It would be nice if you could just tell them what they needed to know. It would be even easier if they could just get it from a teacher or read it from a book. But kids don’t always learn by being told. They learn when something becomes real to them.
In 1883, Mark Twain’s daughters were being taught the history of the English crown. They found it boring and difficult to wrap their heads around—all 37 kings and the centuries through which they had lived. So Twain, always creative—and not one for traditional schooling—came up with a better way to illustrate it. As Ron Chernow writes in his amazing biography, Mark Twain (a must read—grab it here and check out his episode on the Daily Stoic Podcast):
Twain knocked off work early and went forth armed with a basket of little pegs. Using the rule of one foot per historical year, he drove in at the start and end of each reign a three-foot-high white pine stake with the name and date of the king crowned that year. At a glance, the children could survey the entire sweep of British history, an interest aroused of late by Queen Victoria’s reign having surpassed those of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
Isn’t that amazing? Once they saw the history laid out, his kids actually understood it. “It gives the children,” Twain explained, “a realizing sense of the length or brevity of a reign.” What if our teachers and parents had taken the time to do something like that for us, for some subject we were struggling with?
Sometimes, we have to take that extra step to make the lesson visible. To turn the abstract into something they can touch, see, feel, walk through. Because our kids don’t always need another lecture. They don’t always need us to explain it one more time. They need us to help them see it.
That’s our job as parents. Not simply to demand that they understand, but to look for better ways to help them understand. Maybe that means drawing it out. Maybe it means turning it into a game. Maybe it means taking them outside, using blocks, telling a story, making a chart, finding the metaphor that finally makes the light come on.
Help them see what they could not see before.
P.S. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow, who wrote the biography of Mark Twain mentioned above, is a fascinating historian who has also written acclaimed biographies on Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and John D. Rockefeller. I sat down with him to talk about how these men’s deepest personal struggles—and their ability to manage emotion—became the defining factor in their lives and legacies. Check out the Daily Stoic Podcast episode here.
