I could pressure my son, but the skill of reacting to pressure I put on him is not the skill I want him to have.1
—Sebastian Thrun, cofounder and CEO of Udacity, developer of Google self-driving car and Google Glass
What do you want to be when you grow up? What are you going to major in? Adults constantly ask children and college-bound students these questions, and, depending on the answer, the grown-up will offer a beaming face, a quizzically raised eyebrow, or a frown in response. Even when the kid is a stranger to us, we’re pretty sure we know which pursuits are worthwhile and which aren’t.
I’ve already confessed to you that when my daughter’s nursery school teacher took me aside and highly praised her paintings, I thought to myself, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that’s not gonna get her into college.” Avery was only four years old, but what she “ought to” do was already on my mind. I didn’t yet understand how dismissing my child’s artistic talents might be harmful to her. Soon enough, though, in my work as Stanford’s dean of freshmen, I understood the error in my thinking. I sat with far too many students describing what “everyone” expected them to study or pursue. And too many responded through tears when I asked, “Yeah, but what do you want to do?” I developed mantras that I’d fold into formal and informal conversations with my students, one of which was “Find your voice and honor what you hear.” This was my way of saying: What you’re going to be and do in the world is up to you. Look to yourself for clues about what really matters to you. Give yourself permission to be and do those things.
And at home, I did a 180. I stopped expecting that Avery or her brother would become any particular thing (a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an entrepreneur, and so on). I stopped thinking of them as little bonsai trees that I could prune carefully, and I began treating them instead like wildflowers of unknown genus and species that would reveal their unique and glorious beauty as long as I gave them the proper nourishment and environment. I began hoping foremost that my children as well as my students would find what Stanford professor of education and director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence William (“Bill”) Damon calls “purpose.”
PURPOSE MATTERS
Damon’s research indicates that a sense of purpose is essential for achieving happiness and satisfaction in life. He defines purpose as a person’s “ultimate concern,” that which, when known, becomes a person’s ultimate answer to the questions “Why am I doing this?” and “Why does this matter to me?” Damon distinguishes purpose from short-term desires—such as an A on a test, a date to a dance, a new piece of technology, a spot on the team, or admission to a particular college. A short-term desire may or may not have longer-term significance, Damon says. “Purpose, by contrast, is an end in itself.”
In 2003, Damon and his colleagues began the Youth Purpose Project, a nationwide four-year study of purpose in people aged twelve to twenty-six. Only 20 percent of those studied had found something meaningful to which they wanted to dedicate their lives. Another 25 percent were “drifting” with no sense of what they really wanted to do and no intent to develop that knowledge. The rest were somewhere in the middle. Twenty percent who’ve found their purpose is too low a percentage for Damon, who wrote his most recent book, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, not only as a culmination of his work in human development but out of a sense that in society today too many young adults are experiencing a sense of emptiness.2
This emptiness does not arise from a lack of interest in having a purpose. A 2012 study by Net Impact, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping people make a difference in their world through their careers, found that 72 percent of college students feel that having a job that makes a positive social or environmental impact is very important or essential to their happiness. And Millennial Adam Smiley Poswolsky, whose best-selling 2014 career guide The Quarter-Life Breakthrough has shown thousands of young adults how to pivot their lives toward purpose, writes of the desire he and so many of his generation have to find “meaningful work.”3 For Poswolsky, meaningful work “provides personal meaning reflecting who you are and what your interests are, allows you to share your gifts to help others, and is financially viable given your desired lifestyle.” And meaningful work stands in contrast to “mediocre work,” which pays the bills, passes the time, doesn’t align with one’s values, and may make you financially successful but “doesn’t allow you to make your unique contribution to the world.”
“So many young people I talk to end up pursuing paths out of parental pressure rather than personal alignment,” Poswolsky told me. “This leads to confusion and resentment, and sometimes unhappiness. Parents (especially in a job market completely different than the one they experienced as boomers) may not know what is best for their kids.”
As dean, I became very interested in helping my students home in on their purpose as a way of starting them on the road toward meaningful work. I’d tell them to forget what you think “everyone” expects you to study or do for a career. I’d say, Study what you love, and the rest will follow.
“When you study what you love,” I’d say, “you’re motivated to go to every class. You do all the reading. Maybe even the supplemental reading. You speak up in class. You go to office hours. You synthesize what you’ve read with what was said in class and with what you discussed with the professor and fellow students afterward, and you formulate your own thoughts about the material. When you study what you love, you probably end up with a great grade because you were intrinsically motivated to master the subject matter. But even if you don’t get a great grade, if you’ve studied what you love, you’ve put your heart into whatever grade you got. You’ve made a real effort. And regardless of the grade, through all of this effort you’ve got a professor who can write you a very meaningful letter of recommendation about your curiosity and determination. And even more than that, you’ll be able to speak about the subject in a compelling manner in a job interview. If you have the guts to study what you love regardless of what other people say, it leads precisely to the kind of success you’re looking for.”
Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute, a social enterprise that is part of Claremont Graduate University dedicated to a mission of “strengthening organizations to strengthen society,” agrees with my “study what you love” mantra.4 When I spoke with Wartzman in 2014 to get his insight into this concept of life path and purpose, his daughter had just graduated from college, and Wartzman, a highly acclaimed writer, had just written an open letter to her about deploying management guru Peter F. Drucker’s principles in her life; he published the letter in Time magazine.5 “Chances are,” he wrote to his daughter, “what you love plays to your strengths and it’s where you’re going to have the most success.” In our conversation Wartzman added that if you start doing work you love when you’re young, “you’ve got the best shot of reaching excellence and mastery, because you have that much more time.”
Meanwhile, Sebastian Thrun, the German-born Silicon Valley genius behind the self-driving car, Google Glass, and the free online university Udacity, believes that a sense of purpose will lead not only to happiness and to meaningful work, but also to success.6 When I called him in 2014 to ask his thoughts on parenting, the first thing he said to me was, “I’m not an expert in child education. I know the world is full of opinions and I don’t know any more than anyone else.” With that caveat out of the way, he proceeded to tell me that whenever young people ask him for career advice, he gives them the simple message: find your passion. When he told me this I cringed slightly; although “find your passion” was once a lovely philosophical ideal, it has become utilitarian, as in, find your passion—as if it’s hiding over there on the bookshelf or under a rock—and find it quickly!—so you can tell a college admission dean about it. I push back on Sebastian to get at the values that for him underlie this standard platitude.
“I say, ‘Listen to yourself, listen to your intuition,’” he says. “Many kids have a complete disconnect with their inner feelings; instead they’re attuned to ‘tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’ If you’re passionate about what you do, then you’re going to find a job. Relatively few people are actually passionate about what they do, and when you’re passionate you’re twice as good as anybody else. When you hit the working world and you want to be really successful, there’s no one around to tell you what to do. You’ve got to know yourself well enough to know what you want to do.
“How to make a kid truly successful in life is more important than getting into Stanford. I find a shocking number of people who have a perfect pedigree but don’t have the passion. And look at Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates. Their pathways weren’t neatly laid out. This model of dragging the kids to exactly the same stuff at the same time is a broken model. Parents mean extremely well, and are willing to endure a lot of hardship themselves. But for their kids, their independence of thought and mind, and the ability to derive pleasure from their own actions, all of that is left by the wayside.”
Rick Wartzman and I spoke about the potential downside of doing what you love—that is, that it might not make you well off financially. This is a hard subject, particularly for upper-middle-class parents, to swallow. Wait, our kids might have a lower standard of living than us? They won’t live in the manner to which they’ve grown accustomed? They won’t be able to buy a home in the kind of neighborhood we live in? Perhaps. The state of the economy and the cost of living may make it so. But here’s where it’s worth interrogating what success actually means. A kid may come home to more modest digs, and have to make do with less, but if she’s doing what she loves, she swells with immeasurable happiness, contentment, joy, and, yes, purpose. Who are we to say that’s not a meaningful life?
“Children,” says Damon, “must have a sense that they are finding their way toward purposes of their own choosing, and parents cannot make these choices for them.” Parents cannot give a child purpose, define what it should be, or force a sense of purpose onto a child, Damon warns, “any more than the parent can choose the child’s personality or write a script for the child’s life.”
So, what can a parent do to help kids chart their own path?
FIRST, EMBRACE THE KID YOU’VE GOT
“Embrace the child you’ve got” is an obvious point, yet it deserves an underscore. When we decide it’s our job to determine what our kid should explore, study, or do for a living, we run the risk of focusing on who they aren’t (but we wish they would be), and explicitly not seeing, valuing, and loving the person they actually are.
A friend named Jennifer Ayer is head of the Palo Alto independent school, The Girls’ Middle School, and mother of three teenage girls.7 As a child, she was a “teacher and parent pleaser” and had no idea what she really wanted to do. “I knew how to do school, jump through hoops, get all the grades. I remember being told that I was a natural leader and wondering what on earth I was supposed to lead. It took me until age thirty to learn to hear to my inner voice over the cacophony coming from society.” She plows these lessons learned into her parenting and into her role as educator. “I have faith that kids can learn to listen to their inner voice much sooner than I did. Setbacks, struggles, and failures are essential to the process.”
Jennifer’s eyes were opened to the importance of helping a kid find their own passion more than a decade ago, when she invited Challenge Success cofounder Denise Pope to speak at her home, as part of a fundraiser for Bing Nursery School. Until Denise’s visit, Jennifer, a mother of three then-preschool-aged girls, had not given much thought to the perils of having her daughters follow the same paths she and her husband had taken and attend elite schools from childhood through graduate school. “But as Denise spoke I was riveted by what she was saying,” Jennifer told me. “After everyone had left, I turned to my husband and said, ‘I want our girls to be healthy, ethical, and to still love learning when they leave our home. Nothing else matters.’ He said, ‘But secretly you still want them to go to Dartmouth.’ I responded, ‘We have to let go of that. If it is meant to be, it will take care of itself.’ As parents of preschoolers we changed our mind-set and our parenting. ‘Help them discover and develop their interests and talents’ has been our mantra ever since.”
From my conversations with educators and parents nationwide, as well as my own observations, I know this shift in focus toward who a kid is and what a kid can do as opposed to who they aren’t and what they can’t do is sorely needed in our communities and in our homes. Time and again I hear something such as this, from Michele, who lives on the Upper East Side in New York: “We’ve got to celebrate kids for who they are. That’s what’s missing here. There’s too much working on what’s ‘wrong’—deficient in this and deficient in that. There’s little celebration of what’s good about kids.”8
Holley, a parent from northern Virginia, took this shift in focus to heart after hearing a talk by psychologist Madeline Levine.9 Holley told me, “What I found out between Madeline Levine’s talk and my own experience is that just because my daughter is said to be ‘gifted’ doesn’t mean she’s gifted in every subject, at all times, forever. She hates history and English. She loves math and science. But I made her do honors English anyway, and she got a D. I changed my mind after hearing Madeline Levine. Why did I keep saying she had to take all the gifted classes? Why do we make them do things they absolutely hate? I realized we shouldn’t expect our kids to be perfect at everything. My daughter is taking honors chem, and is pulling a B. And she loves every moment of it.”
I had a similar moment with Sawyer during his sophomore year of high school, when he was handling many challenging subjects including honors chemistry and algebra two/trigonometry but positively drowning in his third year of Spanish, which I’d required him to take. Night after night he’d go through the motions of his Spanish homework along with his five other academic subjects, getting farther and farther behind in his comprehension as he went through the rote motions to complete the homework. He was spending upward of four hours a night on homework, rubbing his already red eyes in exhaustion as the hours ticked by, and waking up the next day with no optimism about school or life. He spent two weekends devoted to getting ahead in his Spanish homework so as to lighten the load in each coming week, yet the load never seemed lighter.
After observing this for two weeks and feeling some measure of “this isn’t right” as we relaxed into family weekend activities while our son plodded away at his Spanish, my husband and I decided to offer him a lifeline. Spanish had been our idea, based on my regret over not ever having developed fluency in the language. We talked with him about how to achieve more balance and offered up the idea of dropping the class as one way of doing so. He immediately brightened considerably, but then faced the weighty question: Should I, or Shouldn’t I? He e-mailed his guidance counselor that night and the next day went to see the counselor to talk it through—on his own. His counselor, very predictably but understandably, said, “Colleges want to see three years of a language.” Sawyer countered, “But I’m completely stressed out and it’s impacting my ability to do well in my other classes. If I drop, I’ll have a prep period where I can get started on my homework in the classes I care most about. And I’m not doing well enough in Spanish to have the kind of comprehension a college will want to see.” Sawyer also talked with his Spanish teacher. Ultimately, he dropped the class. Homework is now still a very demanding but more manageable three hours per night. He had a choice in the matter and has had a spring in his step ever since.
As for my husband and me, this was not an easy decision—we very much value our kid learning a second language. It’s an important practical skill and will open him to valuable cultural experiences and other types of awareness. But the stress Sawyer was experiencing every afternoon and evening was becoming unmanageable; it was compromising his sleep and his overall life outlook. We decided we’d rather he squeezed the most out of the subjects he loves—science, history, English, and photography—than see him compromise all of that while being squeezed to death by Spanish. As for colleges, some admission deans may question this decision and decide he’s unfit for their freshman class because of it; but I have confidence—tremendous confidence—that the right college for Sawyer will understand why he made this choice.
SECOND, WHEN THEY’RE YOUNG, LISTEN FOR CLUES
Damon’s research and that of others shows that until around the middle school years, most children aren’t developmentally capable of reflecting about their identity or thinking about the future, both of which are prerequisites to being able to think about their purpose. So no matter how much you as the parent might want to push your kid to know themselves and get going on developing that all-important sense of purpose, a kid simply can’t until that developmental milestone of being able to “self-reflect”—which will be different for every child—is reached. With younger kids, your job is to observe who they are, expose them to different things, and take an interest in what interests them.
“What a parent should do,” Bill Damon asserts, “is lead a child toward promising options. A parent can help a child sort through choices and reflect upon how the child’s talents and interests match up with the world’s opportunities and needs. A parent can support a child’s own efforts to explore purposeful directions, and open up more potential sources of discovery about possible purposes. These are supporting roles rather than leading ones, because center stage in this drama belongs to the child. But while the most effective assistance parents can provide is indirect, it is also invaluable.”10
Google Glass inventor Sebastian Thrun’s young son makes many of his own choices and has fewer extracurriculars than most other kids as a result. “I could probably make my son play chess really well or ski really well, but I don’t want to deprive him of the ability to discover things on his own. I could pressure him, but that skill of reacting to pressure is not the skill I want him to have. When I’m not around anymore, he has to be able to do things on his own. The metric is not whether I can make him do things, it’s whether he can do things. Rather than pushing him to think about this or that, I want to encourage him to find the world on his own.”11
Or, as Poswolsky puts it, “The best thing parents can do is allow their kids to be creative, experiment, and follow their bliss.”12
THIRD, ESPECIALLY WITH TWEENS AND TEENS, REMEMBER: WILDFLOWERS, NOT BONSAI TREES
How can we parents help our kids develop Damon’s sense of purpose and Thrun’s sense of passion without going overboard and charting their path for them? Based on the research of Damon and the advice of Poswolsky, as well as my own personal experiences and observations, here are my tips for how to support your kid in charting their own path, especially during those years when the external pressures of college and the internal pressures of your seemingly combustible teen heat up:
1. Accept that it’s not about you, it’s about your kid. Set aside your definition of a successful career, what you’d be proud to be able to say to others about your kid, or what you’d always assumed or hoped your kid would be or do. This is no small feat. It requires a fundamental commitment to the belief that their life isn’t about you. Many parents struggle with this piece, but it’s essential that you get there. Being able to differentiate your life from theirs is an essential contributor to their mental health—and yours.
2. Notice who your kid actually is—what they’re good at, and what they love. This is your kid’s precious, unique life unfolding, and the possibilities are infinite. Whether you’re at home or out in the world, the clues to what your kid is skilled at and interested in are everywhere. For example, which subjects do they pursue with vigor, discuss excitedly, and persist at when there’s a challenge? What kinds of books and magazines do they read? What topics do they post about on Facebook, tweet about on Twitter, or pin on Pinterest? When are they curious, asking questions, and lighting up with interest? What are they so into that it becomes hard for you to tear them away? What are they bothered about in the world? What kind of injustice concerns them?
Also pay attention to how your kid likes to participate in the world. Do they enjoy interacting with people? Are they good at organizing things? At solving problems? Do they articulate the big picture? Are they interested in every small detail? Are they idealistic or practical? Do they like knowing a lot of information? Are they a numbers person? A people person? Highly competitive? Persuasive? Do they like to use their hands and make stuff? Do they like to help others?
Your kid has a great chance of living a meaningful and purposeful life at the intersection of what they’re good at, what they love, and what they value. There, they’ll experience Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”—where the challenges presented are just slightly ahead of the talent or skill they bring, and their interest and motivation are strong. They’ll feel good about themselves and their contributions. Even if you don’t really understand what it is they do, their joy will be palpable. And that’s what matters.
3. Explore with diagnostic tools. The concept of “strengths”—the ways of being in the world that energize you and, if utilized and honed, can lead to professional success—is the work of Donald O. Clifton of the Gallup, Inc., opinion poll organization. Through the Clifton StrengthsFinder test (which can be accessed for free if you’ve already purchased a copy of a StrengthsFinder book, or can be purchased by going to www.gallupstrengthscenter.com), a person can learn their top five strengths out of the thirty-four talents or skills most common in humans based on Gallup’s research. Writer Marcus Buckingham, author of international best sellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, among other titles, is a leader in bringing the “Strengths Movement” to the workplace. Jennifer Fox, author of Your Child’s Strengths: A Guide for Parents and Teachers, fashioned the “Strengths” concept into an entire high school curriculum and pedagogy when she was head of school at Purnell School, a private, all-girls school in New Jersey.
Parents may find the Clifton StrengthsFinder test to be a fun and useful tool for gaining insight into how a kid is going to find meaningful and purposeful work in the world. It’s appropriate for persons aged fifteen and older. Similar types of tools are the Strong Interest Inventory, which seeks to match a person’s interests with possible careers, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality inventory, which can help a person better understand how they enjoy functioning in the world and the kinds of careers that they might find rewarding. All three of these tools are used by high school guidance counselors and in college career services centers throughout the nation. For younger kids, the strengths movement offers StrengthsExplorer, a tool for ten- to fourteen-year-olds.
4. Be interested and helpful. When a parent senses a spark of interest in their kid, we can be enormously helpful at “fanning the flames,” as Bill Damon puts it, to help our kid and us better understand their interest and where they might want to take it. Family dinner conversations are a great time to sense a spark and then fan the flames. Start by talking about their day and what was most enjoyable at school, or after school, and why. Keep up the continual questioning to get at the nugget of what made the experience enjoyable—and resist the impulse to fill in your own answer or make assumptions. Once we begin to develop a sense of our kid’s interests, we can support them by a willingness to seek out school activities, summer camps, and other forms of enrichment that can help them develop their interests.
5. Know when to push forward, know when to pull back. None of us wants our kid to squander their talents, or to have given up on something when it started to get difficult, such as playing a musical instrument. But we need to look to our kid for clues that they are genuinely interested in a particular pursuit before we decide that this is something worth cultivating at great effort, time, and perhaps expense. If your kid has the budding talent for something and a good deal of interest in it, by all means support it to whatever degree you can. But if your kid lacks the interest, that’s a red flag that no matter how talented they might be, it’s not likely to be something they want to do with their life. If you push them anyway, they may end up bitterly resenting you no matter how much they’ve “succeeded” at it or how proud you are to be able to say they’ve done it.
6. Help them find mentors. According to Damon’s research, “virtually all the highly purposeful youth whom we studied had mentors outside the homes, and these mentors contributed importantly to the youngsters’ quests for purpose.” So we can also fan the flames by introducing our kid to people farther ahead on the same path who can become mentors and help them deepen and strengthen their interests. Many grown-ups in our kids’ lives can be great role models for how to live a life of meaning and purpose. Does your kid love science? Encourage them to ask their aunt, the scientist, about when she first got interested in her particular field and the steps she took to develop that interest further. Does your kid love airplanes? Introduce them to your college friend who builds or flies them and ask that same question. Does your kid have a favorite author? Take her to a book signing and encourage her to meet the person. Encourage her to follow up with a letter asking the author how he or she got their start. Every kid has a teacher, or two, or three, who loves what they do for a living. Encourage them to approach a favorite teacher to ask how they got their start. Even if your kid isn’t interested in teaching, talking to a person who has a sense of purpose helps a kid understand what purpose looks like and they will hunger to feel it for themselves.
Kids of any age can feel nervous at the thought of engaging an adult in conversation, but as with the professors I advised my undergraduates to go meet in office hours, almost any adult is happy to respond to the simple, thoughtful question “You seem to love what you do. When and how did you figure out that’s what you wanted to do?” This question is an icebreaker any kid can ask any adult, and the dialogue can then proceed toward what this person would recommend a young budding scientist/pilot/engineer/writer do to deepen their exposure to the subject.
7. Prepare them for the hard work to come. As was the case with Millennial filmmaker Stephen Parkhurst, parents often tell kids that they can be anything they want to be or that their dreams will come true; both platitudes are half right—believing in yourself and having dreams is really important—but the other half of the equation, which there is simply no way around, is hard work. When we overpraise our kids—telling them everything they did was “great!” or “perfect!” we give them a false sense of what it’ll take to achieve their goals in the real world one day. Being able to give a kid a reality check and constructive feedback are crucial.
We do this by telling our kid what it actually takes to succeed in the real world—hard work, relationship-based connections, perseverance, resilience, and some amount of good luck. Says Damon, “Impress upon them the importance of sticking with something in order to really master it, but also be prepared to give honest, frank feedback.” We’ve got to share with them what we know of the challenges and limitations that exist—not to derail them or make them feel foolish, but to prepare them for just how hard they’ll have to work to make those dreams come true.
For example, a parent of an aspiring professional football player can say, “Son, only three to four percent of high school football players will get the chance even to play in college and a small fraction of them will make it to the NFL…” and follow that up with encouragement about what it will take to get to the next level: “If this is what you want, you’re going to need to double up your practices and work on your strength. I think you can do it if you’re willing to put in the work. I’m here to support you.”
8. Don’t do too much for them. When you’re highly excited about your kid’s interests, you may find yourself wanting to do too much to further things along. Your kid must be in the driver’s seat. They must be the one to make it—whatever “it” is—happen.
Little mini-businesses or social-entrepreneurship activities are all the rage for kids these days, in part because we think “colleges want to see” it on the application. Those motives aside, they can be great opportunities for a kid to develop more skills and nurture their budding sense of purpose. But remember, if you construct the enterprise, order the items being sold, or devise the storage method for the items being collected, deliver it to the school or sidewalk, troubleshoot along the way, and pack it all up when the day is done, and all your kid does is make a sign or poster, stand there with a smile, and take people’s money or donated items, you haven’t helped your child develop any of these traits at all. And you’ll have done nothing to further your understanding of your kid’s purpose. A Seattle parent I spoke with refers to this as “parents acting like the sous-chef and the kid acts like they’re Julia Child.” The right thing for you to do is stand well to the side and observe—take note of what sparks in your kid: Is it handling money and making change? Is it bringing in new customers? Is it engaging in conversation? Is it speaking about the purpose behind the thing being collected or sold? These observations can yield clues as to what your child’s purpose will one day be.
9. Have your own purpose. Here’s where we parents get to put our own selves front and center. Too often, our kids hear us complaining about things; let them hear what pulls you toward work instead of what pushes you away from it. Do you derive meaning and purpose from the work you do? If so, why? Are you experiencing personal growth through it? Are you helping others? Are you making a contribution to your community, or to society more broadly? Are you proud to be earning a living that keeps the family safe, warm, and fed? Is your work about personal expression? Share with your kids whatever it is about your work that gives you a sense of purpose and meaning. If you’re a stay-at-home parent, let your kids hear you say why you enjoy raising children and running a household. If you work outside the home, talk about something meaningful that happened at work that day. Too often today kids are dabbling in everything and end up as dilettantes who know a little bit about a bunch of things but lack the depth they would have acquired if they were truly interested in it and had the time and inclination to pursue it further. If you help them understand how you became a person with purpose, you’ll inspire them to want to do the same.
If, on the other hand, as you read this question, you’re one of those many midcareer people who realizes you’re not deriving much satisfaction from what you currently do for a living, you can be honest with your kids about that, too. Don’t be overly pessimistic—you don’t want them to fear that your job or their home life could be disrupted—but do let your kids know what you “really want to do” someday. Let your kids be inspired by that passion you have for that thing, whatever it is, and let them hear you talk about your plans, and see you making strides, toward making that dream come true.
WANT TO KEEP THEM CLOSE?—GOTTA LET THEM GO
We think we’re playing it safe when we chart our kids’ course toward what we see as prestigious, and as offering honor, title, and money. Many parents badly want those things for their kids’ sakes, but also as evidence of great parenting. So we become architects drawing up plans for someone else’s life. Sometimes it “works”—meaning our hunches or ideals align with what our kid was intrinsically motivated to pursue. Sometimes it just looks to us and to the world like it works—because they became a doctor, lawyer, engineer, concert pianist, pro tennis player, or whatever else we may have had in mind for them—but, in this case, the kid at some point sheds the blinders, sees the landscape of other options around them, and claims their life for themselves, having experienced some degree of angst, if not suffering.
As we’ve seen, Bill Damon is a strong proponent of the role parents can play in helping their kids discover their purpose. Still, he cautions, “A parent cannot simply give a purpose to a child, and indeed any too forceful or controlling effort to do so is likely to have adverse repercussions.”13 In the summer of 2014 I heard about one such case of serious adverse repercussions. A grown man I did not know reached out to me on Facebook to tell me he was glad I was writing this book, and wished his mother had read a book like this when he was growing up. Minutes later we were talking on the phone, and he relayed the following story:
Tyler (not his real name) represents the epitome of professional success for many.14 Close to thirty years of age, he’s an associate at a prestigious corporate law firm in Los Angeles, and a graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Law School. But when it comes to how overparenting can hamper a kid’s ability to find their purpose, Tyler’s story is an instructive one. He began telling the story of his upbringing in a voice that was strong, eloquent, and warm:
“As a kid I was an extremely hard worker. My parents really valued that, and there’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself. They weren’t doing my homework for me but in every class they knew exactly what was going on and they were involved in every single assignment. When I was twelve or thirteen they sat me down and told me grad school wasn’t optional, it was required, and that it would be law school; both of them are lawyers. If that’s what they said I was going to do, I was going to do it. I always did what they said. Their message was ‘This is the path; keep on it’ and anything outside of that path was frowned upon.”
At Harvard Tyler majored in government. “My mom called me multiple times a day and my parents visited me all the time.” This impacted not only on his academic choices but his ability to form relationships with others. He graduated from college and after a few years working at a casting agency in New York, his parents said, “It’s time for law school.”
Tyler chose Stanford in part to get away from his parents, but they came along anyway. “They picked out an apartment for me. They negotiated with the landlord. They paid the rent. I didn’t have to do anything. They even decorated it for me. My friends would moan about having to pay their own way, but I’d tell them, ‘There’s something to that. You’re making it in the world. I’m still trying to please my parents.’”
In law school Tyler noticed his peers “seemed like they were there on their own volition. But I was there because this was the next step in the path laid out for me by my mom. I knew deep down that all of this help was problematic. But how could I say no? My parents had both lost a parent when they were young and I knew it was bringing them so much joy to be so involved and do these kinds of things for me.”
During his first term in law school, his mom was still calling him every day and often multiple times a day. “I’d been a quiet and shy kid but one day it got to the point where I just didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I had no control over the emotion that was coming out of me. It just bubbled over. I yelled, ‘Your voice is the only voice in my head! I have to hear my own voice.’ It was the beginning of the process of putting myself back together.”
That phone call led to a drastic change in Tyler’s relationship with his mother. “I stopped talking to her for about six months. It was really, really, really hard for her. I told her, ‘I’m not going away forever, but it’s the right and necessary thing to do.’ Then I started intensive therapy.”
Tyler was in therapy for the better part of two years. I asked him when he first sensed something was wrong. “As a kid, whenever I did something purely on my own—like writing songs and recording music—I was reproached. The piano lessons were great as far as my mom was concerned because they went on the résumé. But when I was fifteen and brought home a little CD of songs I had written and recorded, my mom said, ‘Did they say you were the next Elvis? No? Okay, that’s what I thought.’ Sometimes my grandma would say something like ‘Oh, Tyler, you have such a nice voice’ and my mom would say, ‘Oh, let’s not go too far.’ I don’t see how she could’ve possibly worried there was a risk of me dropping out of school or not going to college. The fact that she couldn’t even acknowledge the pure joy I got from that hobby—that she tempered my joy, tried to dial it down so much that my grandmother felt the need to stick up for me—was problematic.”
Tyler’s voice becomes gravelly as he reflects back on what he says was a huge depression. “I’m so thankful every day I wasn’t an abused child, but in some sense, those people at least know they’re supposed to be angry. I didn’t know I had any right to have any resentment or anger. It’s a kind of reverse neglect. In therapy I dealt with feelings that were always there but I didn’t feel justified in acknowledging. It took over two and a half years.”
It’s hard for anyone, including Tyler, to criticize an abundance of opportunity and counsel provided by educated, loving parents. “You feel you have security that you should be grateful for. Someone is literally laying out the path for you. You think it’s a good thing. You think you’re lucky. But then you see people who are truly independent, truly passionate about what they do, and you realize you don’t know yourself at all. You’re trying to be the best person for your mom that you can be, with no other goal for yourself. You feel your parent doesn’t ever see you as an individual. Ever. You’re an outgrowth of them, following the path they want you to take. It’s not your safety and security. It’s about fulfilling their ego. It just makes you resentful of someone who thought they were trying to do a good job.”
In his final two years of law school, having completely changed the dynamic between himself and his mother, Tyler soared socially. “I loved it. It wasn’t the study of the law per se. It was that I began to feel for myself at age twenty-six the freedom that kids are supposed to start to feel as college freshmen. I was finally able to carve out something for myself.”
Tyler had family allies in those two years. “My father had never smothered me; he just passively went along with whatever my mom said to do. In the past if he and I talked it was always superficial. But when I cut off communication with my mom, my dad was the interlocutor. He would go to my mother and say, ‘Tyler has a point.’ Meanwhile my mom would tell her friends, ‘Tyler’s mad at me.’ Her friends would say, ‘Well, leave him alone, he’s a twenty-five-year-old man.’ Her friends could see that, but she couldn’t; she just saw the son she could control. She didn’t see me as a grown man until that cycle of control was severed completely.”
“Now she and I talk one or two times a week. Everything is different, and much better. She’ll say ‘I’m sorry. I know I did a better job with your sister.’ It’s hard for her to go much farther than that. I think she would say she needed to pay more attention to herself and less to her kids. I think if she had taken twenty percent of the attention off of me and spent it on herself, I think we all would have been better off. When you have a kid it’s ‘Oh I can focus on this. I can make this thing perfect. Finally here’s something I can control.’”
Tyler credits author Eckhart Tolle’s words for sparking the sense that he could change his life. “In an interview Tolle spoke about children who really aren’t themselves because they’re living as extensions of their parents. That language spoke to me immediately.”
Bill Deresiewicz concurs. In Excellent Sheep he says, “There is something that’s a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That’s what it means to become an adult.”15