How to Raise Amazing Humans - With Ease

There’s a common misconception that raising children is hard; that teaching and “getting” them to learn is hard.  Bull crap. We make it hard.

The more this idea spreads, the harder things seem to become. 

Perception can have a lot of power, if we give it the power, as we have been.

I see it: parents exhausted, teachers stressed, children anxious. This isn’t how it’s meant to be. So what have we created? And how do we create something different?

This is about responsibility: we've created a culture of taking responsibility for the wrong things, and it's ruining our people.

Let me explain.

Taking responsibility for things that aren't yours makes you think you need to fix everything that's "wrong".

This fixation on fixing makes you focus on problems.

Focus on problem-solving creates more problems to solve.

Aware of it or not, we get our kicks and jolly’s this way. You solve a problem, you feel good, so you look for the next problem to solve, salivating at the thought of a dopamine reward.

And children are common “problems” that we keep trying to fix.

We, adults, get validation when children perform (whether we admit it to ourselves or not) . Children, in turn, want validation from us - it's how they're wired - and so a never-ending cycle of egos aimlessly feeding each other has evolved, and it will never stop.

Until we STOP IT.

We, adults, are at fault and we need to turn it around.

Children know they’re driven to please us, but they know they’re following a false god, and so they resent and rebel or become despondent.

They see what's happening and they don’t want to engage. And the well-behaved pleasers who have learned how to play the game are the most at risk of disillusionment and burnout later in life when they realise they've been living for someone else's approval and have no idea what they want for themselves.

There's nobody I speak to anywhere in the world today who thinks that the system we're putting children through is serving the young generations. It's a stressful struggle and chore for everyone involved. This is not how the Universe works. We're making it harder - much harder - than it needs to be. 

What’s the solution?

It doesn’t lie in fixing the system that exists.

That approach hasn't worked: adding more standards, rules and regulations to cater to every denominator is creating compounding momentum in the wrong direction.

It’s exhausting, never ends, and it will never work.

Here’s a story I never thought I’d use in this context, but it’s perfect:

My mother worked at a paper mill in Australia in the 1990’s. A program kept glitching, and as an electronics engineer, she was to sort it out.

She noticed the code to be ridiculously complex and long.

Why? 

Before her, whenever things went wrong, a new piece of code was added to counteract what wasn’t working. For years.

It would take her weeks to go over it and find the snag,

so what did she do instead?

She asked: What do we want this to do?

And she wrote the code that would make that happen.

From scratch.

It was simple and short. It was easy to find an error without going through hundreds of additions by people long gone.

Can you see how fixing problems that others created through trying to fix the problems before is multiplying insanity? 

Teachers and parents everywhere adding more lines of "code" in the hope of raising better humans.

It’s never going to work.

Adding to complexity to counteract problems is not a way forward.

It’s a way to hell.

Can you feel the relief of stepping back and, like my mother, looking at the whole picture with fresh eyes?

Not fixing what exists, but asking: What do we want this to do?

When I ask people:

"What is important for children to learn?"

the answers are nothing like what schooling looks like these days.

Which just shows, it’s time to rewrite the code.

From scratch.

I write about education in its true sense - wisdom and timeless skills that prepare young people for their future, no matter what it brings. Thank you for reading Edition#5 of the Education from Scratch newsletter. In the coming weeks and months I'll share more details of the Seed Skills that underpin everything else we learn in life. Subscribe and Follow me for weekly insights. Message if you'd like to receive the new edition of the "7 Seeds of Success"™️e-book and video series as soon as they come out.