There's other families of languages like Prolog, ML and lisp that are drastically different and I have found that many people find these languages hard to learn.
Moreover, you don't know if the parent also did functional programming.
But I think your remark is a fair one, I think it's about wrapping your head around programming paradigms that are quite far from each other.
Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that emphasizes class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that emphasizes functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML or Haskell), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), and one that emphasizes parallelism (like Clojure or Go).