Wednesday night Yinh came out of the boys’ room and in a hushed tone relayed the 6th grader was feeling down after a bad day. He woke up feeling a bit under the weather (but fine enough to go to school), had a subpar hoops practice, got into a fight with his younger bro (over Halloween masks), his friend was moving to India the next day, and…he was super-stoked about a topic he learned about in Math Academy (interquartile range) but when he told me about it I immediately asked him a question that he didn’t know the answer to deflating whatever good the day had salvaged.
I felt like a total ass. I was 1) out of tune with how the day was treating him and 2) my tone in asking him about the math was out of sync with my message. My intention was curiosity about what he learned but it came out as a challenge or test.
I fumbled. Sometimes you clench the ball too tight.
I have high expectations of effort in 2 categories for the kids:
a) Areas they earnestly want to improve in.
They play soccer for fun but care about getting better at basketball. They create those distinctions. I remind them that getting better doesn’t happen without practice so if you want X and your actions betray you, I’m going to question what you actually want. I try to balance sensibility given their ages without watering down the truth of what being competitive means. Overall, I let their own motivation dictate how hardcore to be about this. I’ll come back to what I mean by this.
b) Things where they are too young to understand the option value of.
I’ll just caveat this with both boys have obvious academic aptitude. If they didn’t, I’d adapt my thinking to what they need as individuals. But since they are capable, I expect them to crush school. You’ll have more choices down the line if you can get yourself onto the equivalent of the honors track. I’m not suggesting this is deterministic — but there’s option value and the easier school work is to a child the cheaper the option premium. Orienting your drive in the direction of your innate strengths is a generally good principle (and possibly underappreciated because the second derivative of that function is opaque but likely convex with respect to success and satisfaction in life).
The flipside of the high expectation is what kids are capable of. I don’t mean this in a purely literal sense. You can search YouTube and find children performing extraordinary feats. Those examples round down to “rare exceptions”. Generally speaking, fulfilling high expectations requires sustained commitment. And sustained commitment relies on motivation. Motivation is a puzzle. What makes some kids (or anyone for the matter) obsessed and others float in the wind? I don’t know those answers but I’ve recently pieced together a partial explanation that bears keeping in mind especially in moments of frustration.
I’ll start with the moments of frustration. Watching my kids waste their time on YouTube Shorts or watching Brawlstars influencers. Nails on chalkboard. Go collect some bugs or build a bike ramp, just turn this crap off. [My nieces and nephews call me Uncle “Nonsense” because I always ask “what nonsense are you watching now?” It’s past the point of meme — my sister’s kids sent me a photo of themselves eating bubble gum flavored ice cream because they know I call it a “nonsense” flavor.]
Sometimes I just wanna yell “go be productive”. But I don’t because that’s not what I really mean — that would be me projecting. That’s my demon, and I don’t want my kids to meet him.
I’ve thought about this a lot. This urge towards productivity. Consider this Paul Graham excerpt I quote in Impedance Mismatch:
What I’ve learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You’ll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.
The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I’m not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can’t be sure I’m getting anywhere when I’m working hard, but I can be sure I’m getting nowhere when I’m not, and it feels awful.
There wasn’t a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn’t achieving anything. The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13. Several people I’ve talked to remember getting serious about work around this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find idleness distasteful, he said:
“I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday.”
Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.
This line resonates “a feeling of disgust when I’m not achieving anything”. But while that disgust is useful gasoline it has fossil fuel level byproducts and externalities. It’s a tradeoff not an unalloyed virtue. So “go be productive” misrepresents what I really want (which stated simply is to be active in mind or body not numbed into zombie mode. A rule that we enforce poorly is “if you are going to watch YouTube you must search for what you want. You are not allowed to let the algo create the menu or serve the next video”).
But the main reason I restrain the “be productive” message is that it’s inappropriate at their age. Even these psychos that Paul Graham refers to didn’t feel the urge to be productive until 13 or 14. He wonders:
Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.
I was listening to Dr. David Yeager on the Huberman podcast (the first time I’ve ever listened to that show believe it or not. Thanks Justin for the heads up, I really enjoyed Yeager’s insights.) and he talks about how puberty coincides with the first time kids really onboard status anxiety. It’s when they become deeply aware of a pecking order or being “popular”. The social dynamics are complex and stressful. It is the first time they start to think of their value in terms of what they can do, or if they are pretty, etc.
It’s the age when kids start bands. We know why they do that. And it’s not to “be productive.” But achievement is a byproduct. Ambition is a natural solution to status anxiety.
Meanwhile elementary school kids are beautifully unaware. Some kids wanna score a hattrick and some are picking daisies. But there’s room for everyone. Their lives are pre-achievement. Open exploration. No judgement. It’s a small window.
How dare I shorten it?
For their whole lives, others are gonna size them up. These boys’ thoughts will whisper “what are you bringing to the table?”. They don’t need extra pressure from me. They don’t need another form of love that comes with strings attached. The world’s love comes with enough conditions.
They’ll need guidance. They’ll be things they can’t forsee because they are unforseeable. But there will also be things they can’t foresee because they’re inexperienced. We can help with that. There will be useful resources and opportunities they didn’t even know were possibilities. We can help with that. There will be questions of reality. Like what it takes to learn. What it means to have integrity. How to model decision-making. We can help with all that.
But we are not here to create pressure. Or fear. I want them to face fear. I don’t want to generate it. The world will do that for free.
If I killed the enthusiasm for what Zak learned in math, I’m doing something wrong. I’m grateful Yinh told me, because like him, I’m learning and we will get better. Puberty is gonna be a trip.
The day after the bad one was uplifting.
I was traveling. Yinh texted me that the younger one was struggling with Math Academy and extra frustrated because the older one who he idolizes crushed his quiz.
But…the older one coached and brought him around and excited again.
Like any set of brothers they can be 2 cats in a bag (they were the night before), but it makes it that much sweeter when they get each other’s backs. This particular instance made me especially proud because I’m relentlessly on their ass about being patient (go slow to go fast) in learning and with each other so any indication that they hear me is a win.
Yinh was blown away at how Zak was so calm and methodical breaking down Max’s difficulty into manageable steps. I’ve had his friends say the same thing about how he helps them. Being patient and helpful because everyone learns at a different pace is an explicit and modeled value at home. But a lot of what you want to instill doesn’t transmit so it’s worth celebrating the small win.
Yinh captured the moment when cooler heads prevailed:
