Parent Joy
Happy Friday, everyone.
Those of you who have met me have probably heard some version of my origin story and how I came to be a part of the team that is Higher Ground, and more broadly how I came to Montessori.
After a bad initial experience working in education, I spent most of my early career in retail management. Years later, though, fortuitous circumstances offered a chance to give education a second try. My husband took a job as a language arts teacher at a Montessori middle school. We also enrolled my child, then a small toddler, at the same Montessori school. And this Montessori school just happened to be run by the team that went on to found Higher Ground.
Clearly, my origin story is rooted in my family. I was convinced of not only the rightness of Montessori for my specific family, but of the urgency and value of expanding it across the world. This conviction flowed from my own deeply personal and joyful experience as a parent. My commitment to Montessori is and always has been about experiencing its value first-hand via my family, and, simultaneously, doing deep, thoughtful work to ensure that its promise is expanding outward.
At the very beginning of Higher Ground, I actually experienced family and work as a conflict. Prior to Higher Ground, I mostly optimized for stability and clarity in my work and personal life. I wanted to work hard at big things, but within the confines of what felt safe. Higher Ground was a true startup: a great team with big dreams, a big appetite for risk, and nothing but the willingness to start from scratch. Joel and I realized that joining the founding team at Higher Ground would mean stepping away from the stability of an established organization. It would mean risking that we could be without a job at any moment. It meant risking that we wouldn’t have that ideal situation for our children. Further complicating the decision was that we had been trying to add a third child to our family for some time. At that moment we felt that deciding to join Higher Ground would require that we abandon the plan to have another child. Little did we know that I was already pregnant.
I gradually came to understand that there wasn’t a conflict between growing and embracing my family life and pursuing my dreams, but that instead I could choose to see them as inextricably connected. We started Higher Ground when I was still in my first trimester, and by the time my third child, Griffin, was born, we had opened the Foothill Ranch campus and created a path forward for me to have my children once again directly experiencing the world I was working to create. That first drop-off, the moment of having all 3 of our children entering a building that we knew had not existed in its current format nearly months ago, and knowing that we had put our blood, sweat, and tears into creating this opportunity for them, was a shining moment of parent joy for me.
That singular moment of parent joy has expanded and shifted into new forms over time. First out of necessity, and then eventually because of the value I saw it bring for my children, we began traveling throughout our growing school network with one or two children in tow. Not only were my children experiencing the joys of one specific Montessori classroom, but also the joys of the work of building schools alongside me. In one of our first summers, my oldest son went on a 3-week-long trip with me visiting Texas and Chicago. He actively participated in the building of furniture, the arranging of the room, the placement of tape on buckets (which I soon learned he was much better at than I was).
This past weekend brought another of these integrated work-plus-family experiences. I had the opportunity to participate in a conference put on by the Montessorium team at our Museum Mile location in NYC, called The Great Rethink in Education. In previous years, my children had the joyous experience of attending Museum Mile during our New York visits, usually for a week in the fall or winter. We had not been to NYC since 2019, and this trip felt like a return to that spirit of adventure, of building, of absorbing the amazing things each new city and school has to offer. While I spent the day with a room of 50 passionate people digging into deep issues in education, my children had the exquisite experience of working with guides (huge shout out to Natasha, Taylor, and Laura from Brooklyn Heights) to first plan and then do and enjoy their day in the city. They frolicked in Central Park with popsicles. They meandered through the Museum of Natural History. And to end the day, they joined the adults for a Touching the Art experience with Luc Travers at The Met, something they had the privilege of doing 5 years prior when we first started running marketing events for Museum Mile.
The visit to the Met embodied the root of what I now see as a pattern of parent joy for me. Yes, I love that they have amazing guides and make progress through the scope and sequence of the Montessori curriculum. Yes, I love that they have beautifully crafted classrooms and smoothly-run schools to attend. But more than those day-to-day moments, what really stands out to me, what brings me to tears, is being able to see the lived application of that school experience outside of the classroom. It’s being able to see my children engage with the world and embrace it, full of curiosity and joy. It’s that Montessori Multiplier effect in action—and visible to me as a parent as my children engage in learning and growing alongside me.
So why am I sharing all of this? It’s great that my children have these experiences, and that I find such joy in these moments of seeing my work and their work collide, but what’s the broader implication here?
In general, my hope is that hearing about this experience will first and foremost bring you some level of joy—that you will know that you are directly contributing to creating this type of joy simply by being a part of the organization.
More than that, though, I hope that you can pause to reflect on your own joy as an employee, and especially those of you that are employees and parents. When and how do you feel joy in your work? When and how do you feel joy in your child’s experience at a Higher Ground school? What makes these moments significant and how can we cultivate them?
In addition, we can think more broadly about all of our parents and the intent to create this type of joy for them. I, of course, happen to have lots of insight into how our classrooms work, and that makes it easier for me to spot and embrace the Montessori Multiplier out in the world. Is that true for all of our parents? How can we, as the adults supporting children day-to-day in school, make sure that our joy, the way we delight in their children and their children's engagement and delight in work, is fully visible to parents, such that they can share in this joy?
This is something that I think is critical for us to think about, discuss, and work on in the coming months, as that feeling of deep joy I’ve cultivated—not momentary joy, but rather a deep feeling of knowing at root that my children are growing and unfolding as distinct individuals that are comfortable engaging in the world—that is something every single parent should get to feel.
Have a great weekend,
Maris