I’ve got twins in final exams this week. Sometimes I feel more like a cop than a mother: “Where are you going? Shouldn’t you be studying? Take off your headphones. Are you sure you’ve covered everything?”

 

I was a very self-driven (read Type-A) kid. I cannot recall a time when my parents ever had to remind me to study. I was an athlete from a young age and I always knew I had to get my school work done to keep doing what I loved to do. I pushed myself through high school, college and graduate school. There was something innate that drove me. I look back on my younger self and I think, “Just relax. It’s going to be OK.” I’m still very Type-A but I feel like I can better roll with the punches with a little more experience under my belt and I’m better able to choose my battles and let the rest go. Most days.

 

One of my twins is like the younger me. My Baby B. He is pretty self-reliant. He does a good job of directing himself, and knowing what he needs to do. He’s the last boy up each night and the first one up in the morning. Honestly, my husband and I feel a little sorry for him sometimes because he gets himself so tightly wound. Poor guy got it from BOTH of us. We see our “Type-A”ness in him and we wish he could relax too.

 

Then there’s his twin brother, Baby A.

 

Let me back up to their first eighteen days of life in the hospital NICU. The nurses loved to feed Baby B because he was the fastest bottle-drinker in the unit, powering down a bottle in three minutes. He was a pound smaller at birth so I think he just came out fighting for nutrition.

 

Not my Baby A. He would just lay back and relax. He couldn’t be bothered with the effort of sucking on a bottle. If a preemie won’t eat on his own after thirty minutes they have to feed them through a tube in his nose. His attitude was very much “just put it in the tube, I can’t be bothered with all that trouble.”

 

Thirteen years later you can still see this on my boys.  Watching them study for finals seems to highlight their differences. Don’t get me wrong. They both really want to do well and be successful. Their methods of getting there are just different. On one hand I want my Baby B to relax and keep it all in perspective. On the other hand, I want Baby A to take it up a notch. They are definitely wired differently.

 

One of the best things that happened for all three of us this school year was a speech given by their new and very young English teacher. She told us at back to school night that she would not accept late assignments from the kids. She said it was time for them to learn about responsibility and consequences now, in the 7^th grade, before high school when every thing would count.

 

I remember having this dialogue in my own head, “Oh no, no late work. That’s tough. That doesn’t seem fair. Oh, but wait. I understand the reasoning. Hey, I think I really like this plan. It’s time for my boys to learn to be responsible for their own actions.”

 

I will admit that until that point I was probably doing a lot more hand holding and cruise directing than I needed to. Maybe no more than any other mother I knew, but I was exhausted and frustrated and concerned at the same time that these kids were not learning to be very self-reliant. That, combined with “every kid gets a trophy” and “kids can’t leave the house by themselves for fear of parents being questioned by the authorities for being free-range parents” was making our kids soft and incredibly dependent on us.

 

Last summer I started kicking my boys out of the house and encouraging them to just get out and go do boy stuff. Sheesh, with cell phones they can hardly end up in the predicaments we used to as kids (bike chain comes off miles from home – now what?). I wanted them to disconnect, get creative and be outside. Remember being gone for hours and hours and hours as a kid?

 

Then last fall that teacher encouraged us to let them suffer the consequences of their actions. That was such a liberating statement for me. Here this teacher, half my age, was giving me permission to stand down. It changed our school year dramatically. Other than periodically asking if their work was done or telling them to take off headphones while studying, we rarely intervened. Guess what happened? They both stepped up their game and started taking a lot more responsibility for their grades.

 

So here we are in the last week of school. I have mostly just policed that they are actually working. The structure, content, etc. of their week has been on them. They have owned it and so far the results are proving positive.

 

A side consequence of me easing up on the reins this year? My fourth grader, the little brother, has assumed total responsibility for his work. He rarely asks for help and simply asks me to sign off each night. I ask “You got it done?” He says “Yep.” I sign off. It’s a beautiful thing. His independence is refreshing. Third kids! (I’m one too!)

 

So I wrap up this post to check in on my boys one more time before their last final tomorrow.

 

“You got it done?”

 

“Yep.”

 

Bring on summer.