Lachlan
From the time he was in kindergarten, Lachlan loved to tinker. He was happy to fix broken classroom objects rather than go to recess. In middle school, he impressed his teachers with his intelligence but not his ability to complete assignments. He also showed a rebellious streak. In eighth grade, he hot-wired the school’s bell system, which enabled him to push a button at any time to dismiss class. He also put a bypass on the school’s alarm system so that he and his friends could get into school whenever they wanted.
As a sixteen-year-old, Lachlan worked at a Shell station. He started off changing tires and oil but soon he was taking the cars apart and rewiring them as a mechanic. He left home and skipped most of his high school classes, and by the end of eleventh grade he had a 0.9 GPA. He managed to squeak by with a high school degree and started to work as an audio engineer. At twenty-one, he was assigned to a contract at the Kennedy Center, where he designed sound systems for the opera house and the concert hall.
Eventually he transitioned into television engineering work. Although he had little prior experience, he worked hard and figured things out on the fly. Through his interests, talents, and efforts, he met people who opened doors that helped him become successful. He started working in engineering management for a national U.S. television network, where he stayed for over twenty years. After a decade he was promoted to a director of engineering position. Clearly Lachlan has an exceptional talent. But he also knew how to do stuff that people would pay for and focused his efforts on improving his skills to measurable ends.
Melody
From an early age, Melody did not enjoy school. She attended kindergarten and first grade only sporadically and by fifth grade she announced to her parents that she would rather not go back to school. Melody’s parents had a lot of faith in their daughter, even at the age of ten, and told her that if she wanted to stay home and do an independent study, that was fine with them.
“You can be anything you want to be,” they told her. “If that’s a professor somewhere, great. If it’s a guitar player, great. Just make sure you’re doing something you enjoy and work at it to do it well.” It was a liberating message, and Melody benefited enormously from the confidence they had in her.
She went back to school for sixth grade and stayed on for a few more years, but when tenth grade came along, again asked to leave. Her parents let her make the call, and she decided to homeschool.
Melody was independent-minded and curious, which made this course of study work for her. But she was also ambitious and wanted to go on to college. She recognized that if college was her goal, she had better return to school for eleventh and twelfth grade, which she did. She went on to attend Stanford, graduating in just over three years, and then worked for ten years before going to law school. For many years now, she’s been a partner in a Seattle law firm.
Melody feels the freedom her parents gave her was invaluable, as was their belief that there was not just one narrow path to a good life. “They let me know, ‘These aren’t permanent decisions. You can decide not to go to fifth grade, and if halfway through you decide you want to go, you can go. That’s fine. You’re not putting yourself on a path that can’t be reversed. You’re not making a decision that’s going to make or break your entire life. You can always course correct.’”
Interestingly, though Melody appreciated her parents’ approach, she didn’t adopt it with her own kids. “When my son was done with high school, he said, ‘I don’t think I want to go to college, I want to take a year off,’ and we didn’t let him. The fear we had was that—what is he going to do? That could put him off track, maybe he’ll have to apply again, maybe he won’t go. I don’t think we were listening to him say, ‘I don’t want to do this, I’m not ready.’ I have some regret about that.”
“But . . .”: Questions About Alternate Routes
Parents will often object to the notion that there are alternate routes to a successful and fulfilling life. Part of the reason is that it is very hard to completely separate your own ego from the question of what your child is doing. Some, once their ego has been divested, still have concerns. Here’s what we hear most commonly, and how we respond:
“But people who take more standard routes earn so much more money.”
It’s true that people who are bright and have the discipline to get them through four years of college are likely to do well. But they would be bright and disciplined whether they graduated from college or not. Who can say whether it was their schooling that made them so?
Actor, TV host, and provocateur Mike Rowe started a foundation committed to challenging the idea that success is only available to those with four-year degrees. On the foundation’s Web site, Profoundly Disconnected, he makes the argument in three simple bullets:
A trillion dollars in student loans.
Record high unemployment.
Three million good jobs that no one seems to want.4
“Isn’t going to college more important now that the middle class is shrinking? Employers won’t even look at you if you don’t have a college degree.”
A few points here. First, nobody can predict what the workplace is going to look like in five or ten years, given the influence of robotics and other forms of technology. We know the new workforce will need to have skills, but we don’t know what kind of education those skills will require.
Remember Ben, the graphic designer? He said he’s confident that he’ll always have work because he knows a trade that’s needed by other people. He finds more security in knowing how to do something useful than in having a degree.
That said, there are many advantages to having a college degree (and advanced degrees). We want kids to go to college and graduate if they can. But what we really don’t want to do is discourage the many kids who can’t make it through college. We don’t want them to believe that means they can’t have a good life.
On Money, Career, and Happiness
It’s not within our area of expertise to wax on about how money and success are not one and the same. However, we do think it helps kids to know that, although income and self-reported happiness are highly correlated, the correlation is much stronger at very low levels of income than at high levels—and that after a fairly low level of financial comfort, there is no correlation between increased income and greater happiness.5 It’s not that we want to discourage kids from making money. It’s just that we want kids to make thoughtful decisions about their lives based on what’s important to them.
We have offered a modest collection of alternate route stories in this chapter, though we have many, many more. Learning about other people’s journeys can be enormously empowering, and we hope these will be just the start of your collection. Toward that end, we also recommend that you check out the following books—all great reminders of the many turns happy lives can take:
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford. A reflection by a motorcycle repair shop owner with a PhD in political philosophy about the value of the trades and working with your hands.
The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love, by Kristin Kimball. Kristin was a Harvard-educated New York journalist who left that world behind to run a farm with her husband. She acknowledges, “I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people.”
The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, by Ken Robinson. Ken is a visionary education consultant who argues that the place where natural talent and personal passion converge is where the magic of life and work happens.
In the end, the best way you can help your child maintain a sense of control and guide him (as a nonanxious consultant) into a satisfying life is to teach him to ask himself two questions: What do I truly love to do? And what can I do better than most people?
It can be that simple.
What to Do Tonight
Make a list with your child of all the different jobs you can possibly think of together. Not jobs either one of you would necessarily be interested in—just jobs that someone is doing. What might those people like about their jobs? What might they be good at?
Share the stories of alternate routes from this chapter with your child. Tell him or her others you know of, and ask if he or she knows of any.
Be open about the surprises or disappointments you encountered on your own path, or that your parents or grandparents did, and how you pivoted. Ned’s great-grandfather made and lost a fortune in the stock market, and went from the biggest house in town to a small apartment and back again. Knowing that even successful people have ups and downs helped give Ned perspective, as did understanding that resilience was a family tradition.
Ask your child, What do you love to do? What do you think you’re better at than other people? Do you want my view?
Ask your child, What contributions do you think you would like to make to the world around you? What steps might you take to get there?
Encourage your child to find a mentor, someone whose life they admire and who can help guide them. Kids will often be more open to guidance from someone who is not their parent.
Onward
BILL ONCE WORKED with a child whose mother was a humorist. Sitting in Bill’s office one day, she remarked, “A lot of what we call raising children should really be referred to as lowering parents.” It’s a clever way to acknowledge that what we recommend isn’t easy. In fact, much is plain hard. It takes courage to trust a child to make decisions, to trust in a child’s brain development, to ignore the pressures that cause us to protect our kids from themselves, or to be overly involved in their lives. It takes courage to face our fears about the future. It also takes humility to accept that we don’t often know what’s in our kids’ best interest. It takes a change in mindset to focus on ourselves—our own emotions and attitudes—as an extremely important element of our child-rearing.
As hard as all of this is, the harder route by far is trying to control what we really can’t. And when you are able to do what we’ve recommended in this book, the result will be liberating and effective.
Everything we have covered—from the science of the brain to the logic of taking alternate routes—is meant to help you instill in your children the models they will carry into their adult lives, the adult relationship they will have with you, and their sense of themselves. As has often been said, people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Think of how you want to make your child feel. Loved. Trusted. Supported. Capable. And above all else, let that be your guide.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book came to fruition with the help of many talented people who were remarkably generous with their time and took great care in considering our ideas.
To begin with, we are forever grateful for the encouragement and support of our brilliant agent, Howard Yoon, and his wonderful colleague Dara Kaye. Howard and Dara insightfully challenged our thinking and nudged us through times when we felt stuck. They also connected us to our partner in scribe, Jenna Free. It is hard for us to imagine a more enjoyable process than working with Jenna. Bringing the ideas of even one thinker to the page is not for the faint of heart, and two is surely more than twice the challenge. We remain amazed by—and are deeply grateful for—how cheerfully and nimbly Jenna helped to bring together the ideas and stories you hold in your hands.
We’re also grateful to Howard for sending our proposal to Joy de Menil, our enormously talented editor at Viking. In our first meeting, Joy asked questions that caused us to clarify our ideas in a way that none of the several other editors with whom we’d met had. We are in awe of her ability to demand the most of each sentence and of the work in its entirety, and her editing of the manuscript made this a much, much better book. Joy’s assistant, Haley Swanson, was invaluable in helping us tackle all the ancillary but equally crucial tasks involved in putting together a book. We’re grateful as well to Jane Cavolina for the close-eyed copyediting, one of the critical and unheralded roles in bringing a book to print, and to the highly talented Anne Harris, who made the process of revising the text and compiling the references for our notes infinitely easier.
We also want to thank Emily Warner Eskelsen, with whom we worked in the earliest stages of creating this book, without whose deep thinking and Herculean efforts we wouldn’t have made it off the starting line, and Kellie Maxwell Bartlett for her help in shaping some of the ideas in Chapter Eight. A word of thanks goes as well to John Fair, a remarkably talented recent graduate of the Siena School who, by the time this book comes to market, will be a freshman at the Savannah College of Art and Design. John created the brain images in Chapter One.
We are also deeply grateful to the scientists and other professionals who allowed us to interview them for this book. We received invaluable insights from Edward Deci, Joshua Aronson, Bruce Marlowe, Daphne Bavelier, Amy Arnsten, and Adele Diamond, and benefited greatly from Monica Adler Werner’s thoughts about motivation in kids with autism. A special thanks to our dear friend and eminent scientist Sheila Ohlsson Walker, whose careful reading of an early draft of the manuscript helped us get the science of stress right. We also greatly appreciate the wonderful folks from the Parent Encouragement Program, particularly Patti Cancellier and Kathy Hedge, whose ideas about the promotion of autonomy and suggestions for handling challenging behavior were invaluable.
Bill would like to thank his wife, Starr, for her 24/7 support, and his children, Jora and Elliott, two wonderful self-driven children who are now terrific adults. He also wants to extend thanks to his dear friend, the psychiatrist, scientist, and author Dr. Norman Rosenthal, for his unwavering encouragement as we worked on this project. Thanks, too, to Bob Roth, the executive director of the David Lynch Foundation (DLF) and to Mario Orgotti of DLF’s Center for Leadership Performance, who have been a continual source of support over the years.
Ned wishes to thank his colleagues at PrepMatters, from whom he has learned so much about helping students; his parents for teaching him, in their own very different ways; his twin brother, Steve, for sticking with him through thick and thin; his beloved children, Katie and Matthew, who have taught him so much and been willing to listen to his attempts to do the same; and most of all his wife, Vanessa, for, well, everything. Thanks also to Chrissellene Petropoulos and Brent Toleman, his surrogate parents, for years of wise counsel and support, and to Dr. Kathleen O’Connor for always, always helping him.
Lastly, we extend our enormous thanks to all the children and parents with whom we have worked over the many years. We are grateful to all of you who have trusted us to work with your children, and to you kids, who have taught us so much of what we know. Many people were kind enough to share with us their stories of gap years and alternative routes. There are so many paths to success, and we deeply thank those of you who were willing to share your struggles and breakthroughs, to inspire others to forge their own paths.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: Why a Sense of Control Is Such a Big Deal
1. The extensive research on the power of a sense of control is summarized well in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by the eminent stress researcher Robert Sapolsky (3rd ed.; New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004). See also an influential review article by Jonathon Haidt and Judith Rodin, “Control and Efficacy as Interdisciplinary Bridges,” Review of General Psychology 3, no. 4 (December 1999): 317–37.
2. Psychologist Jean Twenge studied changes in the locus of control in college students and found that the average college student in 2002 had a stronger external locus of control than 80 percent of those studied in the early 1960s. The cause behind the shift, Twenge suggests, is a culture that has increasingly valued extrinsic and self-centered goals such as money,
status, and physical attractiveness and devalued community, affiliation, and finding meaning in life. An external locus of control is correlated with poor academic achievement, a sense of helplessness, ineffective stress management, lower self-control, and vulnerability to depression. See Jean M. Twenge et al., “It’s Beyond My Control: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Increasing Externality in Locus of Control, 1960–2002,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 3 (August 2004): 308–19. For Twenge’s findings regarding the increased mental health problems in contemporary young adults see Jean M. Twenge et al., “Birth Cohort Increases in Psychopathology Among Young Americans, 1938–2007: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the MMPI,” Clinical Psychology Review 30, no. 2 (March 2010): 145–54. Also see Jean M. Twenge, “Generational Differences in Mental Health: Are Children and Adolescents Suffering More, or Less?” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81, no. 4 (October 2011): 469–72.
3. Christopher Mele, “Pushing That Crosswalk Button May Make You Feel Better, but . . .” New York Times, October 27, 2016, accessed May 11, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/us/placebo-buttons-elevators-crosswalks.html?src=twr&_r=1.
4. Judith Rodin and Ellen Langer. “Long-Term Effects of a Control-Relevant Intervention with the Institutionalized Aged,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, no. 12 (December 1977): 897–902.
CHAPTER ONE: The Most Stressful Thing in the Universe
1. Evidence for the increased incidence of mental health problems in young people comes from many sources, including the previously mentioned studies by Jean Twenge. Also, research summarized in a journal published by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution found that, for the first time in fifty years, the top five disabilities affecting U.S. children are mental health problems rather than physical problems. Janet Currie and Robert Kahn, “Children with Disabilities: Introducing the Issue,” Future of Children 22, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 3–11; Anita Slomski, “Chronic Mental Health Issues in Children Now Loom Larger Than Physical Problems,” Journal of the American Medical Association 308, no. 3 (July 18, 2012): 223–25.
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