016: Knowing How and When to Support Your Child’s Interests

In the Boat With Ben

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Do you remember being a kid and having big dreams? I wanted to be an actor. I used to put on plays for my parents starring me and my brother which, most of the time, ended up being me yelling at my brother for not remembering his lines, or cues, or blocking. It may have seemed silly at the time for the practical person, but as a kid I could see no reason that dream couldn’t be a reality.

We have a great privilege as parents to have a front row seat when it comes to our child’s dreams. It’s difficult to resist the temptation to shrug off something that seems impossible, or to try to steer them in a more practical direction out of our desire to keep them safe and well taken care of. In this episode Ben and Rachel talk about when and how to support our children’s interests and how to strike a healthy balance between being protective and being supportive.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

• Regardless of what age our children are, no interest is superfluous.
• Developing any kind of skill doesn’t depend so much on the tools as is it does on the understanding of how to use them.
• It doesn’t make sense to buy the very nicest tool for a child who’s just starting to explore their interest.
• No investment we make in our children’s interests and development of skills is ever wasted.
• Kids will find a way to pursue the things they’re truly passionate about.
• The reality we need to teach our kids is that when we’re pursuing creative activities, we don’t just get to do them unlimitedly.
• You don’t ever want for there to be strings attached in the way you support.
• We want to help our children avoid burning out on the things they love by teaching them how important rest is.

Show Notes:

• 04:33 Ben: Before we get into the topic, I had asked some questions in the chat room to generate conversation and one of the questions I asked was, “What experience have you had with your parents and your interests? Were they supportive? Did you have to figure it out on your own?” This was a question directed at everyone, not necessarily just people who have children, and I got a lot of really great answers. Aaron says, “My mom was very encouraging about music and reading. They weren’t supportive about entrepreneurship (no experience) so I had to learn about that on my own from people online.”
• 05:43 Sean McCabe says, “Very supportive. My dad wanted to get me into programing. He’s a database administrator and he always had hopes for a family business one day, but I was more interested in IT at the time. He taught me some but didn’t push it too much.” Pablo answered, “For hobbies, my parents let me do whatever I wanted and showed financial support but very little interest. For work/entrepreneurship, they’ve always been very supportive and interested, with zero financial support.”
• 06:50 Charla says, “My family wasn’t particularly supportive of my music, saying it was too hard to get a job teaching music until they realized it really was my heart. It took even longer for my mom to realize I had actually learned a thing or two about taking pictures, but thankfully my husband was 100% supportive so I could tune out her lack of support better. When she saw what we were truly excited about and had a natural propensity toward she would get behind us, but she wasn’t always as aware of our hearts as she thought she was.” I wanted to bring our personal experiences into this conversation and answer the same question. What do you remember of how supportive your parents were of your interests and as interests evolved?
• 07:50 Rachel: I don’t think my interest ever evolved. I remember wanting to be a writer since I was a little kid, but my mom was extremely supportive. She’s a librarian and anytime I wanted to write stories, she provided the things I needed to do that. She actually kept a lot of those stories for a long time and she’s even given some to me. As far as music, she was a single mom for a long time so we didn’t have money for me to have lessons, but she was very supportive in whatever she could do to allow me to pursue that passion too. When I went to college my first year, I was on track to major in music and she was so excited about it, even though you can’t do a whole lot with majoring in music. When I switched to english, she told me to go for it. She was my cheerleader.
• 09:08 Ben: At one time, you were really focused on music and you were very good at the clarinet. Clarinets aren’t cheap, and your mom purchased one for you your senior year of high school and that was huge for her since it was $3,000. After your first year of college, you decided not to do it anymore.
• 09:58 Rachel: I packed it away and didn’t do any kind of music after the first semester.
• 10:03 Ben: I see it as a testament to the kind of supportive parent she was. It wasn’t about the money or the thing, she was enthusiastic and excited for what you chose for yourself. When I was young, I enjoyed movies and theater. They were really magical to me and I always tried to put on plays with my younger brother, but I didn’t have access to furthering that interest. I did participate in a play at a local theater when I was a kid.
• 11:21 Beyond that, whether I lost interest and my parents picked up on that or it wasn’t something I was able to explore more and that was part of the reason I lost interest, it faded away for me. I’ve always enjoyed performing and that comes into play later on when music became an interest for me. When I started to become interested in music, it was around the same time my parents got divorced and I had decided to go live with my dad and step mom when I was 14. I had just started learning how to play guitar and I met some other friends who were also musicians and we started a band together.
• 12:06 I don’t remember my parents being particularly supportive in the financial sense, but they did make allowances for me to go play shows and be involved in music-related things, so I was supported in that way. The parents of the friends I had in the band were very supportive financially and got them a lot of equipment because they saw how serious they were with it. I can’t remember whether or not I expressed the seriousness of my interest in music, but I didn’t get the sense that my parents thought I was as serious about it as I felt I was.
• 13:02 Rachel: What I think about when it comes to whether or not our kids are serious about something is that we also have the ability to recognize talent. I feel like as a parent, if my child has a talent for music, I want to support them in that and give them the equipment, which is what my mom did. I have always had a laser focus on what I want and maybe that helped make the decision to invest in a $3,000 clarinet, but at the same time, she also knew that even if I didn’t have that focus, I was super talented.
• 13:50 Ben: I don’t know how obvious that was for my parents, even though it seemed really obvious to me that it was important to me. I think there was a disconnect there and a lack of communication. My friends’ parents also treated me like a son. They were very supportive of their kids and, by extension, were also very supportive of me so I did get that in other ways too. That’s not to throw my parents under the bus at all, because they were supportive in other ways even if it wasn’t necessarily in the ways I would have liked them to have been supportive. There was also nothing that was going to stop me from pursuing music because I was so passionate about it.
• 15:25 The next question I asked was for the parents in the chat room, “Are any of you struggling with whether or not you should get behind what your kids are interested in?” I think the question is really about the kids being interested enough and that’s what the focus of the show is—how do we know when our kids are interested in something enough to really get behind it? How do we know how to support them? Should we support them financially, or should we hold back on that? Is that going to be something they perceive as pushy and turns them of to whatever they were interested in in the first place?
• 16:50 I like the answers I got back. Gabrielle said, “I struggle a bit. My kid loves video games and I really think they’re awful. Besides the whole screen time issue, I feel they change his personality after playing. I don’t want to tell him that they’re bad, but I want him to point his laser focus elsewhere. It’s non-stop—he plays 30 minutes a day and then talks about it for the next 7 hours.”
17:27 Rachel: That’s why we stopped doing video games for a while. I personally don’t like video games that much. I’ve never enjoyed playing them because I feel like they’re a waste of my time at least, but they also create these amazing story-worlds that can teach kids about what a story looks like.
• 18:11 Ben: In last week’s episode, we talked about approaching the subject of screens from the standpoint of your personal values (Related: e015 Are Screens Going to Melt My Kid’s Brain?). Specifically, your values around creating things vs. consuming things, and that makes the video game conversation very different from our knee-jerk reaction to see them as bad. Anything used the wrong way can be unhealthy. If something is obviously having an unhealthy effect on our child, then of course we’re going to feel an aversion to it, but we should try to get on their side, see what it is they enjoy about it, and find ways to help them use it in other ways.

Exposure to New Experiences

• 20:07 When it comes to the way we support our children, I want us to take our focus off the specific thing they’re interested in and approach it from a different angle. One of the things we need in order to determine if we’re interested in something is to be exposed to different experiences, culture, and art. When we have that kind of exposure and we see the joy someone derives out of something or we see the result of their work, we connect with that and we think, “That might be something I want to try out.” I feel like for children, that’s where many of their interests come from.
• 21:25 A few months ago there was a privately funded rocket that went into space and they streamed the launch live. As soon as I heard about that, I watched it with all the kids. I think I probably got more out of that experience than they did, but that’s the kind of experience I’m talking about. We certainly don’t live in a bubble but we tend to get stuck in rhythms and stay in the same places. One of the ways we can help our children discover what they’re interested in is to get them into different environments and out of their normal routine from time to time. One of the ways we do that is by going to the library, which is still part of our routine. I love the way books can take you to a whole other world.
• 22:41 Rachel: They also teach something. Our eight year old loves to grab nonfiction books and I’ve checked out books on screen writing and storyboarding for him so he can learn more about some of his interests. That’s a way we can support our children in their interests and not have to spend money yet. As they learn more about it, they can determine if they want to work hard for it.
• 23:20 Ben: At some point, we started letting our son, Jadon, watch Star Wars cartoons, and even before that we started reading the Star Wars books together. He started to become really interested in George Lucas, so he’s actually gotten books from the library on George Lucas and the filmmaking process. One day, he even came to us saying he wanted to be a filmmaker.

Regardless of what age our children are, no interest is superfluous.

• 24:33 It’s cute when a four year old says they want to be an astronaut, and it’s ok to acknowledge that’s cute, but I also want to encourage us as parents not to leave it there. Go a step further and say, “There’s no reason you couldn’t be an astronaut.” That’s really true. Allow yourself to enjoy the cuteness of it, but also take it seriously. Five minutes later they could say they want to be the President, but that happens. We see how grandiose their dreams are and we see them bouncing from one thing or the other, so we tend to not take it seriously. Sometimes, we as parents, have had those grandiose dreams that didn’t work out or life took a turn, so we forgot how to dream big.
• 25:41 Rachel: We try to be more realistic about it. Our five year old wanted to be Batman for a long time, so sometimes it’s a matter of looking below the surface of that answer. What does Batman do? He protects people from bad guys, so maybe he’d be interested in learning about law enforcement or being a detective. Sometimes there’s a deeper desire beneath the surface of the words our kids are saying.
• 56:52 Ben: That’s a connection we can make when we see them bouncing from one thing to another, but whatever is underneath that might be the common thread that strings those things together.
• 27:06 Rachel: We get to be the detective of that. We get to see the thread that connects those bouncings together.
• 27:19 Ben: With Jadon, looking back on him wanting to be a filmmaker, I wonder if I was a little overzealous. I was very excited for him and we bought him some things for Christmas that filmmakers could use. We got him a white board where he can do some storyboarding and I made a folder for him with a hand lettered logo on it. We also borrowed a bunch of books about filmmaking from the library and he read zero of those and he has made zero storyboards on his white board, but the interesting thing is he just wanted to jump straight into shooting something on a camera. I was trying to explain to him the importance of storyboarding—start with a story and write it out.
• 28:54 Something he’s started to do naturally is create graphic novels, which he’s also interested in. Whether he uses that eventually as a part of filmmaking or not, that’s a skill he’s developing and it’s something he’s very interested in. He might say he’s interested in filmmaking, but I also need to pay attention to what he’s doing. Sometimes, working toward the thing we say we’re interested in leads us to the thing we really feel passionately about. Having that initial goal ended up being the path that got us there.

Providing Basic Resources

• 30:23 It’s important to allow our children to have time to explore. In the beginning, when they’re first exploring an interest, the tools don’t matter so much. Basic tools are necessary, so when I’m talking about giving your child time to explore, I mean to give them the time, but also provide them with some of the basic resources. For us, a lot of that has to do with books and the things they can learn from those books, but some of it is having some basic art supplies or instruments. Have those things available to them so they can explore those things. Jadon will spend a ton of time drawing and writing, but he’ll also spend time on the piano every once in a while. We’re leaving all of these open doors for him. The piano isn’t the nicest and he doesn’t have really high quality pens or pencils, but it’s what he needs to get started.

Developing any kind of skill doesn’t depend so much on the tools as is it does on the understanding of how to use them.

• 31:36 The more experience you gain, the more of a difference having a better tool makes. For the beginner, there’s no difference between a crayon and a really nice pen, because the way they use the tool is crude and developing. This informs how we approach financially supporting. In Rachel’s example with her mom, it was her senior year before she purchased the clarinet. How long were you playing the clarinet before that? Also, was the clarinet you were using before that the school’s clarinet?
• 32:28 Rachel: Since sixth grade, so that was seven years. That shows focus and determination if you’ve stuck with it for that long. I did use the school’s. I don’t know if they still do it this way, but when I was in high school, they had an instrument for every kid, because most parents couldn’t afford to buy their kids an instrument like that.
• 33:04 Ben: There was also some interest in music before you even started playing the clarinet, so there were things you were building as a foundation toward what you eventually ended up having as an expertise in a specific instrument that, when your mom purchased a really nice one, allowed you to express your expertise in a better way. That’s the balance we want to strike—it doesn’t make sense to buy the very nicest tool for someone who’s just starting to explore their interest. You don’t want to think about it as not wanting to waste your money, because it’s not that, it’s about being smart in how you invest.
• 33:53 All of the things they learn with basic instruments are things that add up toward what they’ll eventually focus on. As we make investments, that’s the mindset we should have as parents.

No investment we make in our children’s interests and development of skills is ever wasted.

• 34:23 Even if you buy something nice, they use it for a week, and then they drop it. The experience they had with that thing is going to carry over to the next thing. I think your mom thought that way, and one could ask, “What does playing a clarinet have to do with writing?”
• 34:48 Rachel: I think it exercises the same part of the brain for one thing.
• 34:55 Ben: Especially when you’re playing in a tradition band, playing traditional music, you’re being creative but you’re also being analytical. Those are the same muscles you need to use when you’re writing. You don’t necessarily have to chase all those connections to find meaning, but I think the mindset is where you need to start, that no investment you make in your child’s interests is a wasted investment.
• 35:31 Rachel: I also think the experiences you gain from that and the people you meet because of those interests all inform each other. When I think about wasted effort, my second degree is in journalism and I spent twelve years of my life working for newspapers. The techniques and disciplines I learned and the people I met opened so many doors for me later. It was all super valuable to where I am now.
• 36:10 Ben: Sometimes, as adults, when we change careers, change course, or focus on a different type of skill, we treat it as if we’ve wasted all of this other time before when we were building those skills and relationships. We think we’re starting from scratch and that mindset can be very crippling. Even if you’re moving into a completely different industry, what’s more often the case is you carry those experiences with you.
• 36:50 Some of those relationships might work differently in the new industry, but could still work for you as part of your network. Demonstrating that mindset of no experience or investment is wasted, it’s useful and contributing toward the future, as a parent and giving our children that kind of mindset, I think we can avoid having that experience if they change industries in the future. It helps them to have a healthier relationship with those changes and they’ll be able to make those experiences useful for them in whatever they do.
• 37:36 Rachel: I think there’s so much pressure on teens now to know what they want to do and to make the decision of going to college or not. If we can expose them to the mindset of: “Whatever I choose isn’t going to be a mistake,” because they’ve seen that in the way they pursue their interests it would be helpful to them. One of the pressures I felt graduating was that I needed to know exactly what I wanted to do with my life and I needed to have it mapped out. I changed majors three times in my first month of college, because I was so intent on getting the “right” one when it doesn’t even matter now.
• 38:30 Ben: I love the way Sean talks about this on the seanwes podcast: when we’re faced with many different options, a lot of times it feels like 360 degrees of options and anything we choose is causing us to walk in the opposite direction away from any other options we could have chosen, but really it’s more like all of the options lead to the same place. We’re walking on a path and if we decide to shift, we might change lanes, but we’re still walking in the same direction. As a 33 year old man, I’m still dealing with the echoes of that kind of pressure—“You have to pick something and it’s going to be for the rest of your life.” I keep having to tell myself that’s not how it works.
• 39:31 Rachel: We can always shift and adjust. For us who grew up with parents who weren’t entrepreneurs and weren’t supportive of that part of that part of our lives, it’s a hard thing to be able to embrace that mindset.
• 39:56 Ben: I don’t want to put so much responsibility on the parent to the point where you feel fearful of messing this up for your kid. There’s nothing that was going to keep me from doing music. Whether I had the support or not, it was something I was going to do because I felt passionately about it. That’s something we have to realize about our kids.

Kids will find a way to pursue the things they’re truly passionate about.

• 40:41 Really, we just get to be part of that process with them. I want to get into the way I believe we can be the most supportive and that is not dealing directly with their interest or the skills they need for their interest, but dealing more with the habits and values that are peripheral to those things—like self discipline.

How Teaching Values Benefits Kid’s Interests

• 41:13 If we can help out children to develop self discipline, that serves us in many different areas of life. When it comes to pursuing our interests, there are always going to be aspects of the things we’re passionate about that we don’t really enjoy doing but, in order for us to be able to pursue our passion, we need to be able to do. Self discipline really is knowing you can do something that feels uncomfortable or that you don’t really like to do. There’s this confidence about it, and I liken it to running.
• 42:02 Now that I’ve been running so many times, I know that I can go run three miles, but because I know I can run three miles, then I can probably run six miles. I know what it feels like to discipline myself beyond the discomfort I feel. If I’m a healthy adult, I’m connecting that kind of discipline to other ares of my life. If I can discipline myself to run three miles, I can discipline myself to write something. That’s an incredible gift we can give our children and it’s something they can use toward the pursuit of their interest in a way that makes it more effective.
• 42:47 Focus is another one of those things we can teach our kids. That’s a hard one for kids, and patience is also a big one. When I think about patience, I think about art. I tend to get so eager to see what’s in my head, that I’ll sketch it out as quickly as possible. The more patient you can be as an artist, the more details of the work you can get into, even to the point where you’re allowing yourself to complete something over several sittings. For Jadon, that’s something that’s very challenging for him right now. When he starts something, he wants to get it done then. That patience can help in developing the skill too, because it takes a lot of patience and perseverance to really get good at something.
• 44:23 Rachel: He does well with the practicing part, it’s when he sits down to do something, he really wants to finish it. He has a hard time putting it away when it’s no longer time to do it. That’s a skill we can help our kids develop as well.

The reality we need to teach our kids is that when we’re pursuing creative activities, we don’t just get to do them unlimitedly.

• 44:59 Ben: Part of that patience is the certainty that you’ll be able to come back to it and pick up where you left off. For children, it’s scary sometimes because they don’t have the same relationship to time we do as adults. When they have to leave something, even though they know it’s not forever, it feels like it’s going to be so long before they get to come back to it. Doing that over and over again is what’s going to develop that patience.
• 46:08 I feel like teaching them the ability to rest is really important. It’s somewhat connected to the last one we talked about, but it’s the ability to walk away from our work and interests and take some time to reflect, rest, and maybe explore other things. I don’t do my best work when I don’t allow myself to rest. I don’t find as much fulfillment in the things I’m interested in when I don’t purposefully take time away from them. I wonder if part of it is the whole, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” thing but we can get burnt out on even the things we really love if we don’t allow ourselves to rest periodically. We want to help our children avoid that by teaching them how important rest is and the role it plays in them being able to do their best work.
• 47:39 We certainly want to be balanced about how and when we support their interests directly, but the way we can be most supportive as parents is helping them to develop the skills that are peripheral to their interests. If those things are in place, they’re interests are going to benefit from them. Having self-discipline, focus, patience, and rest in place is way more valuable to me than a $3,000 or a $10,000 instrument.
• 48:28 Rachel: I would actually add grit to that list—the bouncing back from disappointment. When I was in high school playing clarinet, I feel like I had all of those except rest, but definitely didn’t have the grit. If something didn’t go the way I wanted, I felt like I should stop playing for the rest of my life. Something we can encourage in our children is knowing that one disappointment doesn’t mean the world is ending. We have to be careful about the way we do that, but grit is one of the most important things we need, especially if we’re working for ourselves.

How Do You Encourage Without Pushing?

• 49:36 Ben: Charla asks, “How do you encourage without pushing?” I think we answered this in a couple of ways. One, it’s about the mindset you use to approach to their interests. If you feel, as a parent, that no investment is wasted, your approach to being supportive of your kids is going to feel less like strings are attached. We sometimes get pushy when it feels like there are strings attached, and you may not even be communicating that out loud, or saying things like, “I spent all this money…” There’s also a whole other part of the conversation that has to do with responsibility, because there is some responsibility we want to give our children but if we’re going to be supportive, you don’t ever want for there to be strings attached in the way you support.
• 50:38 It should never be, “My support goes away if you don’t do this thing.” There’s a difference between that and helping our children be responsible. The other part of the approach is that sometimes our children say they’re interested in something or we assume they are, but their actions speak differently, so it’s good to listen to our children but it’s also good to observe them. What are they doing with their time? When they have free time, are they naturally gravitating toward a specific activity? Being more in-tune with them that way can help us not have false expectations about what they might be interested in.
• 51:32 Brian asked, “How do you know you’ve passed the point of supporting your child’s interests?” I think about when our child is so interested in something that they are working and moving beyond any ways we might be able to support them. For example, they’re actively pursuing the knowledge and skills they need, or they’re even wanting to get a job to pay for equipment or a course. When they’re taking that kind of initiative, it’s good to back off a little bit as a parent. Not back off in terms of being emotionally supportive, but supportive in the sense you don’t necessarily have to be a driving force behind them pursuing their interest anymore. Ultimately, we want that for them and we want them to feel like they are capable of supporting themselves and pursuing their interests. We also want to let them know we’re there for them. That independence is important.