To Teach, They Reach For Obama
President-Elect Upheld As a Role Model for Kids

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 13, 2008

Sherry Jones was driving her 13-year-old son, Malcolm, to school the other morning when he mentioned something about some kid he didn't like.

Something about the kid being a jerk.

Jones told him that wasn't kind. When you speak of people, she said, always speak good of them.

"Look at Barack! . . . During the campaign, no matter what, Obama always took the high road," she told him. "During the debates when John McCain would say a dig, Barack would never react. . . . He was always positive."

Malcolm, who likes a good debate, was, for that moment, quiet.

In that silence, Jones realized that something about her spontaneous, trapped-in-the-car lecture was working. "If my son didn't agree, he would let me know," says Jones, an accountant who lives in Silver Spring. "He always has something else to say. . . . Usually, he will say, 'Yeah, but . . . ' When I use Barack Obama as an example, I can see him. He's quiet. He may sit up a little straighter.

"He hasn't gotten to the point where he says, 'You are right.' " But there is something to be said for him saying nothing.

Parenting can be like that. You take what you can get. Any acknowledgment of the parental lecture. Not getting the "yeah, but" can be the change a mother waits for, a silent proof that her nagging isn't going in one ear and out the other. Proof that some of the blah, blah, blah is sticking. So some parents have leaped from reviewing Obama's Cabinet choices to summoning him up at the breakfast table, invoking his name, words and accomplishments to motivate a dawdling, recalcitrant child.

You could call it Obama discipline or Obama etiquette, and it goes something like this:

Get up! Do you think Obama would have slept late and not made it to school on time?

Why don't you guys share? Don't you think Obama would want you to share?

How much did you read? Obama would have finished the book by now.

Do you think Obama would sneak cigarettes? (Oops.)

Obama has become that nice man up the street you want your kid to grow up to be like. And yet we know this example has pitfalls. Real people -- politicians, presidents, football players, actors, musicians -- made of flesh and blood have this little nagging mortal tendency to make mistakes. People inevitably disappoint, leaving parents with a different teachable moment.

This week provided a sharp lesson in the kind of company you keep, or the company you try to stay away from, when the Illinois governor, from whom Obama has tried to distance himself, was charged with trying to sell Obama's Senate seat.

Parenting is lonely, irritating, often maddening work. The work is never complete. A parent is often second-guessing herself. Never thinking she has done enough. Not sure whether her standards are set too high or not high enough. Never sure what's working. Never sure that the child who seems fine now won't be a mess at 30.

So parents reach for help: an ancestor, a cousin, a historical figure -- somebody the child has to look up to. Their latest imaginary friend has become the president-elect, a person held to such high standards that if you parented just right, your child could end up like that, too. We know this is fantasy. But Obama's mother probably didn't think she was raising a future president either. So you grab at what strings are out there.

"It's the third-party thing," says Jill Miller Zimon, a freelance writer and mother of three school-age children. "With kids, lots of times when a child won't do something for you, you will . . . pretend a third party said it was a good thing to do. If you say the doctor said you needed to do this, or your teacher said you needed to do this, it has more impact than Mom and Dad." They perform better for other people. "They are more polite. Because they are more comfortable around Mom and Dad, it is easier to act up because they know there is unconditional love."

And it's nice, she says, "to go back to a time. . . . I could remember in school when you really did hold the president up as an example."

In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama describes his mother's emphasis on education. "Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work. I offered stiff resistance to this regimen, but in response to every strategy I concocted, whether unconvincing ('My stomach hurts') or indisputably true (my eyes kept closing every five minutes), she would patiently repeat her most powerful defense: 'This is no picnic for me either, buster.' "

Avis Jones-DeWeever, a Woodbridge mother of two and director of research at the National Council of Negro Women, bought her children a book about Obama's childhood. "I use it as inspiration for my children," she says. "They see it as real. I look at the picture of Barack on the tricycle. They can see themselves in him. I tell them all the time, 'You are brilliant, but brilliance necessitates hard work to get to the level he reached.' "

There was a point near the end of the presidential campaign when Obama's perseverance rang clear for Jones-DeWeever. "Both he and McCain were in Pennsylvania on a rainy day. McCain canceled. But Barack was there in the rain. The rain was pouring, and he was speaking, and the crowds were there," Jones-DeWeever said. "He did not slow down. At that moment, I knew he would win. It is that sense of determination that I want to impart to my children. That being good is not enough. You also have to have that drive. I want my boys to be like that."

She talked to them about Obama's "Yes We Can" speech in New Hampshire: "To me, what was inspiring about that speech -- that was not a victory speech. He gave that speech after he lost," she says. ("What does that tell you?" she asked her kids. "When you lose, you can still come back.")

Her 12-year-old son, Guy, memorized the speech and delivered it last semester to his sixth-grade class.

Parents are weaving the president-elect's name into speeches of their own as they reach for backup from a man whose life story was anything but perfect.

The Rev. Thomas H. Hagin, pastor of Brightwood Park United Methodist Church in Northwest Washington, use the stories on his children and those in his congregation. "We say: No more excuses. All things are possible. But it comes through hard work. . . . No one can say just because we have been kissed by the sun, we can't reach the presidency."

His wife, Tammy, a D.C. social worker, says she has made a more conscious effort to sit down with their daughter, Amber, to go over school assignments. "Even in Amber, I have seen a push to do better because of the reality of Obama." She turns to her daughter, who is listening with her head in her hand. "I asked you what you wanted to be," the mother says, "and you said you wanted to be a judge. Does that feel more doable now?"

"Yes," says Amber, 14, an eighth-grade student, "because Obama can do it. I see myself studying harder. I stay more focused. I take more notes. I am asking a lot more questions."

Obama discipline is complicated. Kids relate to him in a way that they say they have not related to other politicians. He might be the president-elect, but he's cool, he's young, he speaks a language they understand.

"He's different than other presidents," Malcolm Jones says. "He has kids who are young. And he was endorsed by a lot of icons."

Harlan Jones, director of the New Sewell Music Conservatory in Northwest Washington (and no relation to Malcolm), is sitting in his office talking about Obama with his 12-year-old daughter, Nia, a sixth-grader whose grades have slipped from her usual straight A's.

"You have to get back on page, just like he did," he tells Nia. "We know you are better because you exemplified that through past studies. Suppose he had gotten down? With that in mind, Nia, please straighten up. Look at his strategy. He surrounded himself with people who were hardworking. . . . Who are your supporters?"

"My parents," Nia says, submitting to the lecture.

"I'm glad you said that. . . . You have a support system to do what?"

And Nia, tidy in her blue-and khaki school uniform, obediently answers, "Succeed."