Want Passionate Kids? Leave 'em Alone
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My parents rarely used themselves in the role-model position because if I was mad at them, I would do the opposite. But I can never be mad at my uncle. He's awesome. One of the things they said was that my uncle could use the calculator without looking at the keys. I didn't believe it till I saw it in person. Give him a long ledger and he could add/subtract 50 rows of currency amounts without even looking at the calculator and come up with the right total time after time. I didn't feel like I had to be that good at a calculator because I had a computer. But within 6 months I could type without looking at the keyboard. Inspiration works.
As far as physical activities go, we are letting him choose his path. We're avid climbers, and take our kids with us to the crag, but never force them to climb. Some days they insist on climbing, other days they're happy exploring the woods. Both kids love riding their bikes (which also fits with our lifestyle), and our older son has taken a liking to soccer (though again, we suggested he try it).
I think it's also important that parents provide the opportunity for their kids to have autonomy. If they aren't exposed to different things, they'll never take the initiative to be passionate about something.
Right on. Our kids are a few years behind you (1,3) but my current thinking on this is that they have to do 1 physical activity and 1 other activity, but they can choose 'em.
I wish I could forget 3 years of forced piano lessons as a kid. :)
(I'm talking high-school age more than anytime soon, right now their job is all about playing and having fun.)
I really enjoyed playing but always felt an earlier start would have given me more chance to learn and progress with that instrument. In short I wish my parents had been more pushy with me (and not just in this as it happens).
We also do several road trips each year (the advantage of homeschooling!). This year we're off Hueco Tanks, then Colorado.
Now, if you are a parent and want to HELP your kid with his passion...take 'em to the library, take 'em to the places where they can delve deeper.
My dad took me to the library on weekends so I could check out programming books in middle school.
A very good book about this is called Drive by Daniel Pink. It presents case study after case study of why autonomy matters to both kids and adults, some of which were conducted by the Fed. Highly recommended.
My only addition would be to say that parents need to be ready to "jump" to facilitate new interests while at the same time they'll need to accept the fact that most of these new ventures will "flame-out", and this needs to be allowed to happen without the typical guilt associated with "giving up".
Your suggestion only works for parents with near limitless means. If my kid took a passion for piano, say, and we bought a piano we couldn't just buy something else that year if he wanted to do something else and we'd be unlikely to sacrifice our holidays 2 years in a row to indulge him if he's going to quit. You make your bed, you sleep in it.
Most children can understand that choosing one activity may exclude another due to the limited resources available, however making them feel like a bad person because it turns out that they don't like something they thought they would like before they had tried it doesn't seem to have any effect other than to discourage one from trying new things.
In some ways I must discourage my child from trying new things - he has to somehow, and I'll help however I can, determine before we buy the necessary equipment whether he is going to appreciate the cost in terms of joy/fulfilment/health/happiness from the activity. For those super-wealthy this is obviously a non-issue.
Suppose your child wants to try running an international diamond mining corp. You're not going to discourage them by not buying one are you, you bad bad parent you.
;0)
http://www.livescience.com/culture/children-passions-autonom...
I'm not sure that kids are immediately equipped to understand the importance of hard work for something they are passionate about. It's certainly possible to instill this in them without being a taskmaster.
All aristocrat-peasant societies socialize their population to flatter the aristocracy, including by pretending to be interested in their interests; democratic-market societies like the United States are aristocrat-peasant societies in which everyone is treated as an aristocrat. (See www.historyexplained.com for the theoretical model of aristocrat-peasant and tribal societies; but bear in mind that its model of history is wrong. Read _1491: New Revalations of the Americas Before Columbus_; had the northern American Indians only been immune to smallpox, we'd think of democratic-market societies as a shoddy alternative to the one true way of self-controlled tribalism -- which the Middle Ages, too, had been fitfully evolving into.)
So, the problem is not that children have short attention spans; it's that they haven't learned to fake interest in the manner expected in Western societies. (From your name, I'm guessing that you're American or Canadian.) When a Western child, or a member of most types of tribal societies, is bored, he or she doesn't try to hide it; by contrast, when genuinely interested in something, such a person exhibits a passionate interest uninhibited by concepts of aristocratic reserve.
In short: figure out what a child is interested in -- or rather, let the child figure that out for him- or herself -- and all the rest should come together on its own. Just hope it's not an interest that leads to graduate school in the humanities...
Additionally, kids have parents because they're extraordinarily unskilled at balancing the long-term perspective against the here and now (granted, many adults aren't much better). I find it hard to believe that just letting your kids do whatever they want is really the path to greatness for most kids. I think parents should help kids explore their passions but it seems there's a balance to be found where you also don't let your kids give up as soon as it gets difficult. My parents did that too often, and my wife's parents pushed her through the rough spots. I won't go into the whole results, but it's clear to me which is superior.
Also, please explain why you think it's important for parents to push children when they run into difficulties. I agree that there is a certain amount of basic knowledge, which everyone should acquire whether they want to or not (I've even found benefit from statistics classes). But we're talking about passions -- that is, recreations, not basic knowledge. I agree that encouraging someone to get through difficult spots -- to reassure them if they fear failure, to provide superior knowledge and skills on an as-needed basis -- is a good thing, but the whole point of a passion is that it's something that the person in question _wants_ to do.
So the child can learn that the limits of their ability are beyond the limits of their self-perceived ability.
We're talking about passionately applying oneself to an activity. This does not limit the locus to recreation IMO.
Interesting. I don't know. But why did the Eurasians discover America in the first place and not vice versa?
The American Indians, meanwhile, were basically unaware of worlds other than their own. When Columbus arrived, there were at least five distinct civilizations in the New World (the North American Indians; the Mesoamerican civilizational group, which included the Mexica; the Maya; the Peruvians; the Amazon River civilization), none of which had significant contact with, or knowledge of, any of the others -- while the West had known about China and India since the days of Darius, at the very least, and so was accustomed to the concept that there were very different, but accessible, peoples in the world.
I mentioned _1491_ in the parent post; again, read it for more information.
I tried to read _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, and gave up in disgust; Jared Diamond is a Green with an axe to grind. In the case of the American Indians, geography and disease did ruin them (or rather, it ruined the North Americans and the Amazonians; Mesoamerica and the old Inca Empire are predominantly Indian to this very day, and the most recent Maya revolt against the Spanish colonists was in 1911); but most of the time -- more or less all of the time, in the Old World -- ecological factors are secondary to cultural ones. Look at the history of rice: it was adopted as the basic grain of Persia before it was adopted as the basic grain of China (and long before Japan), because good Zoroastrian piety inspired the Sassanids (IIRC) to import this miracle grain and thereby ensure the prosperity of their peasants.
I think that what's wrong with Diamond is best summarized in his book _Collapse_, the only work I have ever heard of that discusses how civilizations disintegrate and makes no reference whatsoever to Rome. His thesis is that civilizations fall due to ecological mismanagement, so he doesn't mention any that don't fall due to ecological mismanagement -- even the Roman Empire itself! (He admits in the preface that not all civilizations fall due to ecological reasons, but that suggests that the title of his book -- _Collapse: How Civilizations Choose to Fail or Succeed_ -- should have been something a lot less authoritative.)
For what I think is actually the case, look up Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_, an "old-fashioned" -- or rather, newfangled -- work pointing to the importance of civilizational cohesion (Ibn Khaldun's asabiya, but not the normal Arabic definition of it) in the rise and fall of civilizations. Turchin is a population biologist by training, and tried turning his modeling techniques to history -- whereupon he was astonished to discover that a simulation with one variable and about four rules accounted for pretty much the whole range of human experience. The gory, algebraic details are in _Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall_; but _War and Peace and War_ is more accessible and has more historical examples.
One other sidenote: guns and steel were not the fates of the two societies that Diamond was probably thinking of (certainly the two that came to my mind). It's a widely-held legend that Cortes and Pizarro defeated the Mexica and the Inca respectively by attacking with massive numbers of technologically-superior forces.
In reality, Cortes was the leader of a band of adventurers that never got over 2,000 men and was normally closer to 150, most of whom carried swords and crossbows (and abandoned their clumsy, hot steel cuirasses for Mesoamerican quilted-cotton armor); he had about 30 horsemen at the beginning of his campaign, and in one of his decisive early battles was down to something like 15. He didn't win by a technological advantage; he won by his personal courage, the courage of his men, an enormous amount of luck... and the fact that the Triple Alliance thought that it was a good idea to leave a small state that hated them like poison, Tlaxcala, independent -- twenty miles away from Tenochtitlan. (This meant that they could fight the Tlaxcalans to collect a lot of prisoners for sacrifice, and give their men a lot of promotions: the _Codex Mendoza_ has a table of Mexica level-ups that would embarrass Squaresoft.) A friend of mine once quipped that any civilization that thinks that _that's_ a good idea, deserves what's coming to them.
Pizarro maneuvered his way into a badly confused war of succession, imprisoned/befriended one of the two leaders, murdered him, and then pulled the same trick on the other one -- he won through politics, not through power. Even then, it took the Spanish government forty years of campaigns with regular infantry to fully conquer the Inca Empire (I've always wondered why Spain accepted Pizarro's treacherous conquest as opposed to telling him to stuff it, but his having already shipped back an entire roomful of gold bars and two roomfuls of silver may have had something to do with it)... but, again, it wasn't technology that let Pizarro win, it was politics, the same kind of thing that let the Manchus conquer China.
See _Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest_ for details on both. You may even want to read _Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness_ -- an extremely, exuberantly partisan Catholic history of the conquest of Mexico (but still adventuresome, rousingly entertaining, and meticulously researched), which omits not a single detail except Hernan Cortes' five Mexica concubines. (Cortes was married at the time, and was a fairly serious Catholic. As a fairly serious Catholic myself, I have often tried to figure out what on Earth he thought he was doing, but have more or less given up on it.)