Primary Thoughts
Neil Mufson, Head of School

 

This past Sunday I found myself thinking about the “royal treatment” my sister Nina and I would devote to my mother many, many years ago on Mother’s Day. We delighted in making and serving breakfast, doing the dishes, helping in her beloved garden, and performing various chores throughout the day.

 

In addition, when we were about 6 to 10 or so, annually my father would write a musical for us to perform, with the music and title based on riffs to then popular Broadway shows. He would type out the words on index cards, we would somehow surreptitiously practice, and before the performance we made and decorated a program with all the lyrics and index cards incorporated. The shows I can remember were “Mom, We Love You A Lot,” set to tunes from Camelot, “My Fair Momma,” “The Sound of Momma,” and “Momma on the Roof.” My dad would play the tunes by ear on the piano, as he was so good at, and Nina and I would sing and act out the stories in front of the living room fireplace. I often hammed it up and provided some comic relief, much to my sister’s annoyance.

 

Except for Mother’s Day, though, I don’t remember being particularly helpful around the house except for setting the table every night, making my bed, and keeping my room tidy. Given the generally traditional nature of my upbringing, that fact surprises me since I am of the generation in which family life revolved around the family and not around the children.  My needs were never neglected, but they were never exactly central to everything we did.

 

While I ended up developing a conscientious work ethic and always did well in school, I don’t think it came from having responsibilities around our home. Not long ago, though, I heard a story on NPR about how to raise children who will be helpful and responsible, and not bossy, around the house and in their social spheres, and not just on special occasions. The piece featured an expert who had done field work in different cultures in the Arctic, West and Southern Africa, and in South America. She scanned hundreds of studies on how families and groups around the world develop responsibility.

 

What she found was that the children who became the most helpful and responsible had parents who gave children small subtasks of larger tasks to complete – in fact, about 3 a day – and were not put off if the child made a mess or mistakes at first, even if they ended up taking more time than if the parent just did the task themselves. These parents allowed small bits of practice and didn’t worry about precise or trouble-free results.

 

While my parents may have unobtrusively had us doing these sorts of things, what I most remember were the productions, my father’s generous laughter as we pieced the plays together, and my mother’s absolute delight and joy as we performed and as she made a fuss about our versions of Playbill. When I prepared to sell the home in which my parents had lived for 40 years, I found those old Mother’s Day programs in a drawer in the nightstand next to my parents’ bed. Our regular helpfulness may have not formed until much later, but our shows contained something worthy of saving.