DEI had a hard weekend.
One of its true believers hit a wall while forcing her daughter into an equitable system. That wall was her daughter wanting a future to look forward to.
For ten years, she consciously chose a struggling school system so she could lobby for better teachers and more resources. After all, if everyone benefitted, her daughter would, too.
That led to ten years of the daughter falling behind, not hitting her potential, watching her dream of becoming a doctor slip away.
(Credit: New York Times Magazine, used without permission)
That reality forced the believer to recant.
In the New York Times Magazine.
The same place, ten years earlier, where she crowed about the audacity of her decision.
The price of fairness
We’ve tried making everything fair. Because we don’t like to see others suffer.
Then we find out the hard way that kids are wired to believe their parents have their best interests in mind.
I’m not immune to it, either.
Back when my oldest was two, we stopped at a playground on the way to Dulles before catching a flight home. Some local kids saw me playing with her and asked me to push them on the swings.
A quick glance up found their dads sitting at the picnic tables. They weren’t interested in anything outside their conversation. I felt for the kids and obliged.
But that discouraged my daughter. She traded the swingset for the top of a slide to start pouting.
My desire for everyone to feel included came up against my daughter’s desire to spend time with her dad.
I learned my lesson in one afternoon.
I couldn’t imagine doing that for ten years.
The Greater Good strikes again
Maybe it’s a matter of where we put our attention.
Because the most obvious course of action is to jump in and do something to relieve the pain in the moment.
That doesn’t mean the outcome will be good.
Promoting those standards seems altruistic. And the praise feels good. It did for the author.
But spreading attention across a population loses focus. A focus on outcomes in favor of looking busy.
Because, in the end, outcomes matter.
Think for a minute. If you needed to bring in more money, side-hustling several smaller jobs is the obvious path. But do that without awareness and you end up spending everything you make just to show up for those jobs.
That’s the natural consequence of treating every opportunity the same.
And, unless you’ve looked elsewhere, that’s probably the future you’re passing to your children.
The less obvious path
But that’s only one way of doing things.
There’s another.
In short: put your family’s excellence first.
Because we know it takes practice to get better at something. It’s learning to align things in the right order, exploring how new ideas fit together, and finding the right people to work with whose vision compliments yours.
And, like my daughter at the playground, that intention flows outward as it reciprocates.
You just have to be there for it.
Do that enough times and you create a blueprint.
Other people can follow a blueprint. Often with minimal guidance from the one who built it.
That way, you have attention you can give to others who need it in a way that benefits them over the longer term. And you’re not leaving your kid to sulk when you don’t push them on the swing.
Merit matters
Focusing on your own family first can sound flippant. But don’t get me wrong.
It’s ok to want better outcomes for children other than your own. But sacrificing your child’s future to improve an external system is a poor choice.
Instead of exhausting yourself by pushing on society as a whole, change what you can by pouring into your own family first. It’s a lot more doable to lift up one person you brought into the world and offer the blueprint to others who need help.
And it didn’t take you ten years to learn.
Affiliate corner
This is an easier lesson to teach your kids than you think. Get Tuttle Twins and the Medals of Merit to show them how to build using their different talents rather than forcing equality.
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Making a change starts with figuring out how it works. Read more encouraging stories about individual change before you go:
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