Ryan Mitchell
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

I agree with some of your points, although I worry about potential pitfalls in practice.

Should people people take a realistic assessment of personal strengths into consideration when choosing careers? Absolutely — that’s a tough one to argue with.

Should parents be more realistic in their expectations and assessments of their children? Realism is always good, if it can really be achieved. Should parents refrain from pushing their children into doing things they’re not good at? I have mixed feelings.

I hated math as a kid. I cried while my parents forced me to do multiplication flash cards at home because I was failing third grade math. I had a “borderline grade” for 6th grade math and the teacher called my parents in and suggest that I repeat the class next year. My parents insisted on pushing me ahead into algebra, where… I still floundered and barely passed.

But I kind of liked algebra, despite my “bad at math” label, so I kept taking math class after math class even after my parents stopped micromanaging my schedule. My grades started getting better, I (voluntarily!) took a summer class in discrete math and transferred to a local community college to take differential equations my senior year of high school.

This isn’t necessarily a counter-example to your hypothesis. By the time I got to the point where I was an obvious super nerd, the adults in my life mostly recognized and supported this and didn’t, say, force me into after school sports. But in order to get there they first had ignore their assessment of my strengths and abilities and push me out of my comfort zone — even beyond what a “compulsory primary education” would have been.

I don’t know when the cut-off is — the point at which you roll your eyes at the whining and force your kid to do sports, or art, or whatever, even though they suck at it, and the point at which you say “well, maybe you shouldn’t major in physics given that you failed it twice…” But I would bet that my idea of an appropriate cut-off point is higher than yours.

I also don’t know that parents are always the best assessors of their child’s abilities. They may be blinded by their own desires and internalized biases. A former college football star might overlook his son’s lack of potential and push him into a career to the child’s detriment. Academics might force a child with a welding internship lined up to go to college anyway. My mom actively dissuaded me from spending the application fee for the math summer program I mentioned earlier — she thought the program was too prestigious and maintained, until the day the acceptance letter arrived, that I wouldn’t get in.

So, yes, we should encourage diversity in abilities, talents, and proclivities and support people in using their abilities in their careers, whatever they are. Parents should take a long hard look at their own biases in order to make sure they’re neither squashing nascent potentials nor artificially supporting non-existent ones. But the predispositions of children are often very different than those in the resulting adults and learning new things can be difficult and unpleasant. Pushing children out of their comfort zone — not just to tick some “compulsory primary education” checkbox but to force them to experience real struggle and achievement — is absolutely vital.

    Ryan Mitchell

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    O’Reilly author of Web Scraping with Python. Software engineer and data scientist. Bachelor’s at Olin College of Engineering, master’s at Harvard Extension