Like  many teenagers, I graduated from high school and made my way to college. That was in 1978 and I have never really left the college setting. While completing a master’s degree I went from a graduate assistantship to a full time university employee, eventually spending many years as the Dean of Students. Along the way I adopted the term “ Deanly Chat ” as the framework for honest, sometimes difficult, and ultimately constructive conversations with students and/or their parents. The deanly chat fills the uncomfortable spaces between parent and child and serves as a wedge in spaces that are destructively comfortable between young friends.

For example, when speaking with a student who told me that “a doobie-a-day keeps me above the fray,” I could have told him all about relevant brain studies demonstrating how the human brain is not fully formed at his age and won’t be for several more years. How tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) found in cannabis can have deleterious effects on the continuing development of young brains. How it was his parents that called me, expressing their deep disappointment in him and asking me to intervene.

Instead, I asked a question: Smoke all the pot you want but is that going to get you where you want to go in life? Free from the emotions present in a parent-child relationship and given that I cared more about his future than whether or not he liked me, we ended up having a spectacular chat about what is important, personal responsibility, and Colorado laws about teenagers and marijuana. As we were ending the conversation, I asked him if he would still be promoting his favorite phrase to others. Unsure at the time, a few weeks later he came by to tell me that since our conversation, he stopped using the phrase at all. He decided there was a lot more he wanted to be known for than “a doobie a day.”

Another setting where a good deanly chat often takes place is when I speak to groups of parents who are in the audience because they have children in the college search process. I find they are virtually always willing participants in the conversation and want to continue talking long after the allotted time has passed. In the public sphere there is a plethora of information that colleges direct at parents.  I find that much of it comes across as finely curated noise, designed to make parents feel good while not being so helpful at actually preparing them for what lies ahead.

By the time their child gets to college, parents are armed with few useful tools and get labeled helicopter, snow-plow, or bulldozer parents because Mom and Dad only have the tools to be interrupters in the process. All they’re left to do is stand on the sidelines cheering their children on, then at the first sign of trouble, parents instinctively run to their rescue with emotional medical supplies and a mental gurney ready to transport their child past any pain felt from a moment of failure.

The premise of the deanly chat for parents lies in the idea that when prompted, they want to be treated as full partners in the process of educating their kids. Too often as educators we only meet parents at two points: when we’re telling them how great the school is and when we call to say there is a problem. We’re long past the time when we all had to learn the dewey decimal system and we’re largely past the generation where everyone got a ribbon just for showing up. Now we have a generation of kids where answers are provided on-demand by their friends Alexa and Siri.

How do we teach our children grit and perseverance when everything comes to them so easily? In high school we start telling kids they need to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives and I’m afraid they’re going to think Alexa has the answer. Meanwhile many parents communicate the fear that if their kid doesn’t graduate on time and with a stellar record, the future is going to be really bleak.

I believe there is opportunity present to provide families with effective tools so they aren’t left to stand on the sidelines until there is an emergency.  Abraham Maslow once said “If all you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail.” A good deanly chat is about building a toolbox that has the right tools in it. For those reading this column, this space is a venture of collaboration, exploration, frank dialogue, and promoting positive learning partnerships.

This is a revision of my May 1, 2019 post.

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