The sovereign child
On freedom and the currency of trust
I loved this discussion with Aaron Stupple and Naval Ravikant about raising sovereign children:
Aaron and Naval make the case for putting as few constraints as possible on children, especially when they feel arbitrary and abstract for the child. Their goal as parents is to be a safe and trusted advisor, rather than an authority figure who imposes rules.
Rules, they argue, degrade your relationship with your child by putting you in opposition to something they want to explore. Whereas an advisor always requires a foundation of trust in order to provide value. You don’t seek the advice of a person unless you’re genuinely curious about their point of view. It’s not safe to share your curiosity with someone who is judging you for what you do and don’t know.
At the core of their message, it seems to me, is the primacy of trust. Trust is the currency we have with our children. This is super-duper true for PDA children, but I think it’s true for all children period.
As I was listening to this podcast, I felt like I was acknowledging again how joyfully I explored the world as a child. And that I just wanted the adults in my life to join me in my explorations.
I remember throwing lawn darts with my uncle when I was eight years old or so. I noticed that each dart that landed could be connected with a straight line to the previous one that landed. I exclaimed “Another straight line!” I’ll never forget how my uncle looked at me like he was questioning my intelligence in that moment, saying, “Um, every two darts make a straight line.” I remember shrinking in that moment, as though I’d said something silly and was being called out for it.
My curiosity in that moment was about something deeper than my uncle was perceiving. I was actually noticing something deep about geodesics, which are paths between two points on a curved surface. I was expressing interest in the geometry of lawn darts on an undulating lawn: how do you draw the shortest path between any two points on a curved surface?
My uncle could have taken that opportunity to show me a book on differential geometry, and even measure out the distance between lawn darts by rolling a quarter along the ground from one lawn dart to the next, counting the revolutions of the quarter. He could have pointed out that the shortest path from one dart to the next might wind around a hill in between them, and wouldn’t actually look very straight at all. And then he could have pointed out that bigger hills had curvier, longer paths between darts. And in the limit of maximum local curvature you get a sphere. And in fact, planes follow geodesics when they fly across the earth — in so-called “great circles” — and there are specific parametric equations for them that pilots have to learn.
In that moment, instead of feeling ashamed of being excited about seeing a pattern that ‘should have been obvious and unremarkable’, I could have been transported in my imagination into the cockpit of a plane, where a pilot was using the very same ideas that I was noticing myself. What a feeling of connectedness that would have brought me.
And my uncle would have built trust with me.
As it was, I stopped asking my uncle questions after that. That one snarky comment from him was all it took to shut me up. Though I went on to get a degree in theoretical physics. So maybe I used his judgement as fuel for me to learn about what I wanted to, on my own terms.