There’s something weird about the way we raise our kids.
Why do we—especially during the teenage years, a hugely transformational time in their lives—put them in a place that’s basically 95% other teenagers (school)?
And then, after deliberately putting them there, most parents spend considerable angst hoping their kids aren’t going to be too influenced by those same peers and aren’t going to make bad decisions with potentially life-altering consequences.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that “high school” isn’t a fundamental experience of human life, but something we set up that way.
There’s probably value in correcting for this, and I have some ideas, at least at the individual family level.
When I started my first job out of college, the way I learned changed. Instead of learning primarily from books and lectures, I was learning primarily from doing and observing. I took on projects I wasn’t yet qualified for and had to just figure it out. And for the first time in my life, my peer group wasn’t primarily people my age, but mostly more experienced people. I soaked up a ton just by observing how those experienced colleagues carried themselves in their work.
And I was surprised to find that I seemed to be learning more in this environment than I did in the formal school setting.
I’m dunking on school right now but the ire really belongs with adults and how we’ve set up our work lives.
From what I’ve observed, when parents or other adults interact with kids, it’s usually in one of three settings:
Leisure - time together in the evenings and weekends, doing something fun, usually relaxing and passive activities because people are tired after work and school.
Running errands together
Watching kids’ activities - kids are involved in a lot more extracurriculars and clubs than adults, and it’s very normal for adults to spend lots of time watching their kids’ performances and games.
There’s something conspicuously absent from this list—the opposite of #3. Kids spend very little time watching parents in their element.
Very few of us have jobs that we can just bring our kids to whenever we want.
But this is kind of an aberration in history. Apprenticeships used to be far more common.1 Many families worked on farms where kids worked from an early age. There were good reasons we moved away from that as our primary way of life, but there are at least a few distinct positives to that sort of environment:
It’s not just an either-or between working or spending time with your kids. You legitimately could integrate the two. It’s not always a balancing act where time given to one is time taken from the other.
Kids get to see parents where they excel, and there’s a lot of tacit learning that happens when kids get to observe adults at work, ask questions, and get direct advice as they’re working side-by-side.
Kids get to participate in the adult world from an early age—they’re actively serving their family and/or the community. I think many kids crave more opportunities for this than they currently have available.
The adults are the ones dictating the social norms. If you as an adult can be around kids (especially teenagers) and are showing or teaching them how to carry themselves in given situations, it’s a useful counterweight to the influence of their peers.
My kids are young right now (20 months and -5 months—due in December) so I have some time, but over the next 10 years or so, I want to build an environment where I can recapture some of those advantages for my kids.
Here are some of my current ideas:
Start a business
I’ve had a few friends whose parents owned a business, and they’re the few who seemed to have an experience more like these historical ones. Their parents would bring them to work, sometimes to sit in on meetings, sometimes to work various jobs in the business, and the family business was a common topic of conversation involving everyone.
Starting a business is a dream of mine for the future, first so I have the ability to arrange my schedule more around my family (depending on the type of business), but my hope is also that it would also be a family business—one Allie and I operate together but also involve our kids in.
It’s not about having a business they can “take over.” It’s really answering the question—how can we live less in separate spheres? It would allow us to bring them into mom and dad’s world some, and also to give them a taste of adult life while they’re young.
Volunteer or entrepreneurial projects together
When I was young I used to see these profiles on the back of cereal boxes about kids who had started some non-profit, and usually the story was they saw a problem in the world, and their mom or dad encouraged them and helped them take action.
If my daughters want to do something in their community or start some business pursuit, I want to actively help them. Few things teach you high-agency like seeing a problem and going out and doing something about it, and being able to work side-by-side with them on some business or service project seems like a great way to bond.
Get out of my comfort zone (and let them see)
A friend of mine told me that at some point he wants to do a standup comedy set. Not because he aspires to be a comedian, but because it seems like a fun thing to do, yet also scares him. And not only that, but he wants his kids to see him do it. And here’s why:
Kids are always growing and doing things outside their comfort zone but it’s much rarer for them to see adults doing the same. For all the advice we give about how they should handle uncertainty, how much louder would it speak if they could see their mom or dad actually go through something outside their comfort zones?
What’s the thing I want to do that scares me? And is there any way I can give my kids a front row seat to see how dad handles that?
Homeschooling?
There’s a spectrum for how much ownership a parent takes over the quality, pace, and direction of a kid’s education, and homeschooling is clearly one end of the spectrum. I don’t know if we’ll full-on homeschool our kids, but I hope that we end up on the higher-ownership end of that spectrum whatever form that takes.
Whatever kind of school our kids go to, I want to spend a fair amount of time making sure they’re learning in a way that’s helpful for them: are they being challenged enough? Are they struggling to keep up? Are there other subjects they’re really curious about that they don’t get to learn about in school?
And my hope is that this leads to us cultivating the kind of educational experience that’s most potent for them, whether it’s finding learning opportunities for them outside of school, extra resources to help them keep up, or other things they can do to be challenged more.
Time around other adults
I hope Allie and I introduce our kids to a lot of our friends and encourage them to actually have relationships with plenty of other adults.
At some point they will know what mom and dad are about, they’ll get tired of our influence, and they’ll be looking for new mentors to help them grow. Part of my hope is that we’ve encouraged them to have a social circle that includes other adults, and that they’ll look up to some of them as role models, instead of just having other same-aged peers to be influenced by.
At the core, what I’m hoping to do is increase the surface area of situations where both my kids and mom or dad are active and out of their comfort zone.
I don’t want my world to feel totally separate from theirs. I want them to be able to dip their toes easily in both the social world of other kids, but also to be comfortable around adults. And I want us to have plenty of opportunities to work side-by-side—it’s a great venue for teaching them directly, but I also think they’ll grow and learn significantly from just being around mom, dad, or other adults at work.
Hopefully this is something that you’re also interested in, and if so, any experience in making this work in your own life? Anything else you want to try with your own kids?
Benjamin Parry has this really interesting article on the topic: The Art of Training Young People
This one is so on point.
A friend, who has lived her adult life in a metropolis, moved to a much smaller town last year. She is a single mother, divorced.
Being out of a marriage, new to a place, and her own charm, led to a whole group of people ranging from early 20s to 60s becoming part of her new life. She is 35 herself. And her daughter is 6. She owns a cafe now.
Her daughter, primarily due to the absence of a traditional parenting couple, got exposed to a more diverse group of adults who interact with her, care for her, and share their wisdom.
Its literally a village raising her.
And most of these adults, in the absence of kids of their own, are learning so much from that little girl, how to care for a child.
Apart from her theatrics to get her way with the world, she is such a happy kid to around.
So many of her mother's friends now come to spend time with her. And she loves it.
Imagine how comfortable she would be as an adult, secure in her self, when acceptance is not limited to pleasing just mom and dad, but knowing there's a whole world out there who loves her.