 OLD SCHOOL WITH RICK HESS

Simple, Sensible Advice for Raising Virtuous Kids

Musing on the practical wisdom of Four Lessons from My Three Sons

This week, we’ll be lighting the menorah a couple feet from the Christmas tree. Only in

America.

Contemplating such moments always leaves me amazed by such blessings and how they have

come by a combination of luck and hard-earned wisdom. In this instance, it brought to mind a

slender book I had a chance to read earlier this fall.

Author Jeff Nelligan penned Four Lessons from My Three Sons to share his experiences trying

to teach his kids “the basic universal virtues—civility, confidence, resilience and ambition.”

You can’t get any more old school than that. It’s a book about parenting, but pretty much the

whole of it applies equally to teaching and mentoring.

This is simple, sensible stuff. It feels to me like we don’t spend enough time nowadays on the

simple, sensible stuff. We should spend more. Readers won’t find much that’s surprising, but

they’ll find good sense, encouragement, and some useful nuggets.

Nelligan starts with a simple but oft-confounding question: “How do you get a kid to pay

attention?” Schools pay experts and professional trainers a lot of money for answers to that

question. But I suspect Nelligan’s pithy advice may frequently prove more useful.

Recognizing that kids are going to roll their eyes at parental lectures, Nelligan suggests pointing

out specific examples of good and bad behavior as we see them unfold in real time. He tells of

one such experience while leaving a football field with his boys. They watched one of the

players walk off, with his dad carrying his equipment bag and his mom carrying his helmet,

while the boy walked “ten feet ahead . . . texting furiously on a cell phone.” Nelligan’s advice to

his kids? “Don’t ever be like that jackass.”

In an era when sensitivity to feelings may leave some parents hesitant to be this blunt, Nelligan

reminds us that life requires us to constantly make judgments, big and small. He urges parents

(and teachers) to accept that and then be present, principled, and clear in those judgments.

Indeed, he argues that the basics of good conduct are simple. As he puts it, “There’s no intellect

necessary in looking into someone’s eyes when you speak with them. There’s no

expertise needed in shaking hands with an adult and saying Mr., Mrs., or Ms. . . . These are the

easiest, simplest tasks there are.”

When encouraging his kids to be aware of the world around them, Nelligan drills them with

questions. I’ve been known to do something similar, and I quite liked his suggestions: “How

many people in this grocery store do you see wearing college sweatshirts? How many people

are working as waiters in this restaurant? How many out-of-state license plates do you see in

this parking lot?”

Nelligan describes seizing opportunities to reinforce fundamental principles. Like me, he’s a big

believer in timeliness—and that anything other than a respect for punctuality suggests to others

that your time is more valuable than theirs. (My kids have heard me give this little homily many

times. Maybe that’s why Nelligan’s take on this gave me a chuckle.) He tells of a time a family

showed up disruptively late to a school event. Afterward, the family meandered over to him,

with the father explaining, “We were late getting here because we’re always so damn busy.”

Nelligan’s response, in front of his sons? “Yeah, I hear you. Good thing the Nelligans are never

busy.”

There are sensible tips to building a kid’s self-assurance and sense of competence. When his

boys were little, Nelligan would tell them: “You guys are small so if you get lost somewhere in

a bunch of people, look for that guy with a stripe running down their pants. That’s a policeman

or a solider and they’ll help you out.” When his five-year-old got lost at a mall, he stared at legs

until he found a mall security officer.

The volume is hit-or-miss. Some anecdotes fall flat. But it’s an engaging, provocative

contribution. As Nelligan puts it, he wrote this book “with an edge because after 20 years in

Parent World, I know that parenting in this increasingly erratic and questionable culture

demands hard and direct truths, not soft-pedalled equivocation.”

That’s a pretty fair summation of both the book and the need for an old-school approach to

education.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School."