Learning thinking is implicitly tied up in all the learning that we do throughout school and life. Thinking, despite how central it is to everything we do, is typically not taught head on. We don’t grow up taking classes in effective thinking. Think about that for a moment. It arguably is the point of much education, learning effective thinking, and yet the entire design of K-12 and beyond is to teach thinking indirectly. We can take steps to help our kids think better, just as we can make progress improving our own thinking. In my own experiment of one with my son, I have seen that it can work far better than I even anticipated.
Let’s assume that at 18 she comes into a trust worth $25 million. And then there are going to be several inheritances in the ensuing years such that the little girl’s future estate will eventually grow to hundreds of millions of dollars. Somewhere in the wake of the oohing over the adorable tiny skis and taking in all the sweetness, I started thinking about Prudence Celery’s fabulous wealth, and I decided that it was deeply unfair and that I would dedicate the rest of my life to lobbying for an aggressive inheritance tax targeted at young alpinists. Actually, that is not where this is going.
There are lots of well-founded reasons why parents work to shield kids from failure. And some un-founded. We worry that if our kids learn about all the failing, they might end up as failures. They will catch failure. And we will end up the parent with the adult kid living in out in the garage in their thirties, surviving on cans of Chef Boyardee, while spending years trying to finish the application to their tattoo art college safety school. Whatever the reasons that we keep failure on the down low, the degree to which we do is a mistake, as navigating failure is unambiguously one of central keys to an effective and meaningful life.
I was trying to help my daughter with some long division last night. Only, we were working with some online practice website that assumed she had learned a slightly different version of long division…I honestly couldn’t quite understand it, and was thus scouring YouTube for videos that would explain this variation of long division, but because we couldn’t find it, and I wanted be to be helpful, Daddy was fighting the urge to to teach the practice software his own lesson by bashing his daughter’s Chromebook into lots of flying little pieces. Bad Chromebook!
Despite the power of the written word, when it comes to the education that our kids are receiving, writing is the runt of the litter, with reading and math receiving far more of the vital nutrient of focus in the classroom. Meanwhile, many kids of the pandemic era, thanks to online learning, can barely print legibly, let alone be comfortable putting sentences together. The good news is that we, as parents, can absolutely help fill in the gap…
If we are going to build quality neural pathways in the minds of our children that help them process nonfiction text, as well as ideally informing their own writing in the future, adding them to the prized readership of the New Yorker seems like a savvy strategy.
Let’s take a moment to talk about the sex talk that was a rite of passage for so many of us. I’ll go first. Here is what I remember from my youth: my mom dropped some 1950’s-era pamphlets on my bed. She suggested I read them. She added: feel free to ask questions. End of talk. I did also receive school-based sex education at Creek Valley Elementary School, but it was not much better, delivered by a very young female teacher who gave the classic, cliched and very incomplete play-by-play. As lame as those sex talks were and still often are, at least there is a cultural tradition of actually having a formal discussion with our kids.
Now, stay with me, because this mildly comic opening is going to transition to a big life lesson. And as with all life lessons, it has the thrilling potential to change the trajectory of all who encounter it. Though, of course, no promises.
I am a little nervous as I address you all, every person on the planet who has been parenting or otherwise caretaking kids during the pandemic. There are so many millions of you out there, including a number of whom I haven’t yet had the opportunity to meet. But what I have to say has to be said, for the sake of us parents and our kids. Since no one else is stepping forward, I will give it a shot.
So much of our life as a family is, while something I treasure, feels far more than the inside of one of those lotto numbered ping pong ball machines than I would like. Exciting, but also pure chaos. At some point, the notion of having an opportunity to come together to check in, discuss the good and bad, and potentially course correct, seemed like a great antidote to what is otherwise mayhem.
I am not sharing just for the pleasure of the backdoor bragging. In fact, thrilled as I am by the early validation for my crackpot theories, (or, to use business vernacular, the achievement of product-market fit), I feel a bit sick about it all. I am sick about it because what is being revealed beyond what I even suspected is that my bright young kids have likely been starving for a greater level of mental stimulation and challenge for a very long time.
What do you want to be when you grow up? This is a question we were all asked at some point in our early childhoods. Typically, it was posed by someone who wasn’t very good with kids. As those little kids, we did our best to respond. Um, fireman/woman, policeman/woman, astronaut? Meanwhile, our little kid inner voices were saying something else, an innocent version of: just how the hell am I supposed to know what I want to be when I grow up? I can’t even tie my shoes, dude!