When I started winning races my senior year of high school, they were the easiest and most enjoyable runs I had ever had. As a 9th grader, I’d sometimes vomit with the agony of running a three mile cross country race. As a senior, I found myself winning most races effortlessly. I had simply trained to the point at which winning within my league was easy.

Similarly, if your child is developing key skills and living a life of purpose from a young age, adult happiness and well-being, including success, will come easily for them. Self-mastery and the virtues are key, and pave the way for a relatively stress free life going forward. Creating a household environment when your child is young, including most importantly the human relationships in the environment, is critical to supporting your child in developing self-mastery and the virtues. Supporting a child’s ability to focus, rather than encouraging distractability, is essential.

My son is earns a significant six figure salary solving interesting intellectual problems with considerable professional autonomy as he optimizes the largest network of server farms in the world for Amazon. He has time, energy, and leisure to have a wonderful domestic life with his wife and daughter, with healthy food and outdoor activity in a cozy, charming home not far from his work. He did not find it stressful to get to his current position; he simply enjoyed thinking from a young age and had developed the habits of mind, including mathematical thinking, that led him to where he is today. He also dropped out of high school, a decision which delighted me as it demonstrated that he realized a high school diploma has no real value.

My daughter has been fascinated with babies since she was young. She became a nurse who has been working nonstop with newborn babies and their mothers for about six years now. While she and her husband look forward to their own, she loves her life caring for babies, while living 15 minutes away from her brother and his family. They too have comfortable, mostly stress free lives.

While many parents claim they want their children to grow up to be happy and well, often they submit their children to a tremendous amount of unnecessary misery in school (75% of high school students are unhappy at school, 66% are not focused on learning, 30% increase in suicide during the school year) because of a seemingly widespread belief that we need to make children miserable in school in order for them to become “successful.”

I see this as one of the most pernicious falsehoods in our society. I’ve been educating students for decades in largely stress free, warm, friendly environments in which most students are able to achieve their life goals without being emotionally stunted or damaged in the process. I have seen literally hundreds, going on thousands, of young people achieve what they want to achieve outside the parameters of conventional schooling.

How Can You Provide Such a Life for Your Children?

First and foremost, your commitment should be to your child’s wellbeing and not your ego needs. Put so bluntly, it sounds harsh. But there are some parents of a certain social class where the issue of elite college admissions is everything. They feel as if their social status is contingent on the status of their child’s college. Some of the most messed up children I met are those who have been forced to bear the weight of their parent’s social ambitions when that was not the right path for that child. As veteran Montessori educator Chris von Lersner put it when asked if Montessori was a good path to the Ivy Leagues, “It is if that is what the child wants. It is not if that is what the parent wants.”

That said, many or most caring parents mistakenly believe that a stressfilled schooling experience is necessary for today’s competitive college admissions. To begin with, only 6% of all college students attend universities with an acceptance rate of 25% or fewer. The vast majority of students who do go to college will attend universities that are not difficult to get into. The fetish for selective college admissions among elites creates much greater perceived stress around admissions than need be the case. Moreover, as fewer students attend college each year, outside of the selective colleges it is increasingly the colleges that will be desparate for students. With perhaps hundreds of colleges facing bankruptcy in the coming years, they will be eager for your child to attend. Don’t stress out about college admissions. Ensuring that your child is a confident, purpose-driven human being should be much higher priority.

In addition, it is entirely possible to lead a purpose-driven life as a teen and get into the college of one’s choice. Often purpose driven students achieve impressive achievements without traditional college admissions portfolios. As Cal Newport puts it in a post on the “psychology of impressiveness,”

Let’s try a simple experiment. Imagine that you’re an admissions officer at a competitive college, and you’re evaluating the following two applicants:

• David — He is captain of the track team and took Japanese calligraphy lessons throughout high school; he wrote his application essay on the challenge of leading the track team to the division championship meet.

• Steve — He does marketing for a sustainability-focused NGO; he wrote his application essay about lobbying delegates at the UN climate change conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Newport points out that most people who select Steve - because most people can’t imagine achieving what he achieved in high school.

I have known many such students. When I went to Harvard, the kid with the lowest SAT scores in my freshman class was a student who had been elected mayor of his small town at the age of 18. Caleb Cappocia, one of my mentees, is a student who was a professional actor as a teen before getting into Harvard with no traditional academic credentials at all (no high school diploma). Laura Deming got into MIT at 14 after working alongside a world-renowned researcher in her lab for two years (no high school diploma). Former student Jai Agrawal raised $1.2 million at 16 for his Minecraft Mods company, Modrinth, which helped him get into Stanford (he got a diploma but obviously it doesn’t matter). None of these were stressed about their teen years.

One way to think about this is that if you are a college admissions officer reading through hundreds of college applications on a Saturday, you are likely to notice that ones that stand out for some reason. I’ve been on scholarship committees where that is exactly what we did, and most high achieving students have incredibly banal and repetitive applications: 4.0 GPA, 1550 SAT, varsity sports, student council, volunteer work, etc. Yawn. A friend of mine was reviewing candidates for Harvard and she recalled a student who had dropped out of high school, joined a Buddhist monastary for a year, then finished high school. Yes, he had great academics. But out of a large pile of applications, that is the one she remembered and recommended for admission.

While Newport focuses on the psychology of impressiveness, I see purpose driven teens as more likely to achieve such unusual impressive achievements. I’m committed to providing purpose-driven alternatives to the misery of high school.

Many parents see their children as bright, curious, and motivated in elementary school, only to gradually see the light leave their eyes in middle and high school. But based on this false perception that the conventional academic grind is necessary, along with the paucity of options to the standard grind, most kids are forced to continue through the misery. Some develop clinical levels of anxiety and depression, others develop substance abuse or other issues, still others become reliant on medication for their “condition” of not thriving at school, and some die of suicide. Don’t sacrifice your child’s well-being (or possibly their life) because of your ego needs or misguided anxiety about college admissions.

How to Nurture Children for a Flourishing Life

I see developing confidence and focus as key with young children. I’m very attentive to how young children focus and how to sustain their focus and interest just a little longer. In order for them to focus, they need to feel safe, secure, and loved.

They also need to be an environment without distractions. An environment rich in interesting objects to explore is great. Flashy devices or addictive electronic technologies are not great. When my children were young, our nightly ritual was to read together as a family, then eat dinner together, and then story time (or later improv games) before bedtime. We never watched screens in front of the kids, and only rarely watched something on TV together as a family.

I’m appalled when I see families using screens to babysit their children. Yes, occasionally they might be useful in an emergency situation, such as a long plane ride. But a household in which the adults are focused either on productive work or family time together is a household in which children know that either they are being productive or they are spending time together. Kids are sponges. If mom and dad are busy doing things, the kids will be busy doing things (albeit in imitation when they are young). Parents who let their kids indulge in the heroin of electronic addictions then later want to push them to perform academically have it exactly wrong. Model purposeful activity and healthy relationships daily, and your child will most likely develop the habit of purposeful activity and healthy relationships from a young age.

By reading regularly with your child, gradually pointing out the words as you go, then eventually teaching them alphabet and showing them how to sound out words in simple early readers, most will learn to read relatively quickly and easily. Once they attain fluency in basic reading, which might take several months, then encourage reading as much as you can. A child who reads recreationally has a huge advantage on children who do not read - regardless of school curriculum or pedagogy.

I like to play math games with kids, so that playing with numbers, counting by 2s, 5s, 10s, 3s, 7s, etc. becomes literally child’s play. Play thinking games with your kids all the time, while cooking dinner together, driving in the car together, taking walks together, etc. I have Socratic conversations with them as early as possible (certainly by four in most cases) so they habitually think about ideas from a young age. This becomes a joyful way to interact which habituates them to extended intellectual focus.

By the time they are four or five, in addition to reading and other family activities, they should have abundant cool things to play with and experiment with, along with the opportunity to do so. Growing up working class, for me this included cardboard boxes and pie tins, puzzles of various sorts, basic tools, glue, tape, paper, fabrics, etc. along with treats such as magnets and magnifying glasses. In todays tremendous marketplace, most parents can provide much fancier goodies, but you want them to be tools for making things rather than entertainments. Logic puzzles and brainteasers of various sorts are also great. Anything that gets them to continue to practice cognitive focus for extended periods of time is valuable.

At some point you want them to do be doing mathematics regularly, the more the better. That is the one piece which is best developed as a daily discipline by the time they are six or so. Even if it is only 15-20 minutes early on, growing to 30 minutes throughout elementary school, math is the one piece that rarely develops in a spontaneous way (though playing the math games suggested earlier helps a LOT to make it a natural activity).

But if they spend 30 minutes doing math, read for a few hours, and then explore and build cool stuff, and having spontaneous intellectual conversations with you in the interstices of the day, odds are they will be ahead of most kids spending their days at school grinding away and destroying their love of learning and life.

Following such a path, either at home or in an alternative school, will likely put your child in a good place by middle school. If they have hours per day to focus on serious activity, rather than addictive screentime and mind-numbing coercive schooling, they will likely be creating and building as a routine part of their lives by 11 or 12. With support, they are ready to begin taking on even more substantial projects by ages 13 and 14. Most of the teens I’ve known who have done amazing achievements by 15 and 16 have followed roughly such a path. Trad schooling would have prevented them from doing such things.

In their teens, they can be taking college courses and working on substantial projects. Of course, we have many homeschooling teens who are ready to individuate from mom and dad who love our program at The Socratic Experience as more intellectually engaging and social than most college courses, though many of our students also take a few college courses for particular credits. With the right mentors, teens can be taking their creative, entrepreneurial, and intellectual projects to the next level. If they apply for college with great SAT scores, a few college courses under their belt, and impressive real world achievements, they will be a strong candidate for admissions (with of course higher level scores and achievements needed for the more selective universities).

But note: At no point along the way did they need to experience stress, boredom, or lose a sense of purpose and confidence. They have developed the ability to manage their own time and to focus on a self-determined goal to achieve it.

We don’t have to force children to be miserable.

Parental Equinimity and Exemplary Behavior as a Sine Qua Non for Flourishing

Of course none of this works if parents are anxious, angry, themselves addicted to technology, or otherwise providing a poor environment for their children. Sometimes children raised in such households rise to the occasion anyway, or may even compensate for chaos in the home by escaping into intellectuality (to a large extent I escaped my father’s temper by escaping into reading).

But I see most of the perceived need for stressful, coercive schooling to be due to a century of public school propaganda combined with the fact that few parents provide such environments for their children today. Many famous and extraordinary writers from the 18th and 19th century had little or no formal education. Yet given that elite college students struggle with challenging books today, mostly home educated and/or self-taught writers such as Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Laura Ingalls Wilder achieved a higher level of literacy than do students in our colleges today. It cost them almost nothing to be superbly well-educated - they just spent years reading serious books.

Ultimately human unhappiness comes from allowing our wants to exceed our ability to satisfy those wants, therefore allowing our appetites to rule us. The Socratic tradition is based on the maxim, “Know Thyself.” If you and the other adults in your child’s environment are focused on living by example and providing loving attention to your child’s mind, odds are they will grow up to be happy and well. If you live a life in which you are satisfied by the productive activity you do and the healthy relationships you nurture, they will most likely live such a life and grow up to be happy and well.

And by focusing on living a productive life with healthy relationships, including healthy relationships with your children, you will be happier and more fulfilled. Many families experience far more stress both for their children and for themselves than they need to because they mistakenly believe they need to play the standard school game. As it turns out, it is entirely unnecessary to play the standard school game to have thriving children who go on to lead fulfilling lives. In fact, playing the standard school game might be the leading obstacle to a better life for you and your children.