It’s sadly a very common thing. Maybe it was even true of your own childhood. A kid is so different from their parents it almost feels like they must have been adopted. An introvert born to two gregarious extroverts. An artist born to two buttoned-down executives. An athlete born to two bookworm academics. An activist born to wealthy conservatives.
Ben Franklin, whose story we told a while back, was as unlike his father as any child could be. It wasn’t until he visited the home of his ancestors in Ecton, a small village in Northamptonshire, England, that he discovered that his father’s brother (who Franklin shared a birthday with) was an inventor and a writer and a local politician. The actress Tilda Swinton more recently shared that she felt like a “foundling” as a young girl, like she did not fit in with her blue-blooded military family at all. It was only later that she discovered she had been “systematically misled.”
As she explained to the New York Times, “I’ve realized since my parents died that there are artists scattered through my family. My great-grandmother was a singer who had a salon with Gabriel Fauré in London. She was a great singer of lieder in drawing rooms around Europe. She was a muse of John Singer Sargent. Her artistic eminence was underplayed by my parents, who were not artists, and I don’t think they quite understood it.”
Our job is not to make our kids like us. Our job is to help our kids become who they are meant to be. Almost certainly, whoever they want to be has some precedent in our family—and history. We owe it to them to show these branches of the family tree, to introduce them to the ancestors who planted the seeds that are now growing inside them. In doing so, we honor both who they’re becoming and where they come from.
P.S. As we say in The Daily Dad book (new leatherbound edition here), our job as parents is to help our kids “become who they are.”
In fact, the whole month of June in the book is full of practical advice and wisdom about helping your children do just that, especially when they happen to be a little different from you.
Grab a copy here and learn how you can provide the structure and support to help your kids discover who they are today!
