I have distinct memories of my class portraits. I didn’t like brushing my hair, and all of my photos between the 2nd and 4th grades betrayed me with a subtle little lump just above and behind my left ear. In 1st grade I got chickenpox, and had recovered sufficiently enough to return to school – just before the lady from Timeless Images showed up with her tripod and green rug. Some people struggle with remembering when they got the chickenpox, but I only have to consult my 1st grade class portrait. There was the year I got glasses (4th grade), the year I had stitches in my chin (5th), and the year I was first allowed to wear mascara (6th). An entire personal history translated with clarity through my awkward class photos.

In the Newsweek article a Legacy Photographer named Kelly Price said, “People want their kids to look perfect rather than teach them to appreciate their flaws.” She goes on to say that she fears if she asked for her 12-year-old daughter’s photo to be retouched, she would be sending a message of insufficiency to that child. The article quotes a psychoanalyst named Susie Orbach as saying “The rise in airbrushing is a byproduct of a culture consumed with the idea that the body is perfectible.”

When my now 23-year-old daughter first realized she had buck teeth – the kind of sudden awareness that can crush a 10-year-old – I was able to show her pictures of me at the same age and with the same buck teeth. Then I showed her my class portrait from 8th grade – the one with the braces and the headgear. That – and a promise that head gear was rarely employed any longer – comforted her. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that she also saw the massive pimple just over my right eye in that same 8th grade photo – a reassurance that one day she, too, would enjoy pimple-free skin again.

I am disconcerted. I’m not sure if it’s the matter of being a part of a society that is “consumed with the idea that the body is perfectible,” or if my concern is related to the idea of what a perfect body should be. We live in a culture that idolizes the 15-year-old female form – no hips, and an ability to show 6″ of flesh below the navel without disclosing the presence of pubic hair. When I was a teenager it was socially risky to be larger than a size 7. Our children are under far greater pressure today, not only to be a much smaller size, but also to be self-conscious at a much younger age.

Our role as parents is to help our children see beauty in all its forms and to recognize their own inherent beauty – inclusive of any temporary or permanent perceived flaws. When we cave in to society’s superficial notions of what makes an attractive person we relinquish our ability to be authentic. A terrible sacrifice.

Many parents would assert that they ask for airbrushing in an attempt to protect their children from discomfort and dissatisfaction. But is this truly a service to them? Sparing our children the experience of discomfort only delays the time when they must confront it head on. Such delay can rob them of the skills necessary to face their frailties with humor or to muster the courage and strength to recover from a disappointment.

I remember scheduling my Senior Portrait. I was acutely conscious of how expensive it would be, and I asked my mom why the photos cost so much. Her reply was that, unlike my class portraits in years past, the senior photo would be taken in a studio with special lighting and photo retouching services. Not having any prior experience of that type of photography, I questioned the value of spending so much money. Her response? “Oh honey, won’t it be fun to have just one photo that makes you look like someone in a magazine ad? Something you’ll always hold on to because it’s your last class photo?”

It was. And I did. But in all the years since, I have gotten much more value out of those years of class photos that showed me precisely as I was.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

No, we’re not homeless.

We put our house on the market in July. July, 2007, the month the housing market imploded, sending would-be homebuyers everywhere running for the exits, or at least running for their latest FICO score. Suddenly the world of easy credit disappeared, and with it went the era of thinking one could sell their house in something less than five months. But that’s a topic for another day, because right now, we’re talking about home-schooling a kindergartner.

In July, our five-year-old was on track for entering kindergarten in less than five weeks. Kindergarten would not have been the significant milestone it was for our older children, who are 22 and 16. When I gave birth to the two older children I quit my job and worked from home for the first three years, and we had a nanny. So when the older kids entered kindergarten, it was an entirely new experience. When our six-year-old was born (somewhat of a surprise), I was the CEO of a mid-sized corporation. We kept her out of daycare for the first year by juggling schedules, after which she started attending day-care for half-days. When I ended my 11-year stint with that company in July, our little one had been in school half-days for four of her five years. We were all delighted to take a break.

Then we decided to move across the country, and we put our house on the market. What to do about kindergarten? We didn’t know if we should start her, then yank her out five weeks later (we were highly optimistic despite the daily gloom in the Wall Street Journal), or if we should hold off and start kindergarten in our new home. We opted for the latter. We bought books with titles like “What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know” and “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons,” and we began a daily playtime that included reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic.

From our little one’s perspective, it has been a blast. Every morning she dances around impatiently until it’s time to start school. She has now had nearly seven months of staying at home every day, hanging out with her family, and attending school in my home office. We’re worried that she will not be enthusiastic about attending real school when the time comes.

From my perspective, it has been a challenge. Apparently my skills as a businesswoman are not the same ones required to provide a kindergarten education. I am exhausted at the end of each 2-hour lesson. Did I push too hard? Not push enough? Is she making the appropriate progress? You know – the usual parental questions that always come back to the core issue — how badly am I ruining my child?

I was always relieved to be able to send my older children off to school each day. It was a comfort to know they were someone else’s responsibility for the next six hours, and that that somebody else was far more capable than I of preparing my child’s mind for the rigors of the future. Once we moved to the southern state in which we currently live (and are moving away from), that relief turned to constant anxiety. The schools are a huge disappointment. The community is small enough that you have to know someone to get into the very limited number of non-parochial private schools (we didn’t), and I really don’t think most parents – no matter how educated we are – are the best option for educating their own children. So the only option was to turn my children over to someone else’s responsibility each day, but no longer with the comfort of believing they were in better hands than my own.

My older children have done fine, due to their strong personalities and undauntable natures. But both of them chose to test out of high school early and proceed with college, rather than remain in the quasi-violent holding tanks that our community calls school. And no doubt that played a strong role in our decision that our youngest would have nothing to do with the schools in this community. When she enters school, it will be in truly top-notch public schools (far from being a public-school antagonist, I am an incredibly strong believer in the system, though it has been damaged so greatly by no-child-gets-ahead and prior administration neglect and abuses that one wonders what we can do to salvage it).

But in the meantime, I am gaining tremendous appreciation for those dedicated souls who throw themselves to the kindergarten gods each autumn, to embark on yet another season of teaching them social skills, reading, writing, and creativity. Without ruining them.

(c) 2008.  Andrea Hill

“What’s up son?”

“I got kicked out of the mall again. I really want you to help me do something about it.”

So began our sojourn into the perception and actions of private corporate security guards. An exploration of the mindsets that look on most teenagers as potentially dangerous unless they fit a very narrow range of physical description and demeanor.

The backstory: My son’s friend Richard was wearing a baseball cap with a word written across the back. By the guard’s admission, the cap was not gang related. But (again, by his admission) he decided to continue to follow and sweat the boys anyway. After being subjected to the unusually long scrutiny, Richard (16-years-old, 185 pounds of hormone in a 5’10″ frame, easily frustrated) blurts out “why the hell do you keep following us? We’re not doing anything!”

I surmise the security guard had achieved what he set out to achieve. With what my son described as grim satisfaction the guard began to berate Richard, calling him belittling names and swearing at him. My son must have looked disgusted, because the guard then began to lecture him about the importance of respecting his elders. To which my son replied, in an even tone, “How can you expect us to respect you when you aren’t respectable?” (important questionable objectivity disclaimer here – all of these details were confirmed by one of the security guards who witnessed the exchange).

At this point my son was also ejected. Last week he was ejected for loitering, which meant that he didn’t have a shopping bag in his hand after being observed in the mall for more than half an hour (he was collecting job applications). Last month he and two friends were ejected immediately upon entry for wearing baggy sweatshirts.

I do understand that there are troublemakers in the world, that our city has a gang problem, and that people carry concealed weapons and go off in malls with alarming frequency. I suspect mall security guards are somewhat on edge these days. But the picture that was painted, as we sat in the mall general manager’s office and talked through the situation, was one in which men in their 30s and 40s were exercising unnecessary personal power over teenage boys. What purpose does this serve?

The mall manager explained that the mall policy was one of “zero tolerance for gangs,” and he went on to talk – at some length – about their extreme concern for preventing any more mall shootings and for protecting the citizens who enter their mall. Who is suspected of gang activity or considered worthy of scrutiny? The answer, at first, was vague. But eventually, as we asked for specific examples, we learned that the profile of a gang member is any brown-skinned teenage male who wears baggy clothes, baseball caps, and walks with a slouch. If white-skinned teenage males dress like the brown-skinned teenage males, they are also suspects. My son is a brown-skinned teenage male who dresses in jeans and t-shirts but does not wear baseball caps. His friend Richard is a white-skinned teenage male who wears very baggy jeans and baseball caps. Neither are involved in gangs (yes, I’m quite sure).

The mall shooter in the most recent event in the Chicago suburbs was an African-American man dressed like any other man in the midst of a bad winter storm– dark jeans, winter coat, black knit cap. The mall shooter in Omaha was a waifish, nerdy looking young white man that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for a gang-banger. The mall shooter in Utah was a young white male wearing tan jeans, an overcoat, and a mullet haircut. The shooter in the December incident in a Delaware mall was wearing ordinary jeans and a windbreaker, no cap. I don’t see a pattern here.

Maybe the real concern is shoplifting? Probably not, because according to the National Shoplifting Prevention Coalition, shoplifters are equally divided between males and females, and only 25% are juveniles. Most notably, the coalition reports that a common profile for a shoplifter does not exist, so it can’t be targeted.

I must admit to a lot of curiosity on this issue. Does this profile fit for preventing mall fights involving teenagers? Research indicates that mall fights occur in all demographics with all types of teens. Juveniles (Americans under the age of 18) account for 25% of the population, and they account for 17% of all arrests, and 15%-25% of all violent crime (which the statistics indicate is generally not happening in malls). Juvenile males account for a disproportionate amount of violent crime, but misdemeanors demonstrate a much higher participation rate by females. Of great interest is that juvenile violent crime dropped 30% between 1994 and 1998, and has continued to improve (though I couldn’t find good recent statistics).

Is it possible that media-induced irrational fear of teenagers has turned our treatment of the future into a guilty-until-proven-innocent experience? A Public Agenda Online (http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/stats.html) survey indicates a disheartening lack of faith in our kids, with 71% of the general public reporting a negative attitude toward teenagers, including expressing the idea that they do not believe kids today will make the world a better place. Actual statistics of juvenile crime over a 20-year-timeframe indicate that juvenile crime has been misleadingly analyzed and reported (http://www.cjcj.org/pubs/myth/myth.html).

I don’t think my son and I changed the world during our one-hour meeting with the mall manager. But we both learned a lot, and I hope the mall manager did too. My son was able to practice the art of constructive conflict and exercise the ability to listen to someone with an opposing viewpoint before presenting his own ideas. The mall manager, once he stopped defending the mall’s position and really began to listen, started taking notes and promised to have a meeting with security to discuss improvements to their process. My son is no longer banned from the mall.

But the larger issue concerns me greatly. I have been acutely aware as my peers, all of us teenagers roughly a quarter of a century ago, begin to judge teenagers for their clothing, their speech habits, and their music. I don’t have the best memory, but I sure do remember my dad bemoaning my wardrobe, my parents telling me to turn down my music and what-was-I-listening-to-anyway, and being constantly corrected and chided for using teen slang. As an adult I have had very entertaining conversations with my parents about how their own parents were convinced that they (my parents) represented the end of society as they (my grandparents) knew it. And while we didn’t turn out so bad, I also have a sinking feeling every time I see an adult behave poorly in public, act disrespectfully to other adults in front of their children, and show up regularly on the evening news as perpetrators of a broad range of crimes. If we are going to ask “what is the world coming to,” shouldn’t we be asking it of ourselves?

I believe we should be vigilant against the presence of gangs in public life. It freaks me out that I live in a state where anyone can carry a concealed weapon. I, too, want to feel safe when I enter a mall. But the real answer doesn’t lie in antagonizing teenage boys in the process of figuring out who they are, how they want to look, and what they want to do with their lives. None of the statistics I researched demonstrated that there is any benefit in the type of profiling that is occurring in this mall (and I assume, other malls). If we could just turn our attention to poverty, public schools, adult training, fair housing, mental health, drug abuse, and nutrition, we could reduce crime statistics overnight. So who might we look to as a perpetrator of these ambitious acts of public salvation? The profile probably looks just . . . . like . . . us.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

About two weeks ago I heard from a friend that I needed to update my Linkedin profile, because it was way out of date. When I logged into my account (for the first time since I had set it up) I was startled at how much things had changed in such a short period of time.

It made me think about the mid 80s, when Compuserve was the only player on the internet (other than Unix code, finger and FTP). I had a Compuserve customer ID that had only three digits in it, and a “personal” computer that took up the entire surface of my large oak desk. Compuserve was nice, because it provided some communication tools that were otherwise unavailable on the early internet. Then AOL came along in the early ‘90s it was clear that major changes were going to occur. AOL was a community, and really promoted themselves as such. Compuserve was a technical interface with the internet that provided some cool tools. Sure, Compuserve had bulletin boards, but even the bulletin boards were a way for people with like interests to talk about topics that were interesting to them, and the relationships seemed like more of a side benefit.

I didn’t join AOL, because I didn’t feel the need for that community. But a lot of my friends became interested in the internet because of AOL, whereas they had not been interested before. I remember asking what was so interesting about communicating with all those people they didn’t know, and almost to a person the answer was that it was fun and interesting, a great way of meeting new people.

No matter what happened to AOL, they understood – or maybe they just fell into – a burgeoning need for community. It seems like there have been a few different but ultimately intersecting tracks occurring in modern life. The first is the ubiquitous computer. When I bought my first personal computer everyone thought I was crazy. My dial-up connection to use the internet was over my phone line using a modem, and transfer of any amount of data took a lot longer than faxing. Now everyone has a computer, including most 10-year-olds, and those who don’t have a computer and high-speed access to the internet from home can use the computers at the public library for free.

The next is the pace at which business operates compared to only 20 years ago. Our work has sped up, the labor force is getting more and more stretched, and businesses continue to seek ways to improve productivity, so everyone is working harder and faster. The stress this puts on the family is enormous, and for those who haven’t managed to establish families yet, it’s nearly impossible to do.

Enter the internet community. Teenagers report they talk more with their Facebook community than the friends they go to school with – and many of their Facebook friends are the friends they go to school with. In the space of one year Linkedin seems to have grown enormously. Microsoft was so frantic to get a deal with Facebook before Google did that it’s said they cut the deal in the space of one weekend.

The difference between Linkedin and the early AOL is actually quite striking. Early AOL was a way to meet people all over the country that you would otherwise not meet. Linkedin is a way of maintaining your own personal network so you don’t lose touch. Does this mean people aren’t staying in touch with their own networks now? That we’ve become so isolated from one another that we need electronic communities to connect?

And where does this all lead? If it’s true that identity can only be understood in terms of community (which I believe), and our communities have disintegrated about as far as we humans can tolerate, then it makes sense that services like Linkedin and Facebook step in to fill the gap. Of course, the ego is just a construct, and our ability to create a false identity in these virtual communities is very high, so then one wonders what will happen to the psyche in the process. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad or good – it’s just a very interesting step in the evolution of the concept of self.

I updated my profile on Linkedin, and I’ve already heard from a few people that I really had lost touch with. So that’s good. The idea of building virtual networks of people who work together from all different parts of the globe is exciting. And I’m a strong proponent of anyone who can gain work flexibility by leveraging the power of the internet and computers to be at home and with their families more. But I am concerned about the prospect of a world in which people need distance networks to maintain friendships and connections. And there’s a very specific reason why.

When people talk about their relationships at work, it is infrequent to hear them talk about them in glowing terms. Too frequently work relationships are a drain on the soul and not food for the spirit. If that’s the case, and if there is not enough other community balance – either in time or in numbers – then what happens to our overall health? And can a bunch of unhealthy people in a building create a healthy business? Because if they can’t, then all the Facebooks and Linkedins in the world won’t fix it.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

After describing how business managers fear and dislike people who are challenging, a little un-PC (it’s amazing how damaging one little acronym can be, isn’t it?), perhaps prone to scandal on the personal (not the work) side (i.e., “lacking a certain decorum”), difficult to manage, or even egotistical, he says “not only would you fire Winston Churchill, you couldn’t hire John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. or Pablo Picasso. Instead, you can staff up with the corporate equivalents of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and a pair of Bushes. How did we get to be so small?”

Indeed. Every business leader preaches the importance of innovation and outperforming the competition, yet business managers are busy squeezing every threatening and/or unconventional element out of their environment. The only possible result is the lowest common denominator, which clearly won’t achieve innovation and competitive wins.

I think we are all guilty of this at some time or another. The column caused me to look back over all my years of hiring and firing, and I can think of two specific cases where the difficulty of managing someone won out over their significant creativity with questionable resulting benefit.

On the other hand, there is no question that my most creative experiences at work have been while surrounded with very quirky people. The graphic designer whose psychological insights into others was acute even as he was a complete socio/psychological mess himself; the sarcastic but intensely effective professional who was repeatedly accused of egotism when he really was smarter than everyone else and if I couldn’t help but notice it surely he was aware of it as well; the completely adolescent, self-absorbed writer who could make business writing sound like poetry; the zen-y assistant who repeatedly came from so far in left field that he frequently took the rest of the group on a detour that invariably introduced creativity we never would have stumbled on without him; the cross-dressing analyst who regularly forgot to get all his mascara off before coming to work in the morning, and who freaked out the men around him by flirting with them just like they flirted with all the women in the office; the nuts-o marketer who spoke incomprehensibly fast and always had a personal crisis going on, but who could produce flashes of insight three or four times a year that paid for herself and everyone else in her department four times over; designers who could only work in the wee hours of the night and had to be cajoled into considering another viewpoint; and . . . my experience tells me that the sheer fun and creativity of working with people of superior talent and intelligence is well worth their eccentricities.

Years ago when I was in advertising, an art director, aware that I was frustrated trying to manage a group of what seemed to be overbred, tightly wound creative types, told me that I had to learn how to “ride the white elephant.” He explained that white elephants were believed to be as royal as kings, and moreover, they knew they were as royal as kings. So you couldn’t manage them like regular elephants, because they would refuse to participate. If you wanted to associate yourself with a thing of wonder, you had to accept that you weren’t going to be able to make all the rules. He taught me that I had to learn how to make the rules and not get run over (we did have a business to run) while learning how to accept that sometimes they made their own rules, and most important, how to offer them as much in value as I expected to get from them.

Is it a double-standard that I would never advocate keeping egotistical, difficult, surly, or eccentric people who are NOT smarter, more creative, more productive than everybody else? Maybe, but common sense says, why would you? 

In a very funny passage regarding a friend’s sexual deviation and her own mother’s response to it, Dauten share’s the mother’s advice, which was “Unusual people have unusual tastes.”  He ends by saying this:

“Whenever I’m tempted to be narrow-minded or judgmental, I think of that little sentence, “Unusual people have unusual tastes,” shrug, and mind my own business. I can only hope that there are executives who’ll do likewise, that they’ll keep eccentric geniuses on the payroll, despite the trouble they cause. Let’s broaden that maternal advice to this business wisdom: If you want unusual ideas, you’re going to have to put up with unusual people.”

Amen.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill