The Lie Parents Are Told About Raising “Successful” Kids
Nathan (00:01)
Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host, Nathan Rittenhouse.
Cameron (00:04)
and I'm your co-host, Cameron McAllister.
In this episode, we talk about an article in Science Journal that has confirmed some surprising results, and that is that high achievers don't specialize early. In fact, I believe only 10 % specialized early. So that means that the relentless pressure that often exists around us to cultivate high performers among our children are perhaps misplaced or the journal science and they're probably not helping kids either. We talk about that in this episode. This will be helpful to you as you think about a balanced approach to letting kids be kids. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe. And if you want to support the work that we do, go to www.toltogether.com.
Nathan (00:06)
I'm not a bumper sticker guy, Cameron, but if I was like, know, all the bumper stickers, like my child is an honor student at such and such, you know, middle school. I think it'd be great if there was a bumper sticker. Maybe it's out there that says statistically my kids are average. Like, I mean, I just, and it's true for you too, it's statistically your kids are average for everybody listening statistically. Your kids are average. it's how averages work, but the, the, the, the bigger story here is that.
Cameron (00:24)
There's a market for that somewhere probably.
Nathan (00:36)
And I think, you know, the takeaway from this is for all of you young parents out there to, breathe a sigh of relief because the journal science, ⁓ released a study saying that the vast majority of top achievers and elite performers did not specialize as kids. So your Olympians, Nobel laureates, high academic, most athletes were there. There's a, only a 10 % overlap between those who are really, really.
You know prodigies and then we're at the top of their game in the in the years in which you can really Manifest that so ⁓ it's just counterintuitive to a world in which we live in which Johnny and Susie have to be specialist by age 8 and you better be playing soccer 360 days a year if you ever want to have a chance of you know making it big or Clearly if you can't play the violin by the time you're six years old your life's pretty much over as a violinist so
Cameron (01:28)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (01:35)
⁓ It's saying that those who? Who specialized too early don't make it as far as those who have a broad set of life experiences and then specialize later in life and That's it. That's the whole story right there. I mean you can look it up the study That's it but I think it does speak to something interesting about the way in which we think about not just ⁓ The world in which we live but the way in which we think about expertise and what it means to be a specialist and then just the
I think a lot of parents feel like they're under in order for their kids to be awesome by age 11.
Cameron (02:14)
Why do you think American parents feel such pressure to have their kids be awesome or top performers?
Nathan (02:22)
I mean, the basic and the cringe answer is that a whole lot of this is people living vicariously through their children. mean, nobody is this rabbit of a football dad as the guy who almost made it in high school. Cheerleaders, man, there's a whole category for you. ⁓ And we just dig the hole deeper as we go. But there is a lot of, ⁓ there is a lot of identity that parents...
Cameron (02:29)
Hmm.
Nathan (02:48)
Air quotes achieve through the success of their children. So I would say that a huge portion of this isn't even about the kids
Cameron (02:58)
And I think also we've got a real dedication in America to social engineering. We wouldn't say it in those terms usually, but we do think, hey, with the right ingredients, we can produce these results. Even on an interpersonal level, we can do this with, there's a funny line, what's funny, but kind of tragic in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, where he has one character who he says, basically some people go into their basements and.
Nathan (03:14)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (03:26)
build model airplanes, this guy wanted to build a tennis prodigy. Take his son and run them through these drills. And we laugh because we know people who actually do that.
Nathan (03:30)
You
Mm-hmm.
Well, you can see it so clearly in the lives of other people of like are you encouraging a desire that your kid has? Okay, so say you have a kid who wants to play the piano and you know one week they don't feel like practicing it You're like, you need to sit down and play the piano. That's not what I'm talking about That's encouraging them to you know to follow through on something that they're moderately invested in ⁓ But you do see a lot of little soccer players out there who really don't want to be there But their dads want them to be there ⁓
Cameron (04:08)
Mm-hmm. Sure.
Nathan (04:08)
And so, I
mean, there's a careful balance there, I think, of, you know, obviously we want to encourage young people to do things that are difficult. On the other hand, to say that if you can't hit these metrics by this age group, ⁓ you're probably not going to amount to anything. We can kind of sort this out in sixth grade. The numbers aren't there,
Cameron (04:29)
Another aspect to this, Nathan, is that, and this goes along with what you were saying about living vicariously through a kid as well, to a significant degree, success is often measured by how your child develops. Or at least I think in the minds of certain parents, they tie their sense of success to their child's performance, whether that's in school. So yeah, mean, why else would you put?
a bumper sticker on your car that says, you my child is an honor student. have seen one, you've seen the counter or rebellious bumper sticker to that one that says my child can beat up your honor student. That's also a bumper sticker. I've seen that around here a few times.
Nathan (05:14)
Yeah, I seen those.
Cameron (05:19)
So it's, and I I suppose we need to turn to a consideration of the actual children in the midst of this interesting phase of life. Yeah.
Nathan (05:33)
I'm a little
bit there. So let's we got to work through this because there is a I mean and there is a biblical this is not like up just let them do whatever they want. I mean there is a biblical list here for managing your household and raising your children and honoring your father mother are real parts of the formation of teaching somebody how to be a human. The other thing that I think is a ⁓ neat part of the ⁓ I don't know what phrase we want to use here of like the trying to craft your kid into something.
is that when it comes to behavior in general, you'll hear somebody say like, boys will be boys. And I think, you know, I had all brothers and my parents lived with the mindset of like, no, boys will be men. ⁓ And so the childhood isn't an excuse for the repetition of that behavior. You want to see them grow out of that. So I think in, we don't have the same moral and community metrics to measure as we do, ⁓ Suzy won the spelling bee.
Or got this on her ACT. We don't have the equivalent of like, know what? That's just a young man right there who has a lot of integrity. I think who thinks for himself, ⁓ goes out of his way to look for new ways to help the needs of other people. Like there isn't a ⁓ metric from that. That's not a, it's not on the, it's not on the bingo card of successful parenting actually.
Cameron (06:55)
Yeah, moral development isn't measurable in those terms. You can see some, I remember one of, I was listening to a podcast, another podcast, not ours, sorry, but I was listening to another podcast with a professor, a humanities professor, and they were talking a little bit about the difficulties of being a humanities professor in a STEM society obsessed with results and metrics. And I believe the language that's used
with lot of professors is, know, outcomes. You need to predict your outcomes for your class. And this one, this, this professor who is a professor of English was saying, yeah, there's an amazing milestone that happens in sophomore year where some of them who have taken to heart deeply some of the lessons that we've learned, whether it's, you know, from reading the Scarlet Letter or the Great Gatsby or Mrs. Dalloway, whatever it is. And they come back and they're suddenly, are not only are they
Are they more grown up? They're somehow they're more real. He goes, but how are going to put that on a, you know, outcomes? Will become a real person. And, but I knew what he meant and it, and it rang true. that's we, we, there, there are those moral milestones as well that you see in your children in their early years. And it's true. They don't show up as, as neatly as what you see on, on a ball field, for instance, but they are every bit as real.
Nathan (08:00)
Yeah.
Cameron (08:24)
but we do live in a culture that doesn't, at least doesn't seem to value that as much.
Nathan (08:29)
Well, so you can test drive this. It's one of the funny things that my wife and I all do. And you have like parent teacher conferences as you go sit down and they're immediately going to go through here. This here, the benchmarks here, the test scores here, the how they're performing. Here's the thing they wrote. Here's the art picture. And if you just try this, you say to them, say, Hey, that's great. Thanks so much for teaching them. ⁓ and we're, we're interested in how they're doing academically, but also, ⁓ we really want to know. Are they helpful? Do they see needs and meet them? Are they kind? are they respectful to you?
And just watch the change that happens in the conversation when you approach the teachers. They actually these things are actually priorities for us. And you know what grade level they're on in math isn't you know, I mean that's good to keep track of. But and it's it's fascinating to like most academic settings. Or even your local public school probably has something about that the goal of the school is to build competent future citizens. So it's like it's baked into the language like we know.
what we're wanting to do in childhood and and the delight of watching people. I think how much fun the the teacher that you're talking about has from saying I've watched this person change and grow in these ways by engaging with this piece of the literature. Like that is the delight of parenting and teaching in all categories, but most of it is outside of a metric that you can brag about ⁓ when your college application, I guess.
Cameron (09:57)
Why do you think, and you come from a long line of educators yourself, Nathan, why do you think it is that so many of us seem to be squeamish about letting our kids just be kids, just have a childhood? So in other words, not filling their schedule with different planned activities and just letting them go outside and stare at the big sky, get hurt, fall off their bikes, that kind of thing. What is...
Nathan (10:02)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (10:26)
Because it seems to me that this only gets more pronounced now. Why? What are some, I mean, I'll think along it with you. Yeah.
Nathan (10:29)
Hmm. Do you think it's, do you think it's a, an underlying
category where we see reality as a competition? It's a, it's a Darwinian, the strong will survive 20 years from now. And so I, ⁓ train my child to be an expert, to withstand the, you know, to, rise to the top of every situation. ⁓ and I'm going to give them an edge by having them be a, ⁓ a little adult at eight years old.
Is it some sort of protection mechanism, I think, to say, well, they really need to be prepared to the cold hard reality of, ⁓
Cameron (11:03)
Yeah.
Yes.
It's not going to be, of course, it won't be any one thing. I think probably that that certainly is an aspect. lot of, I think of the line, everything always brings to mind a movie for me, sorry. But I think of that line from Brad Pitt in, in Tree of Life, where he looks at his son and he says, it takes fierce will to get ahead in this world. And in Tree of Life, Brad Pitt's character is, he's a father in the 1950s. So mean, that was post-war generation, tough time for kids.
Nathan (11:28)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (11:38)
especially for sons and fathers, but he is himself a frustrated man who had many, many grand ambitions that were unrealized. This is true of so many of us, by the way. So I think that's definitely an aspect where people look at their children and they think, want you to seize the opportunities I didn't, and I really care about you. I want you to get ahead. Part of this is also, I mean, American...
culture in general is fiercely competitive. That is true of our nation. And I can say this with, yep, I'm not saying it's bad. It's not necessarily bad.
Nathan (12:12)
I'm competitive. don't think that's necessarily bad, but we have to articulate it in order
to put some boundaries on it.
Cameron (12:21)
Well, but it's different. So what I mean by that though, isn't just that, yeah, you are competitive and that's fine. And part of that's, there's a really healthy aspect to that. It spurs people on to do, to think more creatively, to be more disciplined. Those are all good things. So there's a tremendous aspect to that. But speaking as a European transplant, I've been here for over 20 years. So, mean, this is my home now, but everything, the number, there are two things that people who are foreign generally say about America when they come. One is everything's bigger.
And the other one has to do with just the incredible speed, how fast paced everything is in America. I mean, again, I came from Europe. Europe is not known for being fast paced. Now globalization is a real thing and America has a huge influence around the world. So you'll see some aspect of this, but by and large in a lot of places in Europe, certainly where I was in Austria,
Nathan (12:54)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (13:14)
pace of life is just different. You walk into a restaurant and they expect for you to be in there for a long time. They're not trying to process you like you're on an assembly line and they don't have screaming loud music blaring in your ear. They expect for you to, the journal word is best here, genis, which means relish, enjoy. You're there to enjoy time and fellowship with people. America is very different from that. It's move, move, move. There's a restlessness in it. So competition can be a good thing. Competitiveness can be a good thing.
perpetual restlessness, I'm going to say is not a great thing. And that's very much part of the atmosphere of America.
Nathan (13:48)
Well, hang on, hang
on. there is an element of this, of like the entrepreneurial inventive productivity that comes out of that, American verse relishing in European is phenomenal. Like we crank out because I'll give you an example. Exactly. Well, here's a line. So.
Cameron (14:03)
Somebody here is listening and they're thinking of the Protestant work ethic right now. That phrase is in their head.
Nathan (14:13)
So Andy Bannister was visiting us back over the summer and we were leaving to go somewhere and I had some snacks. like, Hey, do you want a peanut butter pretzel? And he's like, Oh, what? And I'm it's like, it's like a little piece of pretzel with peanut butter inside of it. And he's like, what? And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, he's like, Oh yeah. He's like, man. He's like, I love this country. He's like, here's some, there's like, what are two good things? Hmm. Pretzel and peanut butter. Let's start an entire business based off of putting peanut butter inside of a pretzel and just go with it.
Cameron (14:27)
It's the best.
Nathan (14:40)
And he was saying how like that's very different from a European mindset of like, what's the fastest way that I could package peanut butter inside a pretzel so I could eat this while I'm traveling. ⁓ and I love peanut butter pretzels. know, it's a, so I want to see drive in my kids, but I also want them to be kids. And my dad taught fifth grade for almost 30 years. And he would just talked about how the, the, the adult team
Cameron (15:02)
Mm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Nathan (15:09)
11 years old shifted in that 30 years so He said the thing that happened is that you started seeing 11 year olds have to navigate life categories that Really? You shouldn't even know as a category until you're maybe like in your mid-20s from all sorts of things from relationships to sexual things to and he said it just
And he's like, you would watch kids melting down under the system and the counselors would be like, why can't we? And he's like, because your brain isn't developmentally able to handle the types of stuff that we're feeding it at this point. And it's stunting the future because you're trying to cram being a teenager into being an 11 year old. And I think maybe it's just like, we don't understand moral development intuitively of like, this is a kid that we're dealing with. So.
Cameron (15:56)
Yeah.
Nathan (16:09)
So there's a difference between I have high expectations for my kids as kids. I don't have high expectations for my kids as adults. I mean, I do when they get to be adults, but they're not there yet. So there has to be something where we just recognize that your five year old is not like you.
Cameron (16:10)
You know.
I think.
Nathan (16:29)
yet.
Cameron (16:30)
Well, so much of what we do is structured around ease and convenience and kids are profoundly inconvenient. And I, so I think there's a great deal of pressure when they're younger to demand cooperation very quickly. So that, that can be, that can be difficult. So you, I've heard quite a few wise people say in, those moments where there are the meltdowns, the normal kid stuff, your job is not to get the kid to be quiet for everybody else's benefit.
to get the kid to cooperate to make you look better, but your job is to be a mom or a dad in that moment to the child. expecting, but I, you know, your story from your dad there puts me in mind, perhaps you've heard this anecdote from Cory Tenboon, but she was on a bus with her father when she was a girl and there were some teenagers talking about, I think sex. And at the time she was able to realize this in hindsight, but she, as a little girl, didn't quite understand what they were on about. And so she asked her dad,
What are they talking about? And he looked at her and he pointed up to the highest section where you store your bag on the bus. And he said, here, reach up there and grab our suitcase. I can't dad, I can't reach it. Right. You can't reach it. And there are certain things that you can't reach just yet. And what they're talking about is something that you can't reach yet. I hear stories like that and I think, gosh, why can't I say something like that? That's real. That's wonderful biblical wisdom right there in the moment.
Nathan (17:38)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah
Cameron (17:59)
So many kids these days are having to do a whole lot more reaching. And part of that has to do with just the poorest nature of our world where so much is coming at you, so much quicker and so much faster. And I think one area, Nathan, where I've experienced this is some people will say, have you talked to your children about this sexual issue or whatever it is? And oftentimes I'll say right now, well, no, you need to get ahead of it.
Cameron, you need to be prepared. You need to talk about it now. Well, when they ask questions about it, certainly we are ready and we are poised and ready. This is a discussion friendly household. No subjects off the table. We will. But I'm not going to foist it on them prematurely because I don't want them to do unnecessary reaching. I want them to still be kids and I want them to enjoy childhood as best. So I've tried to ensure that.
Nathan (18:45)
Mm-hmm.
So.
That's really great. But one of the important features of that story that you told about Cory Tim Boone is that her dad could reach the overhead luggage. so I think a couple of things. I have a daughter who's 13. My oldest son is 11. So, you know, they're in that kids at school talk about stuff. And so I just periodically check in like, hey, kids at school talking about this. Yeah, this is do you under do you understand? And or do you want to talk about it? And my daughter frequently say it's like.
I know as much as I want to right now. And it's like, yep, that's great. And I'm happy to talk to you about when you want to know more. And so I do kind of keep saying, I can reach the luggage and you can't yet, but when you get there, I'm going to be there to discuss that through. So I think there's a way in which we can do that. But the other thing that is interesting about that story that I think a culture of like high expertise for children is that the vast majority of expertise is outsource.
Cameron (19:28)
Mm. Yep.
Nathan (19:54)
So if you want your kid to become phenomenal at ballet, there are very few fathers and mothers who are going to say, I'm going to teach my child to be phenomenal at ballet, or I'm going to be the one that coaches them in soccer to be the next whoever, or I'm going to train them vocally. It's almost all outsourced. And so you then move into a culture where the parent is no longer the expert on the development of the expertise of the kid. It's almost like if you aren't paying for it, it's not good.
Cameron (20:04)
Yeah, right.
Nathan (20:24)
There's so there's an element of that too that we we've we're trying to figure out an economic model for parenting that probably isn't necessary
Cameron (20:37)
But also I think we need to recognize, here's another basic category. Human beings are made by God and made in the image of God and therefore are profoundly mysterious in the sense that we can't wrap our whole minds around any one person. We can't put them in a box. We can do that in our minds, but it's a distortion of reality and it hurts us as much or more than it hurts the other person when we do that. And so if we were looking at children,
The element of control, it's in a, we have to see this differently. You can't control the outcome of, you have a serious influence on your child and on their development. And by God's grace, for better or for worse, you can influence their heart, but you can't control them. And I think, and you can't control their outcomes, you can't control their future. There isn't a guarantee. I mean, we all know,
You mentioned before, Nathan, the creepy fact that parents of children who turned out really well, there seems to be a common thread when you ask them, what did you do? What's your secret? We don't know. Well, and can also do another sobering example. can give examples of, mean, we all know people who had several children and most of them turned out really well. They all grew up under the same roof with the, you know, in the same household, but one of them didn't turn out so well.
Nathan (21:45)
Yeah.
Cameron (22:05)
What happened there? There is an, there's a mysterious element here. Yeah.
Nathan (22:06)
But.
But so when you say it didn't turn out well, you're not talking about a failure to become an expert in a particular field or make money. That's not what you mean by that. You're talking in moral terms. Yeah. And so that is the, I think what all of us long for, but maybe religion, Christianity specifically holds that. ⁓ I would way rather have a wonderful future relationship with my grandkids than I would for any of my kids to be.
Cameron (22:17)
No, not at all. We're talking about, I'm speaking in moral terms. Yeah. Yes.
Nathan (22:39)
so wealthy that we didn't have time for each other. And I think we all know that and would say that. some of it is, I wonder too, Cameron, is there a sense in this of an urgency that there's a window of formation that we think that uniquely children can only learn certain things? Now, if you want to be an elite ⁓ athlete, you probably, like 20 to 30 is a bit of a range. so in order to be 20 years old and have 10 years of experience,
Cameron (23:02)
Sure. Yep.
Nathan (23:08)
Okay, you need to start when you're 10, but setting up a culture that in your teaching a kid to love to learn, learn to love to learn. Hopefully doesn't stop when they're 18. and the other, the other example of this, I can think of a number of people who were like when I was an undergrad who maybe did something else and then came and were like maybe two or three years older, but had a couple of years, more years of life experience.
They were better students. And I even find that now that I go back and read some of the stuff that I was assigned in high school, I just didn't have the life experience to make sense of it at the time. And you're like, actually, Moby Dick isn't about whaling. ⁓ yeah. So, you know, there's, there's a, there's a sense there of like, have to mature into some categories before we can really collect the full weight of what it is that is available to us in that time. And yeah, that's good.
Cameron (23:48)
sure, yeah. Yeah. ⁓
Also, I mean, we're not talking exclusively about creativity, but that's an important aspect of childhood, just being imaginative. That requires the, you need the ability to be bored for creativity. A lot of people have talked about this, you need leisure. So I am not saying there's a balance here and there's a healthy balance between Nathan and I, since Nathan is American born and I'm European born. And there's some interesting fun frictions between the two different sensibilities that come about from that.
Nathan (24:21)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (24:40)
The ability to kind of mess around and dream, I think about some of the most... When I was in high school, for instance, I hated school. I was a very bad student and I had no interest whatsoever in academics. I was completely unmotivated by that. But one of the most helpful developments in my life was playing music in a band. we wrote... All these years later now, over 20 years later, I can look back, I just actually played...
got together with my old guitar player not too long ago. was in town and we played the old songs. And now we're actually at a place where we can say, hey, you know what? These aren't bad. We were good. We had something. so that was important for a number of different reasons. was, we were messing around a lot of the time and that's how you write songs. Well, that's how you do something new. You mess around, you play around and eventually something. But then you also have to learn to work with others because we're playing in a group and getting along was not easy. Especially when you're in high school and you're
Nathan (25:17)
You
Cameron (25:39)
You're a bunch of boys locked together in a sweaty room playing music. Yeah. Getting along can be a little bit of a challenge. But my point there is having the space to roam and to dream and to imagine. Now there are limits there. There's a balance. Because you also need discipline. So also when it comes to songwriting and all that, you need lots of practice. You need repetition. All of the old school stuff that's all the drills, all the stuff that's, you know, all the disciplinary aspects come in as well.
Nathan (26:07)
But
again, was your mom making you do this?
Cameron (26:08)
But you need some of that space.
Absolutely not. This was the one, this was one of the only things in my life at the time that I genuinely wanted. This was, this was what I was interested in. Yeah. It was, it was a genuine interest, but just say, yeah, ensuring that kids can have that, have a little bit of that space doesn't mean that you can't have, I think, I think team activities are good. I think sports are good. I think these are great outlets, but I also think it's important that our children have also, you know,
Nathan (26:23)
And so.
Cameron (26:41)
time for just play where they can just go out and roam and be kids and dream and investigate what they find interesting. I think that's really important too. Yeah.
Nathan (26:53)
had a conversation with one of my children this morning that I was saying, actually frequently, of saying, I don't really care what the outcome of this is, but I want to see you do the best that you can. And so I'm cheering for you to perform to the level of what I know you can do. I'm not expecting more of you, but I'm also not letting you get away with less than I know what you can do. And so that's a, I think a parenting sandwich there of saying, what are the...
The vast majority of the things that my children are involved in right now.
Well, actually, so I had I had two brothers who were offered soccer collegiate soccer scholarships and turned it down because they were going to focus on different things. Yeah. And so it wasn't it was kind of annoying to lot of other people who would have liked to have them. But they're like, we're not going to become professional athletes like that. You know, and maybe that'd be fun, but we don't have time to do this. And, know, the other thing. So it's a ⁓ it's kind of wild to be that type of person in a context where everybody is just so stressed out.
Cameron (27:37)
really? I did not. Mm-hmm.
Nathan (27:58)
and you're good at it and you're not stressed out about it because you're doing it for the fun of it. ⁓
Cameron (28:06)
Well, Nathan, what was your relationship to running when you were in, because I mean, know that was a big part of your high school years and.
Nathan (28:13)
Yeah, so running was something that I had, I don't know, at some point I decided I wanted to break the school record in the two mile. ⁓ And so I was training for this at a level way beyond, like I would go and run when it was cold and my mom would be like, why just quit, stop? And I'd like, mom, most mothers encourage their kids to pursue their goals and you're always trying to get me to. ⁓ But anyway, so there was that and it was fun. Yeah, I can run in the snow ⁓ and uphill. ⁓
Cameron (28:34)
Nathan wasn't most kids. We'll say that.
Nathan (28:42)
There was a sense in which you do something that starts as enjoyment. And then I went to college and it became very, very regimented. mean, so precision tracking, heart rate thresholds, the whole, ⁓ VO two max lactic thresholds, the whole like, and it became a bit mechanical. And then I remember there would be like, say like Christmas break where I would come home and then just go run and not even take a watch with me. No heart rate monitor, nothing. Just go run for the sheer.
Cameron (29:11)
Mm.
Nathan (29:12)
fun of it. And I would come back and submit my, you know, running report and is like, how many miles did you do this day? I don't know. How far did you go? I don't know. How fast did do it? I don't know. But I needed to just do it for the joy of, and it's not like I was hurting myself. I still did fine jump right back into the training program. But there was a sense in which you have to, at some point do the thing for the joy of doing it. And then you find rest and satisfaction in it. ⁓ that
Cameron (29:38)
Hmm.
Nathan (29:42)
can get squeezed out of it by being overly ⁓ clinical in the analysis of the type of the thing. so I think preserving that for our children, we all know this to be true in all categories of our lives. There are probably people who are working a job right now that they used to love, and then it just got kind of dried out on them. ⁓ Or same thing can be true in worship and our church attendance, all sorts of stuff. It started off and then it just became a bit ⁓ overly... ⁓
Measurable in some sense in it and it took the spunk out of it. So what we're saying, I think in this podcast is that If your kids are just enjoying being kids Fantastic like it's not you're not you're not ruining their chances of writing great literature in the future or ⁓ and also camera just think like anecdotally in your in your own life and then the lives of the people, know of people who ended up doing just
crazy stuff later in life, there's no way you could have seen that coming when they were 14 years old. ⁓ You know, I remember, even even for you specifically, your mom talking about how when you left for school, she would cry just like, don't know if Cameron's ever going to be able to master the English language. ⁓ know. The the so I enjoyed school, Cameron did not. Cameron was probably more popular in school than I was ⁓ the but the sense of that.
Cameron (30:43)
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah.
I was the opposite of Nathan in school.
Nathan (31:08)
humans continue to learn throughout the entirety of our lives that we are more way more dynamic and When the Lord calls us into something and we really get interested in it for the sake of the right reasons and motivations We all know that we are willing to throw phenomenal amounts of time and energy and resources into learning something that is a genuine pleasure into and ⁓ Desire slash calling for us and so having a broad skill set that comes from just the
Cameron (31:24)
the
Nathan (31:36)
free-floating downtime of you know is a couple months ago I think I said in a podcast that are way worse things that you can do than nothing and Man, I really think that's true, especially for kids that What do you what did you do outside?
Cameron (31:44)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (31:53)
Great. It's healthy. Well, okay, so.
Cameron (31:53)
But that assumes that you're outside. It assumes you're outside
though. Therein lies a challenge for some of us. Let them go outside. Perhaps they need a little bit of encouragement in that direction. ⁓
Nathan (32:02)
the you are less likely to sled ride in front of the UPS truck
if you stay inside though. But the not in the last day or two, but the
Cameron (32:11)
Not that that's happened, right, Nathan? Yeah.
Nathan (32:19)
What is it? What is the summer here? Chill out a little bit, right?
Cameron (32:24)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
More can be said, more will be said. But I think one of the challenges of our moment is just to let kids be kids. There's a balance there. think we've tried to address it in this episode, but letting kids be kids and doing what we can as parents, if we are parents, to ensure that for them, it's important because we love them.
Nathan (32:51)
Yeah, do you think that there's a... Do remember when your kids are learning to walk and then they are learning to walk up steps? And there are different size steps that you can take when your legs are little, right? That's hilarious. so oftentimes you're holding a finger, you're holding two fingers, or you're just carrying them or whatever. And so I think the parenting goal here, and even if you're not a parent, you're discipling somebody or you're encouraging ⁓ along the way. And hey, I'm still being parented.
Cameron (32:58)
yeah, it's fun.
Nathan (33:17)
⁓ And my parents are being parented by their parents to certain like this never stops, but there is a way in which you at certain times ⁓ Introduce them to bigger obstacles because you know, their legs are long enough to handle it and I think what we're Militating against here is is putting Your kit your four foot tall kid in top of and you know in front of a three foot step and saying go for it of What are the appropriate things for that age and are they enjoying the climb?
rather than meeting the metrics that will go well on a bumper sticker.
Cameron (33:53)
Well said. You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where we think out loud about current events and Christian hope.