Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Chris answers a question about how to help your child get good at things.
Greg:
How do I plan to introduce or get my daughter into the things she'll like and excel at? There's so much! Jock life, artist life etc.
Greg, this is a good question, and something that I also had anxiety about as a younger adult and a newlywed, when I would imagine myself as a dad. How do I help my kid find the things they are good at, stick with them, and enjoy them?
I worried about this a lot because I had the experience of entering legal adulthood motivated by precisely nothing. Not just marketable and/or productive things—I had no interest in anything other than distracting myself, moment to moment, from ennui and existential despair. My problem was not that I had failed to become good at things; I'd been decent enough at some of the things I'd picked up and dropped, including the sports I'd been obsessed with. But I didn't know how or why to pursue a thing, or what to do when I encountered difficulty. If I ever had the courage to take stock of myself, I saw an aimless doofus who wasn't better than an advanced novice at anything, and thus had no reason to expect his life to resolve into any clear shape.
I couldn't speak any languages or play any instruments, I couldn't sail a boat or ride a horse or even maintain a car, I couldn't paint or sculpt, I couldn't build or repair things, I'd never been anywhere or seen anything. I wanted to do these things, and I wanted to become someone capable of doing these things, but I felt frozen in place. I had no idea how to stick with anything, and my generalized fear of failure would immediately defeat any flailing efforts to pick up any skills or hobbies. For a time in my 20s and 30s, fear of this exact pattern made me deeply reluctant to become a father—itself an occupation, composed of skills, including the very challenge you, Greg, are fretting over.
What I wanted to avoid, with my own child, was developing into her a habit of sticking with things only until they become hard, then assuming that they are hard because she is not talented or capable enough to rise any further, then to feel embarrassed, then to drift until she encountered another interest at which she could easily rise to the level of advanced novice, and repeat the cycle.
Fortunately I am married to a person who is incredibly great at pursuing things, who over more than two decades of marriage has taught me a thing or two about how to choose a thing, how to know if it's hitting, and how to be serious about sticking with it. Now I know how to show things to my kid. Decades in the intimate company of a functional adult have done wonders for my capacity for trial and error. It turns out that being around people who know how to do a thing—in this case, who know how to try different activities without entering a years-long shame cycle—is a great method for self-improvement.
That, Greg, is the meatiest part of my advice to you. The best way to learn a thing is by the example of a person who is good at it, and the best time to be taught by that person is when you are new to it and brimming with excitement. What we have done for our child is link together in her mind the excitement of doing a thing with the experience of seeking out and trusting someone who is great at that thing, and who has an aptitude for teaching it. My daughter loves her ice skating, gymnastics, and Italian lessons, for example, because the people teaching her those things are kind and engaging teachers who make the process fun. She likewise loved her swim lessons, and she is now a better swimmer than I have ever been in my life.
She has a ukulele that she likes to jam on, but when her lessons were not hitting, she was starting to dread them. She told us her coach wasn't really talking to her; when she made mistakes, he talked to the class instead of her, so she felt frustrated and ignored. But she doesn't want to quit ukulele! She said to us, very reasonably and confidently, that she would like to try out a different coach, preferably a young woman who will talk to her. She has gotten the healthy idea into her head that frustration with the activity is a problem with the method of learning or instruction, and is not inherent to the activity. Most importantly, she doesn't yet seem to come anywhere close to blaming herself. To me that is a triumph.
Not everything we try out is a keeper. That's my other bit of advice: Quitting is fine! Not all forms of quitting are created equal: Finish the class/course/season, and if it's still not working, move on. My daughter loves dancing but wasn't really into dance instruction, so we dumped it. When we talk about it now, we talk about finding the right studio or coach, and she is fully open to trying it again down the line. I'm sure she'll dump other things along the way. The option to move along to the next thing can be a dangerous temptation, I suppose, but I think it's also important to lower the stakes of trying a thing: You are not committing yourself to a lifetime of struggle. You are merely trying out a thing to see whether you like doing it.
You want for your daughter to have confidence that she can learn things and pursue them, so long as she can find the right environment for learning. To me, that's the key thing: You don't necessarily want your daughter to think of herself as uncommonly good at doing things—that's a trap—so much as you want her to think of all things as doable and human capacity as a resource that is generally abundant, and the process of becoming good as a matter of circumstances and reps.
Whenever possible, learn things together! Across the ice rink from my daughter, I stumble and wipe out embarrassingly, during the Adult 2 ice skating class that I am insanely unqualified for, but she gets a real hoot out of seeing me over there scrambling around on my skates. Let your daughter see you trying things, struggling, and going back for more. From my experience of having a wife who tries things and now of raising a child who tries things, I feel very confident saying that watching someone else try and try again helps to build up some resilience to the concept of failure. I hate to cite a commercial that I saw on my television, but the script they gave to Caitlin Clark in that one ad is on the money: Let yourself be bad at something! It is practically a superpower.
Remember when George Costanza started making a point of going out on a high note? Socially, this was weird. As a learning tool, it's great! The best time to put away a book you are reading to your child is after a cliffhanger, so that she has the experience of asking for more reading, of sincerely wanting the next chance to sit down and read. This also works great with flash cards: Limit yourself to a maximum of 10 cards, no matter what. You might consider this weirdly manipulative, but I have straight-up explained to my daughter: "Nah, we're putting the flash cards away now, because it's better to be excited to do them later than to become bored of them now." The same could be true of grounders in the front yard, banging away on some drums, or improvising "Roses are red" poems on a road trip. Don't push for a particular outcome! Instead, stop before the activity has a chance to become tedious or boring.
I know you probably don't mean it like this, but to be clear: You do not have to find some hidden mysterious category of things your daughter "will like and excel at." What you and your daughter will encounter, because it's what everyone encounters, is a world full of interesting things. Learning about these interesting things, trying them, and developing them as interests is a matter of practice. The mistake is thinking that you have to find the thing. I wish I could go back and teach this to 13-year-old me: The more narrowly you restrict yourself to things I am naturally good at, the longer it will take to find the thing, and the harder it will be to accept setbacks and failures. If what you have is curiosity, and what you are good at is trying things and practicing, anything can be the thing.
Take it seriously and make it fun, Greg. Don't put a ton of pressure on yourself or your kid to develop curiosities into hobbies, or hobbies into pursuits, or pursuits into The Shape Of The Future. Try a lot of things, try them together, try them in as focused and formal a way as you can manage, accept the possibility of failure, and be ready to move right along if something doesn't hit. With any luck, your kid will develop a healthy way of being interested in things, without the freight of shame, and all before they are 40 years old.
