Your Child Does Not Need to Be Good at Everything

In just over a month, assuming everything continues to go to plan, Whitney and I are going to have a baby.

A boy.

Our first child.

Which is an extraordinary sentence to write because I am still not entirely convinced that anyone has checked whether I am suitably qualified.

There appears to be remarkably little vetting involved.

You spend longer proving your identity when trying to log into your supermarket saver account.

And yet, sometime very soon, somebody is apparently going to hand me an actual human being and say something along the lines of:

“There you go. Keep that alive. Also, ideally, try not to psychologically damage it.”

No pressure.

Naturally, I have been thinking quite a lot about what sort of father I want to be.

Not whether I am going to teach him to run ultra marathons or ski or make sourdough, although clearly all three will be compulsory and failure to understand a properly fermented dough by the age of six will result in immediate sanctions.

I mean the bigger things.

What do I actually want for him?

And the more I think about it, the answer is surprisingly simple.

I don't want him to spend his life trying to be brilliant at everything.

Actually, I hope he isn't.

We have become completely obsessed with being good at things

There seems to be an unwritten rule now that everything a child does should somehow lead somewhere.

Football isn't just football.

It's development.

Swimming isn't splashing around in a pool.

It's progression.

Music isn't making a hideous racket on a recorder while your parents quietly consider moving house.

It's grades.

Running isn't running around until you're exhausted and covered in mud.

It's personal bests.

School isn't somewhere to learn things, make friends, discover what fascinates you and occasionally forget your PE kit.

It's performance.

Everything has become measurable.

Everything has a level.

A target.

A grade.

A certificate.

A league table.

A comparison.

And inevitably, somebody somewhere will turn it into a bloody app.

Your nine-year-old can't just enjoy tennis anymore.

Apparently, we need to know his ranking.

Against whom?

Other nine-year-olds?

Why?

Does Wimbledon need to know?

He's nine.

His greatest achievement this week might have been successfully opening a packet of Mini Cheddars without ripping the bag completely in half.

We appear to have confused childhood with a 16-year corporate performance review.

I understand the attraction

Parents want their children to do well.

Of course they do.

I will too.

I will undoubtedly become embarrassingly proud when our son does something relatively mundane.

He will probably stack three wooden blocks on top of one another and I'll quietly wonder whether architecture schools should be informed.

“Whitney, look at the spatial awareness.”

“He's eleven months old, Tim.”

“Yes, but look at the structure.”

This is what parents do.

We love them, so everything they do feels important.

But somewhere between wanting our children to thrive and wanting our children to excel, things can get a little muddled.

Because doing well is lovely.

But believing you must do well at everything is exhausting.

I know.

I have had a lifetime of experience.

I know quite a lot about perfectionism

I am not saying this in the fashionable Instagram way.

You know the sort of thing.

“My biggest weakness is that I'm just too much of a perfectionist.”

Which usually translates as:

“I would like to mention a flaw that also makes me sound incredibly impressive.”

No.

I mean genuine perfectionism.

The tedious sort.

The sort that whispers that things aren't quite good enough even when everybody else thinks they are.

The sort that moves the finish line every time you get near it.

The sort that makes success strangely unsatisfying because the moment you achieve something, your brain immediately points at something else.

I have done this with work.

Businesses.

Running.

Ideas.

Projects.

My body.

My brain.

Probably pizza.

Definitely pizza.

I've run marathons and spent more time thinking about the time I didn't run than appreciating the distance I did.

I've built businesses and then wondered why they weren't bigger.

I've created products and focused on what they still needed rather than what had already been created.

I've chased ideas with the assumption that somewhere, eventually, there would be a magical moment where I could sit back and think:

There.

That's enough.

I have arrived.

It turns out “arrived” is an extraordinarily difficult place to find.

Google Maps doesn't seem to have it.

Children don't start off like this

Watch very young children.

They are astonishingly bad at almost everything.

And they couldn't care less.

They fall over constantly.

Imagine doing that as an adult.

You walk across your kitchen, collapse face-first into a cupboard and everybody cheers.

“Nearly there, Tim!”

Then you get back up and immediately have another go.

Toddlers don't seem particularly concerned about looking stupid.

They don't say:

“I think walking might not be my thing.”

They wobble.

Fall.

Laugh.

Get up.

Repeat.

They draw terrible pictures.

They sing completely out of tune.

They dance with absolutely no rhythm.

They tell jokes that have no punchline whatsoever.

And they're delighted with themselves.

At some point, unfortunately, we teach them otherwise.

We teach them comparison.

We teach them that somebody else's picture is better.

Somebody else runs faster.

Somebody else got a higher mark.

Somebody else made the team.

Somebody else is top set.

Somebody else has more followers.

Somebody else is “gifted”.

And suddenly the question changes.

Instead of:

“Did you enjoy it?”

We ask:

“Were you good at it?”

Those are not the same question.

I want my son to be allowed to be terrible at things

There.

I've said it.

I hope my son is absolutely rubbish at some stuff.

Not everything, ideally.

That could become administratively difficult.

But I want him to experience the extraordinary freedom of doing something he enjoys without needing to demonstrate any particular talent for it.

I want him to paint ugly paintings.

Play chaotic football.

Bake strangely shaped bread.

Sing badly.

Dance ridiculously.

Attempt things where the likelihood of success is relatively small.

Because there is enormous joy in being an enthusiastic amateur.

Somewhere along the way, adulthood tells us that hobbies should become achievements.

Run?

Do a marathon.

Cycle?

Do a sportive.

Bake?

Start a business.

Take photographs?

Build an Instagram account.

Enjoy gardening?

Apparently you now need an allotment and seventeen raised beds.

Why can't we just do things?

Why can't enjoyment be enough?

I don't want to raise a CV

This might sound obvious, but I don't want to spend the next eighteen years building a human LinkedIn profile.

Captain of this.

Grade 8 that.

County level something.

Head boy.

Three A-stars.

Volunteer expedition to Costa Rica.

Founded a sustainable clothing company aged fourteen.

Fluent in Mandarin.

Plays the cello.

Completed an internship at Goldman Sachs while still technically breastfeeding.

But childhood has become astonishingly competitive.

Parents compare milestones almost from birth.

“He's sleeping through.”

“Ours rolled over at twelve weeks.”

“She started walking at ten months.”

“Our Hugo has begun developing a proprietary AI model.”

Wonderful.

Hugo sounds exhausting.

I don't want to spend my son's childhood looking sideways.

I want to look at him.

Comparison is an impossible game to win

Because whatever you achieve, there will always be somebody better.

Always.

Run a 5K in 25 minutes?

Someone does 20.

Run 20?

Someone does 17.

Run 17?

There's probably an alarmingly thin man in Kenya casually running 13.

Bake a beautiful loaf of sourdough?

Instagram will immediately introduce you to somebody in Copenhagen making loaves that resemble Renaissance sculpture.

Build a successful business?

Someone else's business is bigger.

Earn £100,000?

Someone earns £1 million.

Earn £1 million?

Someone owns a submarine.

Eventually, the entire human experience becomes one enormous game of Top Trumps.

And there is always another card.

Which means comparison cannot tell you when you've won.

It can only tell you who happens to be ahead at that particular moment.

So what do I want instead?

I want curiosity.

I want resilience.

I want kindness.

I want humour.

I want him to be interested in things.

I want him to ask ridiculous questions.

I want him to become fascinated by something completely unexpected.

Dinosaurs.

Planets.

Beetles.

Engines.

Bread.

Ancient Egypt.

Weather systems.

Whatever.

And if he spends six months absolutely obsessed with the mating habits of freshwater snails, I hope I am sensible enough not to ask how this will help with his GCSEs.

I want him to discover that learning something can be valuable simply because it is interesting.

Not everything needs a commercial application.

Not everything needs a grade.

Not everything needs to improve your future earning potential.

Sometimes it is enough to know why octopuses have three hearts.

In fact, that is excellent information.

I want effort to matter more than outcome

This one will be difficult for me.

Because I am very outcome-driven.

I like numbers.

Targets.

Results.

Evidence that things are moving somewhere.

I want the business to grow.

I want the product to sell.

I want the marathon time.

I want measurable proof.

But life doesn't always work that way.

Sometimes you can work incredibly hard and lose.

Sometimes you can prepare brilliantly and something goes wrong.

Sometimes you are simply not the best person in the room.

That does not make the effort meaningless.

This is something I want our son to understand much earlier than I did.

You can lose the race and still have run brilliantly.

You can fail the exam and still have learned something.

You can audition and not get the part.

You can work hard on a business that doesn't succeed.

You can love somebody who doesn't love you back.

You can try.

And sometimes trying does not produce the outcome you wanted.

That is not failure.

That is being alive.

Perfectionism makes promises it cannot keep

Perfectionism tells you:

“If you just get this right, you will finally feel okay.”

So you try.

You improve.

You achieve.

And for approximately fourteen minutes, everything feels wonderful.

Then perfectionism clears its throat.

“Yes, but…”

There is always a “yes, but”.

Yes, you ran the marathon.

But not fast enough.

Yes, the business is working.

But not growing fast enough.

Yes, people like what you made.

But someone left a three-star review.

Yes, you did well.

But you could have done better.

Perfectionism is basically having the world's most irritating management consultant living permanently inside your head.

And he's never impressed.

I don't want that voice to become the loudest voice in my son's head.

He will have enough critics in life without employing one internally.

Of course I want him to work hard

This isn't an argument for mediocrity.

It isn't:

“Don't bother trying, darling. Daddy wrote a blog.”

Quite the opposite.

I hope he learns the pleasure of working hard at something.

I hope he experiences the satisfaction of improvement.

I hope he discovers what it feels like to practise something repeatedly and suddenly realise:

Hang on.

I'm getting better.

That feeling is wonderful.

But effort should expand your world.

It shouldn't shrink it.

The danger comes when achievement becomes identity.

When:

“I did badly in a maths test”

becomes:

“I'm stupid.”

Or:

“I wasn't picked for the team”

becomes:

“I'm not good enough.”

Those are completely different statements.

One describes an event.

The other describes a person.

Children need help keeping those things separate.

Actually, adults do, too.

Maybe the question should be: did you enjoy yourself?

This sounds ridiculously simple.

But imagine asking children this more often.

“How was football?”

“Brilliant.”

“Did you win?”

“No.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Yes.”

Excellent.

Conversation finished.

No tactical debrief required.

No analysis of positional discipline.

No conversation in the Volvo about why Charlie wasn't tracking back.

He's seven.

Let Charlie live.

There will be plenty of time in adulthood for performance reviews.

Childhood should contain vast amounts of pointless joy.

Climbing trees.

Digging holes.

Building things that immediately collapse.

Making dens.

Laughing until something comes out of your nose.

Inventing games with rules nobody understands.

I want our son's childhood to have room for that.

And yes, this is partly about me

Whenever you think about raising a child, I suspect you inevitably think about your own childhood.

The things you loved.

The things you found hard.

The things you wish you had understood sooner.

I spent a great deal of my younger life worrying.

About death.

About strange thoughts.

About whether things felt right.

About whether I felt right.

And eventually, over the years, I learned something I wish I could somehow package up and hand straight to my son.

You do not have to believe every thought your brain produces.

You don't have to solve every uncomfortable feeling.

You don't have to become perfect before you are allowed to relax.

Sometimes you can simply let things be.

I have spent years learning acceptance.

To accept.

Allow.

Embrace.

Not because everything is wonderful.

But because fighting reality every second of the day is unbelievably tiring.

And perhaps one of the greatest things I can give my son is permission not to fight himself.

I don't know who he will be

This is probably the strangest thing.

I already love somebody I haven't met.

Somebody whose personality I know absolutely nothing about.

Will he be loud?

Quiet?

Confident?

Sensitive?

Sporty?

Academic?

Creative?

Completely uninterested in everything I love?

Quite possibly.

Perhaps I will spend eighteen years attempting to introduce him to skiing while he sits indoors building miniature model railway stations.

That would be annoying.

But ultimately, he is not arriving to become a smaller version of me.

That feels important.

Children are not legacy projects.

They are not an opportunity to correct your own disappointments.

They are not here to achieve the things you didn't.

I don't want to stand next to a football pitch secretly trying to relive some imagined sporting career through a six-year-old.

I want to discover who he actually is.

There will be pressure

I can't stop that.

School will bring pressure.

Friends will bring pressure.

Social media will almost certainly bring pressure, assuming society hasn't finally come to its senses and fired the entire internet into the sea.

He will compare himself.

He will want to fit in.

He will fail at things.

He will be embarrassed.

Rejected.

Disappointed.

Heartbroken.

I won't be able to prevent all of that.

Nor should I.

But perhaps I can make home somewhere he doesn't need to perform.

Somewhere he doesn't have to arrive carrying evidence that he deserves love.

No grades required.

No medal.

No certificate.

No personal best.

Just him.

I also want him to see me getting things wrong

Parents have a strange temptation to appear all-knowing.

I imagine this becomes harder once your child is old enough to realise you regularly can't find your phone while holding your phone.

I don't want to pretend I have everything figured out.

Because I don't.

I want him to see me try things that fail.

I want him to see me laugh at myself.

I want him to hear me say:

“I got that wrong.”

“I don't know.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Let's try again.”

Those might be some of the most useful sentences a parent can teach a child.

Not through a lesson.

Through example.

Because if your dad can get things wrong without collapsing into an existential crisis, perhaps you can too.

Success is much wider than we pretend

We have an incredibly narrow definition of success.

Usually involving money, status, qualifications or impressive achievements.

But some of the most successful people I know, by the definition that actually seems to matter, are simply content.

They like their lives.

They like their partners.

They have friends.

They laugh.

They sleep.

They don't spend every waking second believing they are three achievements away from happiness.

That looks increasingly impressive to me.

Maybe success is not being extraordinary.

Maybe success is building a life you don't constantly feel the need to escape from.

Maybe success is knowing when enough is enough.

Maybe success is being able to sit quietly on a Sunday morning with somebody you love and not secretly feel guilty because you aren't achieving anything.

If I can teach my son that, I will have done something useful.

Perhaps we need to stop asking children what they want to be

Adults love asking children:

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

As though every seven-year-old should already have developed a coherent long-term career strategy.

What does he want to be?

Seven.

Let him get on with it.

Perhaps a better question is:

“What do you enjoy?”

Or:

“What are you curious about?”

Or:

“What did you do today that made you laugh?”

Because jobs will change.

Interests will change.

Life will change.

The career our son eventually has might not currently exist.

Trying to prepare a child for a specific future is impossible.

Preparing them to be adaptable, curious and comfortable with uncertainty seems rather more useful.

I want him to know that ordinary is not an insult

This might be the most radical thing of all.

Our culture relentlessly tells us to be exceptional.

Stand out.

Be extraordinary.

Be number one.

Change the world.

Build your personal brand.

No thanks.

What if you don't change the world?

What if you simply make one little corner of it nicer?

What if you are a good friend?

A decent partner?

A kind neighbour?

A loving father?

What if you do work you enjoy reasonably well, come home, cook dinner and have a laugh with your family?

That sounds like quite a successful life to me.

Ordinary can be magnificent.

In just over a month

Our lives are going to change.

Dramatically.

There will be nappies.

Sleepless nights.

Confusion.

Probably moments where Whitney and I look at one another and quietly acknowledge that neither of us has the slightest idea what we're doing.

And somewhere amongst all that chaos will be this tiny boy.

Our son.

He doesn't know anything yet about grades.

Status.

Money.

Achievement.

Personal bests.

Followers.

Performance.

He won't know he's supposed to impress anybody.

He will just be himself.

And I suppose my job, or at least part of it, is not to accidentally teach him that being himself isn't enough.

I want him to try things.

I want him to work hard.

I want him to discover what he loves.

I want him to challenge himself.

I want him to fail.

I want him to win.

I want him to lose.

I want him to occasionally be absolutely useless at something and carry on doing it because it makes him happy.

Above all, I want him to understand something that has taken me the better part of forty-odd years to appreciate.

You don't earn your right to be happy by becoming perfect.

You don't have to be the best person in the room.

You don't have to win every race.

Build the biggest business.

Get the highest mark.

Have the most impressive job.

Or spend your entire life desperately trying to prove that you are enough.

You already are.

And if our little boy grows up knowing that, genuinely knowing it, then whether he's top of the class, middle of the class or the child who has somehow managed to leave his entire school bag on the bus again…

I think we'll be doing all right.

Although, for the record, he will be learning how to make a decent pizza without putting pineapple on it.

I'm not completely abandoning standards.

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