Prudence Celery
Note: The names of several of the kids referenced in this post have been changed, though the names chosen are similar in spirit to the actual names.
A very little girl, probably just three, is being fitted for equipment to go downhill skiing for the first time. She is this tiny, too-cute kid who, were her parents so inclined, could be a featured model in a Ralph Lauren kids clothing campaign, with her wavy blonde hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and real live dimples.
A ski rental dude, after some extended searching in the back, finally comes out with some appropriately tiny downhill ski equipment. He even has a pair of real boots for her. They are just like the big clunky hard plastic ones wear, but super mini. What is it about miniature things that are so cute? Real little ski boots!
The little girl’s face lights up. She drops the dolly she has been holding to reach out for the ski boots. All of the adults witnessing the scene collectively go awwwe. This includes mom, dad, grandpa, and grandma, rental guy, and me—the random customer who was waiting his turn and got caught up in the the moment.
It was, sincerely, a sweet scene. At the same time, it got me thinking. The ski rental space we were in was not some sprawling place at the base of a huge resort with music blaring, the smell of hot wax from ski tuneups in the air, and throngs of people coming and going. It is a small little alcove in a luxe residence and resort complex that is nestle midway up the mountain at a more exclusive ski facility.
As you wait for your skis, you can help yourself to hot chocolate from a beautiful silver urn, which is right next to is a basket of cute kits for s’mores, all individually wrapped in cellophane, and then out the window you can see a stunning view of snow covered mountains, and in the foreground is an inifiniti pool, steam rising off the ninety-degree water, a pool that gives you the option of swimming from the outside right on into the spa.
I could go on and on, about the elevator in the sprawling townhome in which we are we are staying, the work-of-art and constantly changing breakfasts buffet items, and the swarm of servers who attend to you during breakfast, but you get the idea. It is the kind of place you see in the travel and leisure magazine at the dentist’s office and likely runs more than $100,000 for a week’s family vacation (lodging, skiing, restaurants, shopping, plane, etc.).
My presence in the splendor is accidental. I am tagging along on a guys’s ski trip that is being hosted by a generous, smart, and industrious friend, whose entrepreneurial efforts have been sufficiently successful that he owns a unit within this complex. (I meanwhile am what my daughter calls unemployed, even though I have repeatedly explained that daddy is on a vision quest, which is different.)
The little skier, whose name is Prudence Celery, is no interloper, as some tactful eavesdropping reveals. Her family recently bought one of the homes, adding it to the others (Bermuda, Majorca, Manhattan). Which means, among other things, that little Prudence will, in a relatively short time, say fifteen years, probably come into an initial tranche of wealth that is far greater than most of us will earn in a lifetime.
I am speculating, but let’s assume that at 18 she comes into a trust worth $25 million, but. because of how much support she receives from her family, most of that will just keep growing, and then there are going to be several inheritances in the ensuing years, with lots of expert financial management along the way, 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. As long as the adult Prudence Celery doesn’t get excessively creative with the tax dodges and shelter corporations, or try to come after me or my descendants should word somehow someday reach her that I took the liberty of referencing her in this post, my view of her financial head start is: you go, girl.
That said, it did occur to me that she could help me out, serving as an illustration for some valuable lessons on the realities of the world that I don’t think my kids are learning in school.
Prudence Celery, Abdul, and Boys in Blue
My kids attend a middle school in a city school district where the topics of equity and social justice are very front and center, and have been since early elementary school, the central message of which I fully agree with: that we in the U.S. cannot manage to provide a world-class education for all our kids in what is often referred to as the world’s richest nation is—as I assume we can all agree—tragic, shameful, and something to fix.
As it happens, much of the discussions that the kids are exposed to around equity are limited to their school. Discussions like: were the auditions for the play properly advertised to the Somali community, given no Somali kids auditioned, and is the best remedy to cancel the play even if Somali parents are suggesting they knew about it but didn’t want their kids involved. Kids should also understand that some inequities aren’t going anywhere.
For instance, while the U.S. education system is often denigrated for how poorly it compares to that of other developed nations, this statement does not apply to the elite private schools in the U.S., which is a point that can be overlooked. Top U.S. private schools offer exceptional educations, especially for kids like Prudence who can couple their schooling with outside tutors, coaches, and other learning and development specialists.
Prudence’s education will be such that she is going to be fluent in not one but two secondary languages. She is also going to learn coding at an early age, even venturing into machine learning and AI while still in middle school. Encouraged by her painting teacher, who herself will be a professional artist, Prudence will take her art so seriously that she will end up being represented by an up-and-coming art dealer by time she is 17.
It will be the skiing that becomes her greatest passion and focus. That first exposure that we all witnessed when she first laid her eyes on that tiny equipment will blossom into an obsession with freestyle skiing, which she will so excel at that she will make the difficult decision to drop out of her boarding school after junior year and opt to travel with several excellent tutors as she competes in Europe and eventually makes the Olympic team.
The most amazing thing is that Prudence will end up being personally so appealing. People will marvel at how grounded she is. This will in part be thanks to a number of life coaches her parents hire to work with her, one of whom helps her set up her first non-profit. In the end, given this all, Prudence’s intellect, knowledge, ability to write, and to think critically, all by the time she is 18, will be far superior to that of most achieve adults ever.
While this may seem extreme, the details are all based on real examples, and anyone who doesn’t think that there are kids being educated at a level that dwarfs the education provided by the average public school needs to get out more. Much as it somehow feels taboo to point this out, I think I owe it to my kids to at some point explain the scale to which many kids in the country are experiencing a radically better education. This is life as it is.
(I will also point out that there are dramatic differences in education that are far closer to home here in Minnesota, where simply crossing over the city line from Minneapolis into an adjacent suburb can mean that test scores will jump dramatically and things like engineering programs in high school are a reality instead of something recently cut—differences that are a result of legislative decisions on how schools are funded in the state.)
My kids should also understand the antithesis of the Prudence Celery experience. One of the most vivid illustrations for this is the life of the kids in Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo’s 2012 searing account of life in a Mumbai slum. The book chronicles the harrowing efforts of the kids, including Abdul and Kalu, to earn the money their families need to survive by picking through garbage for items that may still have value or be recyclable.
It is a haunting book. But once we go down this path of considering the disparate ways that kids are educated and develop, I think the the kids who are brought up with the greatest challenges in the world deserve at least a footnote, if not an actual moment of silence. It is for this reason that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is going to the top of the stack of books that is on my 14-year-old’s bedside table. He is almost fifteen. He can take.
Of course, we don’t need to go quite so far away to experience the other side of the spectrum. The excellent documentary Boys In Blue, directed by Peter Berg, like Boo’s book, gives an artful and visceral view of adversity. The four-part series follows a group of boys on the Minneapolis North High football team and their coaches, and it stands out for providing a frank, non-Hollywood portrait of the challenges faced by black teens growing up amidst dysfunction as they try to do the right thing.
Boys in Blue, like Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is hard to take on multiple levels, most painfully in the case of the deaths that occur. But it also inescapably real life, the world today’s kids are growing up in and eventually entering on their own. (I just took a quick break for working on this essay to make some lunch. While eating, I randomly glanced at some local news and learned that one of the kids featured in Boys in Blue, Cashmere Hamilton-Grunau, was shot multiple times yesterday, March 21, 2023, sustaining non-life threatening injuries.)
Prudence Celery, Abdul, and the boys in blue. These are cursory examples, fleetingly raised, but I hope something of the sense of why they are relevant to our kids as they get older comes across. The topics of equity and social justice can be essential, but then so too is this broader sense for full the complexity of the world of kids, education, development and opportunity.
Once this broader topic is broached, the stage is set to bring the conversation back to our kids and how they want to factor it all into their own development and how they go forward.
Good Fortune, Agency, and the Big Unknowns
For those readers who are parents or guardians, it is safe to say that in most cases your kids have already won what billionaire investor Warren Buffet clumsily called the ‘ovarian lottery’.
Based on reader data for my website, these kids are either growing up in the U.S. or one of a small number of other western developed countries (and not the Mumbai slums). Also, they are being raised by someone with the time to read material like this post and put thought into childhood development, as well a person who has the facility with language that is already a predictor of future success for kids.
This is all Lotto-level good fortune, though it can be be hard for parents to keep in mind what extraordinary foundational good fortune our children have as we experience daily freak outs about our children’s setbacks (snubbed by the cool kids again!!), but they really have been born with a level of affluence, freedom, and opportunity that is fairly miraculous in the course of human history.
Hopefully, our kids can understand Buffet’s point about how lucky this all is. Reading Beyond the Beautiful Forevers or watching Boys in Blue can help. And once they do, it might be time to share a strange fact about lottery winners, which that one-third eventually go bankrupt. This is the paradox of being handed something rather than earning it. First comes appreciating one’s good fortune, then comes the work of making something of it.
Making something of one’s good fortune brings us to competition, which is often how opportunities are doled out. Competition is so central to adulthood works that we can take it for granted. In terms of work alone—getting a job, pursuing promotions, avoiding layoffs—competition is a continual hum of this large part of adult life.
So, fully explaining the degree to which competition is a major theme of life is part this discussion. And the more attractive the opportunity, the more scarce it is, and the stiffer the competition, possibly even including the likes of the epically-advantaged Prudence Celerys of the world, and, hopefully also some epically-determined kids who have overcome systematic discrimination faced starting out in places like North Minneapolis.
This opportunity to compete for opportunities, at times unpleasant and stress inducing as it might be—this is part of the lottery winning, as kids like Abdul and Kalu (were he still alive) would surely agree. It is emphatically true that the opportunities are not equally available and that the deck is stacked against many of the kids the U.S., but it is a mistake to lose sight of the fact that the opportunities exists and that kids do overcome long odds.
My wife and I have been able to experience this first hand, having lived in North and been foster parents and mentors. We have seen the tragic ends, but also stories that are deeply inspiring, including a friend of ours we first knew as a young teen fleeing her home, but who now works for a Fortune 500 company, where she also secured jobs for two of her siblings, and is now able to support her love of travel (most recently Lisbon).
(In the spirit of spotlighting the perseverance of North kids, I need to also mention Taquarius ‘T.Q.’ Wair, who our foster kids were also friends with, playing basketball and football together, and who has gone on to win play college football, despite all of the extreme injuries he suffered in a house fire at the age of four, which led to him winning and the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance at the ESPY’s in 2020, along with other national acclaim.)
This ability to make one’s way in the world, regardless of resources and despite varying educational quality, hopefully continues to expand as the availability of free online education tools increases. The odds may be long, but there will in the future be stories of the occasional slum-dwelling kid managing to find a smartphone in the trash and use it to access Khan Academy, and then work her way up to free MIT coursework and beyond.
In my parental fantasy, there is a cocktail here of information that my kids will grasp at some point prior to heading out into the world—understanding these ideas around advantages, disadvantages, discrimination, fortune, opportunity, agency, and competition, and what that all implies for how they should be thinking about their development now and how they will navigate their futures.
While that is a lot to take in, I think there is still one other big reality that could inform our kids understanding of the world, which has to do with the degree which every bit of reality that I am describing should not be taken as any guarantee of what the future will be like. That is another of the big curveballs in life. Much as we pretend otherwise, we have no idea what tomorrow will be like.
Kids who have been raised in the COVID-19 pandemic likely have a better appreciation than most for the unpredictability of the future. That said, they also share our tendency to assume tomorrow will be like today. And they also aren’t in a position to understand how uncertainty of the future is more real today than ever.
For instance, there is the fact that AI may sooner than expected be decimating huge swaths of the knowledge worker jobs we might have been thinking would be options for our kids (possibly even for ourselves). And then there is the sense that genetic engineering is another genie-out-of-the-bottle-sooner-than-anticipated variable that may upend the world our kids inherit. The list goes on, as we know.
For anyone with teenagers who might be interested in exploring the role uncertainty in life, Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is a thought-provoking look at how highly improbable events have a habit of repeatedly happening, despite the ability of humans to remember this fact, a blindspot that Taleb profited on as an ivestor on a massive scale. Personally, it will be a few years before my kids take on the The Black Swan.
If I think about what I most want for my kids at this point in their lives it is that they laugh as much as possible, with ready laughter being one of the great gifts they have access to. And I aspire for them to excel at other quintessential kid-dom domains, many of which are on full display during a sleep-over: amazingly bad eating, hours and hours of movies and video games, and extreme sleep deprivation. What could be better?
But then there are lots of more serious goals and aspirations, and a good number of these may have a better chance of being achieved if ours kids have a more three-dimensional understanding of the world they will be entering—an understanding that is far more dimensional than many of us had as kids and will hopefully help provide better context for our parental guidance. And maybe even spur them into a more active role in their own development.
All thanks to the inspiration of a very fortunate and very young downhill skiing enthusiast.
Benton Post Script
As a parent, my efforts are not focused on changing the world but on my own struggle to do my best my kids to thrive and find fulfillment in the world as it is. That said, parenthood has not yet completely subsumed my full psyche and soul, and this other part, rather than begrudge a young heiress, it does still cringe at the advantages I had growing up, my own Prudence Celery side, and the degree to which I haven’t always made more of them.
It is because of this that I have been intensely grateful to have happened into being a foster parent and a mentor in the past, having an opportunity to play a small role in helping a small number of kids alter their life trajectory. As my kids get older, less fascinated by my every utterance, and are more interested in some separation, I plan to more actively return a personal mission aimed at countering my privilege by some statistically significant factor.
In the meantime, I make do with a small amount literacy tutoring (through Reading Partners), specifically working with a young, just-turned-six, ball of energy and smarts named Benton, and for a number of reasons it seems fitting to close out a post that opened on Prudence Celery by giving Benton a moment in the spotlight, while sharing the lows and the highs of this work, in part knowing this might be inspire others who have been considering some similar effort.
Benton and I, unfortunately, meet over Zoom, though he is in North Minneapolis, home of the boys in blue, and somewhere I would happily drive, if that were how the program worked. He logs on. He logs on. His bright young face fills the screen (dark brown eyes, light brown skin, along with the ears and close-cropped hair that suggest a mini Barack Obama). And that is often the most chill moment we will experience.
Different adults are often coming and going in Benton’s small apartment, sometimes arguing, sometimes swearing. Benton’s diaper=clad two-year-old brother’s beautiful girl-like face (I initially called him Benton’s sister) takes over the screen for extended periods. Benton frequently gets distracted playing with the computer, prematurely ending the Zoom, or launching off on tangents like asking me: how old you are before you stop getting whoopings?
At one point during a particularly chaotic session, I asked him to find his mom, which led to a tour of the house as he carried the laptop, revealing the torn up ceiling, and then as the search extended, I suddenly feared where this was going: we end up in the bathroom talking to his mom, who is sitting on the toilet, and who then commands Benton to sit and the rest of the session occurs with me, via the computer, sitting on her lap, tutoring Benton.
During another session, Benton was spending so much time away from the computer and playing with toys that I sort of give up midsession. When I have his attention for a moment, I admit that I don’t whether we should continue, though I’m not sure that he hears me. Not great tutor resiliency. And I do honestly question whether ask about moving on to some kid who seems more interested in the tutoring.
Last week, it was chaotic again. Again, the loud adults and baby brother. And it was even worse in that someone offscreen was incessantly moaning this unnerving guttural moan. At first I thought it was a baby, which doesn’t make sense given the low tone. I ask who it is and if they can be a little quiet. Weston says that is Regina, but Regina she doesn’t speak human.
I shake off feeling guilty over the notion of someone with CP or some other ailment hearing me suggest they be quiet, and come back to the tutoring. And, as sometimes happens, Benton starts focusing, responding to the slides we are reviewing. He is calling out the letters he sees, making the sounds, then forming the words.
Benton is such a quick kid when he can pay some attention. In this case, he is advancing while also surreptitiously playing some video game using some device he has hidden in his lap.
Hey, Benton, I say, “You got a two-screen thing going there?” He looks up and smiles, “Yeah, got two screens going.”
I let it go, and we keep moving forward with the slides, going from luck, to suck, to duck, muck. Benton is killing the ‘ck’ sound. His brother is also getting into it, and is echoing the words Benton says, while Regina keeps plaintively moaning offscreen.
I am loving the progress and let him know, “Benton, you are owning ck! Ck your jam, Benton! So bright, so quick!”
“Remember last week when you were giving up?” he asks, revealing he was paying attention.
“Yes, I was frustrated, but you are in the zone now.”
Benton brings his head in close to the camera, so his whole face fills up my computer screen, as he cocks his eyebrow, tilts his head, doing a solid impersonation of The Rock, I believe. And then he leans back and we resume, now plunging into reading aloud, reading a book about a kid learning to mix paint colors.
Benton is nailing that, getting the big words, even the word ‘picture’, just needing little corrections.
Learning to read, it really is so bleeping hard, as other parents likely well remember. It is not at all as natural for kids as learning to. Getting each new word out early on can feel like a mini child birth session, as kids struggle to get the word out and you as the parent or tutor are the birth coach. Breathe!
It is is such a strain, you feel like you can almost hear the brain actively constructing new wiring to make this odd miracle happen.
“Yes! Yes! You’re reading, Benton! You’re the man!”
Benton is clearly enjoying my increasingly big enthusiasm. He leans into the screen again, now curling up his lip up a bit Elvis-like and telling me, “Say this, Weif, say ‘bruh.’”
“Brah?”
“Bruh,” say “Bruh.”
He is schooling me in the current pronunciation of what once was bro. It is tricky to get it right.
Benton returns to the story, reads another sentence, and when I shout encouragement, he says, “Are you going to subscribe to my channel?”
It takes a second to realize this is a YouTube reference, of which he is told me he is a big fan.
“Yeah, brah, keep reading, I’m going to subscribe to your channel.”
“Well,” Benton adds, “then hit that ‘like’ button too, and smash that notification bell.”
He goes back to reading. I continue the enthusiasm, “I’m subscribing, Benton, I’m hitting that like. button.”
And so it goes, Benton personifying a YouTuber, baby brother echoing, Regina moaning, and faceless adults arguing in the background, but that sharp little Benton is reading.
Again, he is pressing his face up to the camera so that a fantastic Rock eyebrow raise and head tilt fills the screen.
“Bruh, bruh,” Benton is saying, “Bruh, when I am 18, no, no…tomorrow, when I am 13, I’m going to come over to your house, bruh.”
“Yes, brah, you are going to come over to my house,” I respond.
Just two dudes, mind melding over a literacy lesson, subscribing to each other’s channels, making plans to hang out tomorrow when Benton turns from six to 13, and feeling a little high on progress and hope. Yeah, bruh.