Why your child requires a long sampling period

Your children are not your children. 

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

- Khalil Gibran

Sample this: Half of all the careers that would be in vogue two decades from now haven’t been invented! Yet scores of parents don’t get tired of asking, ‘What’s the best career for my child?’ They seem more urgent about a definitive answer than about questions concerning a life partner or more enduring undertakings.

The query has an implicit assumption that there’s ‘a career’, or ‘the career’, or, for the lucky few, ‘the dream career’. Well, there could be, except that it must be discovered, painstakingly so, for both an individual’s capabilities and market possibilities are ever evolving. The best parents and teachers can do is provide a long sampling period for their students. Here’s why.

From time immemorial, one of the fascinations of our species has been child prodigies. A prodigy is someone who performs at a master’s level while still a child. Prodigies are more likely to be seen in fields like music, mathematics, or chess than in literary or scientific studies. Yet very few prodigies blossom into adult geniuses. They experience burnout from early pressure, face social isolation due to their abilities, lose interest once they master their narrow fields, and, in many cases, fail to develop coping mechanisms and a work ethic to meet the expectations placed on them.

‘The skill of being a gifted child involves mastery of a domain,’ explains the social psychologist Dean Keith Simonton. ‘While the skill involved in being a genius involves the transformation of a domain.’ As per Wharton’s Adam Grant: ‘Although child prodigies are often rich in both talent and ambition, what holds them back from moving the world forward is that they don’t learn to be original’.

The prodigies, it seems, direct all their might to a narrow set of learnable traits and skills and saturate faster than others, but upon achieving that state, they get trapped. Very few follow their head start with lifelong reinvention. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Pablo Picasso were two such rarities. What made them exceptional? A long sampling period and deferred specialisation.

Imagine a child who doesn’t seem to stick to a specific course and keeps dabbling with multiple undertakings — most left unfinished and rarely mastered. The conventional wisdom would declare such an adolescent not amounting to much, for she will be left behind the ‘initiated’. But in a life exceeding eighty years, on average, and a career breaching half a century, one can afford to be wasteful early on.

Wasteful in a clever sense of sampling multiple fields, tasting possible career options, and being provisionally committed to a course of action. Any advanced specialisation comes at the cost of leaving a lot out (remember, focus is the act of omission and not commission), and if the fortunes later turn, the child is left haplessly entangled in her web of expertise.

The contrast between Andre Agassi and Roger Federer is instructive. Agassi, who picked up tennis at age three, owing to a super-human push from his Olympian dad, lived a life of a tormented genius, forever hating the game that gave him his name. Federer, on the contrary, was dabbling with soccer years before settling for tennis. His years playing a wide range of sports gave him dexterity, sportsmanship, and physical and mental stamina, which he brought to tennis, leaving the game transformed by his elegance.

The difference is much starker in how the former ATP No. 1 stars live in retirement. A longer sampling period and deferred specialisation not only offer a broader worldview and coping mechanisms, but also sustain diverse career possibilities. And this is non-trivial when your life is an enterprise of careers, and a career is an enterprise of activities, however loosely coupled.

Our schools and households must be designed to provide children with broader exposure. The typical split among the arts, science, and commerce, so common in the Indian education system, is a vestige of the industrial era and Macaulay’s regime. Which problem in real life is purely art, or purely science, or purely commerce? It’s always a wicked one, with its multiple dimensions, warranting a battery of skills.

The prodigies excel in very narrowly defined fields and are valuable only as long as those fields are socially acceptable and economically rewarded. But we are talking of longer time horizons, where we need mental dexterity and physical stamina that one gathers by not committing early on.

‘You waste years by not being able to waste hours,’ lamented the famous behavioural economist, Amos Tversky. His statement is a wake-up call for teachers and parents who still push their wards onto the narrow rails of medicine, engineering, the civil services, chartered accountancy, or the remnants of the bygone era.

They are not even safe bets, let alone wise ones. Let your child’s experimentative streak run amok, at least for a while. Your dream career may be your child’s trap, for she’s unique in every which way. I would be pleased with someone still unclear at age 30 about what she wants after trying most of the possibilities, rather than someone who appears clear at age 22, whose clarity is mostly borrowed rather than earned.

Let them be. Just be around, but by the side and not in the front.

(The author is an academic based in Bengaluru)