The Project

Like many, and like Natalie in her own way, Graham is a very self-directed kid. He spends copious amounts of time lying on his bed reading on his iPad, getting involved in all manner of the most interesting discussions on various fora in places like Reddit, SpaceBattles, Discord and Quora. If there is some question of something related to a current event, often we just need to mention it to him and he will be much more informed about it from various angles than we could ever hope to be.

But it's hard to get him to focus on other things with a future orientation, like college, or physical fitness or... So we are often in the position of nudging him gently and continually and of hiring professionals like a math tutor and an executive function coach to support him.

One night at dinner in recent months when I was nudging him on something (driving without us in the car, a haircut, studying for the SATs, taking a shower, strengthening his upper body like his doctor recommended, looking more deeply into colleges, I haven't the foggiest what it was) he pushed back a little, alluding to "whatever this 'project' is you have in mind for me."

First off, as male teenage space-demarcating goes, this wasn't bad. I was much worse and my methods were much worse.

But "the project" he alluded to, what is it? I guess it's just basic parenting, what we all want. We want him (and them) to be able to fly from the nest, to go out into the world and flourish, to embrace it and enjoy it while standing on their own two feet. To prepare for our eventual absence.

It's a complex project, no doubt, complicated in particular by the endless plethora of choices with which we are all faced. The behavioral economists have done a great deal of good work, no doubt, but the place where they have had the most concrete and immediate impact has been on the design of 401k plans. A couple of them (Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi) discovered that people in 401k plans freaked out and couldn't make good decisions about investing when they had to choose between too many options. They discovered that the right number of options was 8 or 10 max.

This principle holds true for a lot of things in life. When faced with too many options, we can easily get caught up in "analysis paralysis." I think college choice and the general prospect of the future freaks the fuck right out of most teenagers, of course. I was terrified, myself, and retreated into a variety of self-defense mechanisms.

So our job is to help our kids narrow things down and make the decision-making process manageable on an ongoing basis. And the key is to help them figure out who they are, which we begin by helping them figure out who they are not.