right tool? Or am I just habitually choosing what worked for me when I was nine?
And those things can be appropriate responses, but they might not be. And I just want parents to begin to be really thoughtful in their reaction if they're doing something out of impulse and habit, or if this is really the right tool for the occasion.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Well, and I think that's what's so great about the concreteness of contain, resolve, evolve. Because when things happen, emotion kicks in and having something to rely on, that's not a complex heuristic of this, that or the other thing. It's like, no, let's just start the process and have that awareness of that we are emotional and we are going to carry things into this from our pasts.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Yes. And for me, the key to this process is not that you pick the right thing to do, not that your child perfectly figures this situation out. The key is your kid gets some practice. All we want at the end of this journey, when we send them off into the world, is for them to have enough experience with problems and problem solving that when it happens to them out there, they can reach into their brain and say, okay, yes, I have felt this before and I know that I can take some action. So it's not important that they get it right. And you don't have to trip yourself up as a parent thinking, I don't know if they did the right thing here. Doesn't matter. Did they do something great? Then we're making progress just by doing something.
[00:25:38] Speaker B: So how would you recommend that our parents, who would be attending our session here on May 15, they'll be reading the book, but what would be helpful in terms of their preparation for their time with you?
[00:25:54] Speaker A: I love that. So I would say early on in the book, I introduce the different archetypes, the eight different archetypes. Sort of keep your eyes open. I would say, go on a bit of a scavenger hunt and start observing and saying, do I think my child is more the sensitive one or do I think my child is more the ego or do I think my child is more the rebel, the daredevil? And just pay attention and observe without commenting? You can just treat it as a little scavenger hunt and you're doing nothing but kind of collecting anecdotes or data. Then I would notice how you react when your child is in that role, what that brings up for you, what your response is, and then come and let's talk. I love giving presentations. What I love the most is the Q and A after, and I have been traveling the country talking about this book and I've been giving talks for 15 years. No question you bring is going to surprise me.
I am so used to hearing about the many swings up and down of parenthood. So that part is really fun. So do some observation and then come and let's see what we can uncover together.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Well, that's great advice. That's great advice and that'll get us set up. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today.
I really look forward to welcoming you to EPs in May and thank you for the time.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: Thank you Sam for having me.
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