After brief introductions from actor Marcus Giamatti and Head of School Andrew Wooden, Rob Evans, Ed.D. took the floor at Marymount of Santa Barbara to speak to assembled parents, teachers, coaches, school administrators and Santa Barbara community members interested in hearing one of the nation’s pre-eminent experts on education and childrearing speak about the challenges facing schools and families today.
Evans’s talk Monday, Feb. 22, 2016, was one in a series of Marymount’s Speakers Series designed to bring thought leaders, experts and innovators in education to Santa Barbara.
Using humor as the sugar coating on the pill, Evans spoke frankly. The audience seemed to vacillate between laughter, surprise and moments of self-recognition.
As a clinical and organizational psychologist, a former family therapist, a former teacher, executive director of the respected Humans Relations Service in Wellesley, Mass., and author of the widely acclaimed Family Matters: How Schools Can Cope with the Crisis in Childrearing and The Human Side of Change, Evans is uniquely positioned to give advice.
He described his guidance as “simple, but not easy,” and explained that children need three essential things to be successful: nurture, structure and latitude, going in to detail about how and why each of these is important in the development of “resilient, problem solving, curious, empathetic and capable” people.
He also spent time talking about how much of parenting is a “dilemma” because it is ongoing, repetitive and never-ending, not a “fix it and leave it problem.”
He encouraged today’s parents to have confidence in their ability to parent well, to remember the successful lessons their own parents taught them and not be swayed by parenting trends, or as he put it, “books about parenting that are not based on science or worth the paper they are printed on.”
As far as the challenges facing schools, Evans explained, “When I was growing up, if you got in trouble at school, you got in trouble at home. I do not believe there is a school of any kind across this country that can count on parents siding with a school when a student gets in trouble today.”
Evans said that many parents today have a “We support your policy, but we want an exception for our child,” point of view. He then went on to explain how this position hurts today’s children in the long run by not allowing them opportunities to learn from their mistakes.
Evans’s talk at Marymount both expressed empathy for today’s parents because the world is much less predictable then it used to be and shed light on the painful irony of the fact that much of what parents do “wrong” today is for the best reasons.
He also talked about how parents today are spending much less time with their children than they did in the past and how this affects their ability to truly nurture their children.
Evans’s talk was both emboldening and grounding. Attendees were reminded to laugh and to think about “how funny that [difficult parenting] situation would have been had you been in a better mood that day,” and the importance of remembering what you do well, not just what you do poorly, when it comes to parenting.
Before the question and answer period at the end of his talk, Evans assured the crowd, “You do not need to be perfect to be a good parent.”
Talks in the Marymount Speakers Series are free to the public and a part of the school’s commitment to students’ individual and intellectual flourishing, ethical collaboration and service to the community.
— Molly Seguel is the director of admission at Marymount of Santa Barbara.