Specialized kids are not resilient kids. It’s pretty simple why: If you can only do one thing, if you’re built for only one type of environment, you have trouble when conditions change.
Our job as parents, we said recently (and also state in The Daily Dad book—new leatherbound version here) is to raise resilient kids who have a broad set of skills and interests, who don’t limit what they can do and can’t be put into a box. But it’s also our job as parents to be that kind of person too. We have to be a resilient, flexible, well-rounded human being not just to survive the stresses of parenting but if we want to raise kids for the world.
In his fantastic book Of Boys and Men (a must read and a must listen to Daily Stoic podcast guest), Richard Reeves, talks about how fragile and insufficient our attitude towards gender often is. He’s critical of both progressives and traditionalists in this regard. “The role of mothers has been expanded to include breadwinning as well as caring,” he writes, “but the role of fathers has not been expanded to include caring as well as breadwinning.”
Just as we want kids who can be “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck,” as he writes, we as parents should be striving to embody that same versatility. We should be more than just providers or caretakers. We should be explorers, creators, learners, and models of resilience ourselves. Parenting isn’t about slipping into a specialized role—it’s about showing our children that it’s possible to grow in multiple directions at once, to embrace both strength and sensitivity, ambition and humility, stability and adaptability.
So let’s be that example. Let’s contain multitudes, as the poem goes, showing our kids that they do, too.