The Wrong Questions
This is the first of a short series inspired by a question from one of our subscribers. If you have a question or a topic you would like us to explore, send it our way.
A subscriber wrote to us with a question a lot of parents wrestle with: “How hard should we push our kids to excel in school and activities, versus letting them just be kids and explore the world?” What most of us really want, the subscriber said, is for our kids to be happy and to become contributing members of society. If they want to shoot for the moon, wonderful. If not, how much should we push?
We turned that question over several time in our heads. And as the son of immigrant parents who pushed HARD, Victor feels that question at the level of the kid who was pushed and as parent who tried hard (but didn’t always succeed) at not paying that parenting pattern forward.
This is where we landed. The choice isn’t between landing on excellence on one end or letting them be a kid at the other end. That yardstick is measuring the wrong thing.
The yardstick is mislabeled
The real question isn’t how hard to push. It’s asking who holds the wheel. On one side is adult-directed performance: the parent picks the goal, sets the pace, and the child produces. On the other is child-directed exploration: the child follows what interests them, tries things, drops things, and finds out who they are by bumping into the world. It’s not the content or the intensity of any given activity that matters. It’s who’s directing it.
We can measure a grade, a ranking, a spot on the starting squad, so those become the things we pursue. The harder-to-measure stuff, whether a kid is curious, whether they can recover from a setback, whether they like who they are, gets treated as extra because none of it shows up on an easy to read actual or metaphorical scorecard. But the measurable things aren’t the ones that build sustainable life satisfaction.
Victor’s mantra – Everything is beautiful until you measure it – came to him in response to an over-measured life. In parenting, the temptation to pursue easy to measure milestones leads to a transactional culture in which we start managing the child (and their activities) instead of engaging with them. Parent and child both too busy to reflect on what really matters to them.
Exploration is not a soft, lower-stakes option you settle for when you have decided not to raise a high achiever. Exploration is the mechanism that builds a high achiever.
Exploration is how a capable adult gets built
A sense of purpose doesn’t get installed by external pressure. It forms downstream of a kid trying something, getting feedback, and trying again. The sequence is consistent. A moment of contact with something that sparks interest, then some tentative doing, then the discovery that the doing matters to someone, then commitment. Every step in that chain requires the child to be the one moving. Pressure may start the engine. But it can’t steer.
That means the two things so many parents want (to “let them be kids” and also achieve) aren’t on opposite ends of the yardstick. Letting them explore is not a detour from raising someone who contributes. It is the way you arrive at a young person who contributes from the heart. The only kind of achievement threatened by exploration is the kind the parent wants more than the child does. If that stings, I feel you. I’ve been there. The problem was never the exploring. When we compress a childhood into credentialing, resume-building, and the next scheduled achievement, we are not accelerating the path to a secure, self-driven, capable adult. We are crowding out the experiences that produce one. It’s not too late to course correct.
Researchers used to compare kids who were in activities to kids who weren’t, and the activity kids tended to win out. Then someone wondered if they were asking the wrong question. What would happen if instead you followed the same kid, before and after joining. Did the kid change? It turns out, mostly not. Signing up does nothing by itself. What changes a kid is what sometimes happens once they’re there. Contributing to a group that wants them. Work that excites them. In other words, a hand on their own wheel. None of that follows a registration fee, and none of it survives being forced. The season your kid begged for and the season you signed them up don’t yield the same outcome. One builds a self-motivated kid. The other builds a grudge.
You can watch this happen in miniature. A kid plays around with a camera on a family trip, takes a photo they think is cool, shows someone, gets an unforced positive reaction, asks to do it again. Nobody assigned it. Six months later they are phographing everything, teaching themselves because the drive is theirs. That’s purpose forming in real time, and it was sparked by the space to explore, not a syllabus. No amount of pushing manufactures that spark. It needs unstructured and unmeasured space. We have failed at this more than once. We’re learning. So can you.
What handing over the wheel looks like
When our kids were teenagers, we did something that struck a lot of other parents as reckless. We decided not to have curfews. They – our son and our daughter – could stay out as late as they wanted. The one rule was that before they left the house, they had to tell us when they would be back. Any time was fair game. If they said three in the morning, fine. But they could not be late. Not even one minute late.
This wasn’t permissiveness. It was a transfer of ownership. A curfew keeps the wheel in the parent’s hands and demands compliance from the kids. Our version handed them the wheel and asked them to plan, to weigh ahead time what they wanted to do against what they could deliver on, and to agree in advance to be accountable for their own word. The point was never the time of night. It was who was got to decide. (NB: this example is a specific one from our specific family enacted with our specific, fairly neurotypical children who had already demonstrated that this type of family policy would be a just-right challenge for them – and for us, quite frankly. We are not saying every family should do this.)
Notwithstanding, the “no curfew” framework shares the same instinct that answers the subscriber’s question. We are not choosing between an ambitious kid and a happy one. You are choosing how much of the deciding your child gets to do while the stakes are still small enough to practice on. Often, kids are more prepared to be self-directed than parents are ready to give up control. If that’s you, spare your kids the micromanagement and accept the invitation to explore why you are drawn towards that level of control.
To be clear, handing over the wheel is not the same as leaving the car. Child-driven does not mean adult-absent. The whole time our kids planned late nights, one of us committed to staying awake, paying attention, ready if they needed us, and ready for accountability, if necessary. (Turns out they were literally never late against their self-directed deadlines.) Exploration without a steady adult nearby is not freedom, it’s neglect. The better instinct is to stay close by while letting them steer, which is harder than either grabbing the wheel or walking away.
So the honest answer to how much should we push is that push is the wrong verb and the yardstick is the wrong instrument. The question worth asking is not whether you are pushing hard enough. It is whose hands are on the wheel, and whether you are willing to slowly, deliberately hand it over.
Try This
The Wheel Audit
For one week, pick a single activity your child spends real time on. The sport, the instrument, the class, the club. Do not change anything about it yet. Just watch it, and answer two questions honestly.
First, who chose it? Not who signed the check, but who wanted it in the first place. Was it the child’s pull, or your plan for them? Second, who sustains it? When your kid is tired and does not want to go, whose energy gets them out the door: their own commitment to something they care about, or your insistence?
You are looking for the mismatch. An activity the child chose and sustains is exploration, and it is building something real whether or not it ever produces a trophy. An activity you chose and you sustain is performance on loan, and the moment you stop pushing, it usually stops. Neither answer requires you to quit anything this week. It just tells you which hand is on the wheel, so you know what you are actually building.
Consider This
Think about the thing you are best at as an adult, the capability you are proudest of. Now trace it back. Did it start because someone made you, or because something pulled you and an adult had the patience to let you follow it? Sit with what that origin story tells you about the kind of pull you are, or are not, leaving room for in your own child’s week.
Want the research behind this post? Read the Dive Deeper: To What Ends -- the purpose and exploration evidence, what it shows, and where its limits are.
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