How to Raise Amazing Humans

My mother was an electronics engineer. She was good at it, and she'd been working in the same system long enough to know its tendencies. The most common one: when something doesn't work, patch it. Add a fix on top of the problem. Keep the existing structure and manage around its limitations.

She hated that approach. She told me once that the clean solution was almost always to throw out the code that wasn't working and start again. Not renovate. Rebuild.

"Patches breed patches," she said. "You end up with a system that's mostly duct tape."

I've thought about that a lot in relation to education and parenting. Because what I see, everywhere I look, is a culture of patches. A child struggles, a program is added. The program helps partially, a second program is added. The behaviour continues, a strategy is added on top of the strategy. And slowly the whole thing becomes a system that's mostly duct tape, and everyone's working harder to maintain it than would have been required to build it well in the first place.

The exhaustion is in the patching.

The cycle that runs everything

Here's what I've observed, and it's uncomfortable, so I'll say it plainly.

Adults get validation when children perform. When a child does well in a system, adults take credit. Parents feel they've succeeded. Teachers feel effective. The whole ecosystem produces a feedback loop that keeps everyone invested in the child's performance as a measure of adult success.

Children know this. Not consciously, not in words, but in the way all social creatures know the dynamics of their group: through observation and adaptation.

So children learn to perform for adults. And adults validate them for performing. And the actual needs of the child, what they're actually curious about, what they actually struggle with, what they actually need to develop, gets buried under the performance.

And then everyone wonders why, at fifteen or twenty or thirty, the person doesn't know what they want.

Of course they don't. They've spent fifteen years learning to want what someone else wanted them to want.

What ease actually looks like

Ease in parenting doesn't mean absent or passive. It means aligned.

When what you're doing matches what your child actually needs, things move. Not because you're not putting in effort, but because the effort is going somewhere useful. Like the elbow exercise I use in workshops: when your attention is in the right place, the same task takes less energy. The movement becomes efficient.

When you're working against the grain, when you're pushing a child toward something their system isn't ready for, or holding them back from something they're ready for, everything is harder than it needs to be.

The mother who told me she was exhausted trying to keep her son engaged. The father who told me he felt like he was failing at something he should be able to do. The teacher who told me she'd stopped enjoying the work. All of them were working against the grain and feeling it.

None of them had been told that there was a grain to work with.

The first question

My mother's approach to bad code was to ask first: what is this actually meant to do? Not what is it currently doing, what is it meant to do?

I think that's the right question for education. What is this actually meant to do?

When I ask that in workshops, the answers are always the same. I want my child to know how to think. To be curious. To be able to create a life they love. To handle difficulty without breaking. To know who they are.

Nobody says: I want my child to pass more tests. Nobody says: I want them to comply better.

And yet the system is built for compliance and test-passing. And so the patches get applied because the original design doesn't produce what we say we want.

The alternative isn't a different system. The alternative is understanding the actual thing. Development. How it works. What it needs. What gets in its way. When you understand that, ease is available.

That's not a theory. That's what I've watched happen in family after family, for thirty years.