A12 O THEGLOBEANDMAIL| TUESDAY,FEBRUARY18,
LIFE&ARTS PARENTING&RELATIONSHIPS| OPINION| PUZZLES | WEATHER
| NEWSThequestion
My 14-year-old son is in Grade 9
and he has so much more home-
work than he ever has before. Ev-
ery day is a battle to get him to do
it. He’s doing well in school, but I
am so tired of fighting with him
about it.
Theanswer
I think that almost every parent
reading this shares your pain.
If you are nagging your child to
do his homework, and making
sure he does it, you are taking re-
sponsibility for his homework.
And if you are taking responsibil-
ity, he doesn’t have to. When will
you stop taking responsibility?
Grade 10? Grade 11? University?
You might want to stop now. That
doesn’t mean you wash your
hands of him. You can support
him in a way that still encourages
him to step up.
How do you do this?
First, hand the responsibility
back to him. I would start by tell-
ing him, “I love you too much to
fight about homework.” (I bor-
rowed this line from one of my fa-
vourite books, The Self-Driven
Childby William Stixrud and Ned
Johnson.)
You can say, “This is your life. I
think it’s important to do well in
school and at the same time I rec-
ognize that you have to decide
what’s important to you.”
You won’t be around forever to
motivate him. He needs to devel-
op self-motivation.
If you’re like most of us, this
will be scary. What if he stops do-
ing his homework and fails out of
school and never finds a job? That
probably sounds silly to read, but
taking charge of your child’s
homework likely comes from
your anxiety about what the fu-
ture holds for him.
Most of the time, we are “cata-
strophizing.” Our fears are un-
founded and we are imagining the
worst-case scenario. Learning to
take responsibility for himself is
actually the best way to avoid any
bad outcomes you might imag-
ine. You need to manage your
own anxiety so he can do this.
Next, help him think about the
future. Many kids actually do havean idea of what they’d like to do
when they grow up. But they
haven’t necessarily thought
about how to get there. Helping
him think about this can help him
develop self-motivation. For ex-
ample, one of my sons hopes to
get a scholarship to play baseball
in university and dreams of play-
ing professionally. He doesn’t care
much about school or grades. Yet,
he does his homework because he
recognizes that he needs to do
well in school if he wants to be
considered for a scholarship.
What does your son want to do
with his life? If he has some ideas,
help him research what it might
take to get there. If he wants to go
to university or college, what are
the high-school requirements? If
he wants to do something specif-
ic, like be a police officer, what
kind of higher education wouldhe need? If he has no idea what he
wants to do, you can speak about
“keeping your options open.”
You can still support him with-
out taking over. Homework is, af-
ter all, between your child and
their teacher. A simple, “Hey, do
you have any homework to-
night?” is a great way to let him
know you care. You could add,
“I’m here if you need any help. Let
me know.”
You did say that he was doing
well. That’s great and tells me that
he already has the skills he needs
for success. If you were worried
about lagging skills and felt he
needed extra help, I’d suggest
helping him make an appoint-
ment with the guidance counsel-
lor to see what supports are avail-
able.
Finally, remind yourself that
academics are not the be-all andend-all for everyone.
There are things in life that are
more important than high marks.
What else is your child interested
in? “Good enough” in school
might make room for “excellent”
in other areas.
The idea here is not to let him
fail. The idea is that the key to his
success, in whatever field, is effort
from him, not effort from you. It
may take a little while for him to
take responsibility.
Take a deep breath and remem-
ber that the possible outcomes
are not as dire as you might imag-
ine in your most anxious mo-
ments. While you wait, stay con-
nected and keep the lines of com-
munication open. Your faith in
him will give him faith in himself
to make the right choices.SpecialtoTheGlobeandMailHowdoIavoidargumentsabouthomework?
Encouragingyourchild
totakeresponsibility
fortheirassignments
willhelpthemmore
inthelongrunthan
naggingthemeveryday
SARAHROSENSWEET
OPINIONISTOCKPARENTINGSOS
I
t was Lesley Manville’s idea to
have Liam Neeson sprawl on
the floor. They were about to
film the most intimate scene in a
deeply intimate movie,Ordinary
Love. She was playing Joan, who
has breast cancer, and he was
Tom, her husband of many years
- and many ups and downs. Joan
will undergo a double mastecto-
my the next day, and they’ve
checked into a hotel room with a
bittersweet plan: To have sex for
the last time before her body is
changed.
Until now, the couple have
been pros at keeping it light,
keeping their sadness at bay. To-
night, they’re going to let them-
selves feel it.
But physically enacting this re-
quired finesse. “To put it bluntly,
if he’s lying on the bed and I’m
on top of him, there’s a lot of dis-
tance between us,” Manville said
in an interview during last Sep-
tember’s Toronto International
Film Festival. “Or else I’d be all
scrunched up.”
Manville, 63, is one of Britain’s
most popular and formidable ac-
tors. (As she puts it: “In England,
I’ve got the most brilliant ca-
reer.”) For more than 40 years,
she’s shone on television, film
and stage, working with the Roy-
al Shakespeare Company, the Na-
tional Theatre, the BBC and a
who’s-who of directors including
Sam Mendes, Stephen Frears and
especially Mike Leigh, with
whom she’s made a fistful of
films – and who is famously col-
laborative with his casts.
She’s been nominated multi-
ple times for multiple awards,
and has won a shelf-full.
Why shouldn’t she offer sug-
gestions?
“I like to think people employ
me because of what I’ve got to
offer,” she says briskly.
“Actors aren’t robots. We can
bring stuff to the day.”
We’re drinking little pots of tea
in a corner booth at a hotel res-
taurant.
Manville is wearing something
chic and black; she has a deli-
cate-featured, characterful face,
and a musical voice. (She trained
as a singer as well as an actor.)
Although she’s very pleasant
company, she’s not superen-
gaged by the interview process.
She regards me steadily and an-
swers readily, but it feels as if
she’s floating above it, that it’s
not really her concern.
Born in Brighton, she bossed
around her two older sisters, but
was“noanarchicrebel–Iwasa
good girl. Still am.”
She married and divorced two
actors, Gary Oldman and Joe Dix-
on, and has a son, Alfie, who’s 30.
She lives in London, where she
still takes the tube. “I need to be
in the world,” she says.
She certainly knew what she
was in for withOrdinary Love.
Written by the acclaimed play-
wright Owen McCafferty and di-
rected by Lisa Barros D’Sa and
Glenn Leyburn – a married cou-
ple – the film is powered by its
precise observations, of both
marital contentment and the
ravages of cancer treatment. “Lis-
ten, there’s no point coming to
this project thinking, ‘Oh, do I
have to take my clothes off? Do I
have to look rough?’ ” Manville
says.
“I wasn’t going to try to not
look rough. Some of the shots
are really brutal. But that’s what
this is. We always planned to go
all the way with this film, and I
love that we did. It doesn’t shy
away.”
Because the hotel-room scene
is all about Joan’s breasts, Man-
ville knew Neeson had to be
close to them.
So she suggested that he lie on
the floor – his back propped up
against the bed’s footboard, his
long legs stretched out – and that
she straddle him.
(She’s 5-foot-2, and he’s a full
foot taller; the film uses their size
difference to touching affect.)
It was Neeson’s idea that Tom
should slowly unwrap Joan’s
scarf to reveal her bald head. “It’svery powerful,” Manville says.
“A, to see a love scene between
two people who are over 60” –
Neeson is 67 – “and B, it’s saying,
‘I love you and desire you even
without your hair.’ Scar across
her breast. But it still manages to
be sexy.”
As mentioned, in England,
Manville cherry-picks the
projects she likes – doing Ibsen
and Chekhov on stage, playing
Margaret Thatcher on TV, star-ring in films such asAnother Year
(2010), which earned her the
London Film Critics Circle award
for best British actress.
But she experienced “unques-
tionably, a shift” when she
played Daniel Day-Lewis’s un-
compromising sister in Paul Tho-
mas Anderson’s 2017 drama
Phantom Thread.
“Suddenly I was in a film di-
rected by one of America’s great-
est directors. With Daniel,” she
says.
“So, everyone is going to see
it.”
Her subsequent Oscar nomi-
nation for best supporting ac-
tress opened up Hollywood in a
way she would not have pursued
on her own.
“I would never, at age 60-plus,
go sit in America and wait for
them to give me a job,” she says
laughing.
“So I’m enjoying it all immen-
sely,” including roles in twoMa-
leficentfilms and the comingLet
Him Go, opposite Kevin Costner.
But wherever she works, Man-
villewon’t play “just somebody’s
wife or mother,” she says.
“It has to be very woman-cen-
tric for me to want to do it. My
thing is to be a chameleon, differ-
ent parts, characters of different
classes.”
She doesn’t overrehearse; she
likes to “make room in the mo-
ment, to see what comes.” But
she puts in the hours.
“I do my homework, I turn up
on time,” she says. “And I get
very irritated when people
don’t.”
Cautiously, Manville ventures
that the film and TV industry are
becoming more receptive to
characters her age.
“Film companies, producers,
are slowly realizing there’s a
massive market for women over
40 and 50, to go to films where
they are properly reflected and
observed,” she says.
But she doesn’t have a dream
project – “just more of the same,
please.” Her smile is serene.
So she doesn’t fantasize about
landing a blockbuster franchise,
playing the head of a galaxy?
“And get the big paycheque?” she
coos. “I could do that, yeah. Can
you sort that out for me?”
We both laugh at that. The
amount of sorting out that Lesley
Manville needs from anyone else
is zero.Special to The Globe and MailOrdinaryLove’s
LesleyManvillewasalways
ready‘togoalltheway’
JOHANNA
SCHNELLER
BIGGERPICTURELesleyManvillesaysitis
importantthatherroles
are‘woman-centric.’In
OrdinaryLove,above,she
playsJoan,awomanwho
hasbreastcancerandis
preparingtoundergo
adoublemastectomy.