I am a terrible gardener—to the point that when I am at a gardening store, walking down the aisles, looking at plants, you can, if you look closely, see the plants shivering slightly, shivering in fear that I will select them to bring home to my garden, where their specific care needs will be misunderstood, or they will simply be neglected, until they dry up an parish.

It is so bad that I once heard a particularly healthy geranium that I was about to select  cry out, “Oh, god, no. Not me! Please, not me!”

(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.)

This is all to say that I know very little about gardening and generally have found it hard to imagine that anyone would actually enjoy it. 

And then one day while at work, a number of years back, I was making Monday morning small chat with a coworker named Buffy. She was a sweet, preppy, somewhat older woman who was telling me about her weekend. She was feeling sore but pleased, as she and her husband had spent the whole weekend “putting in a new garden.”

Putting in a new garden. What did that even mean? To me, gardening was a matter of just randomly buying the flowers that needed to be purchased every year and then mistreating them.

Buffy, though, patiently explained that putting in a garden meant that you actually spend time designing all the areas you have for plants in your yard, and then map out all of the different plants that will go in, and you do this a bit like a painter paints.

She went on. You are playing with color and size and texture, and also factoring in how the different plants will flower at different times of the summer and how the look will change. Also, you are using a combination of perennials, which are the ones that come back, with some annuals, which you can change up every year.

They had worked all weekend on this new garden, she said, but now it is in place, they just needed to take care of the small amount of maintenance, weeding and watering, and purchase some annuals every year, and their garden would be great for years to come.

That exchange happened over ten years ago, and I have still never blossomed into a gardener. Gardenias continue to quiver in my presence. But I have returned in my mind to that metaphor and life lesson it represented over and over, especially as I get more involved in developing the minds of my kids.

Buffy was preaching the power of the intelligent, intentional one-time investment that has the potential to reap dividends over and over for years, in ways that make that initial investment seem like such a bargain.

Much of education falls under this category. The whole process is about the investment of time, effort, and expertise to install mental capabilities that our kids can tap into throughout their lives.

The investment Mrs. Rebholz made in 8th grade to teach me and my classmates how to write complex sentences has been paying off for me ever since in all of the writing I have been doing for the many decades since.

You have your own examples and are undoubtedly working with your kids to develop knowledge and behaviors every day that they will benefit from years to come--from brushing to learning to ride a bike to critical thinking. 

As I am doing more thinking about the current K-12 model, I am reflecting on the power of a well planted garden and musing about what skills or types of understanding would I, if I could go back in time, want to put into my own mind in my early days.

One surprising one that has occurred to me is cooking. In hindsight, given how much time we spend eating, it is slightly insane that we don’t learn to cook well in our early years. And I am not talking about the popover you might have learned to make in home ec.

With that in mind, I will at least make the case in future years for my kids spending a summer attending a vocational cooking school, explaining the way that bit of learning can make a difference across the years to come.

Another of the metaphorical gardens that I now realize would have been wise to put in early is relationship management. Friends, family, romantic partners, social circles, business networks--relationships end up defining so much of the way we experience life.

This is, of course, not surprising. We are herd animals. We are all about our relationships. Our. 

What is surprising is that there isn’t the investment of focused learning early to help increase our chances of getting relationships right. Instead, the learning is all very ad hoc, with some people naturally excelling, and others struggling. 

A telling sign that we could have all used help long ago is the rise of conversation cards as a trendy topic. We are still struggling with the most rudimentary element of relationships--what to say to each other. 

I don’t at the moment have any suggestions for supplementing your kids education in how to have thriving relationships, beyond suggesting that I think this is one of the skills we parents will be wise to help our kids plant early.

What else? What are other areas of life, knowing what you know now, that would be wise for your kids to learn in their youth--skills that aren’t typically taught as part of K-12, so that they can reap the rewards over time?

Maybe it is just me, but there are some critical lessons about building healthy relationships that would have served me well throughout the decades. As a result, this site will have some future writing and resources to help make this investment.

Possibly a good one start with--at least this is my plan--is to teach the Buffy rule and explain how certain savvy one-time investments of time and energy can pay benefits in our lives again and again--in ways we parents are jealous our kids can learn now.