Raise a Child Who Can Go Anywhere

If there is one goal I have had in raising my children, it is this: to keep as many doors open for them as possible, for as long as possible.

Of course, doors close. A twelve-year-old who has never held a tennis racket is not going to become the next Roger Federer. There are only so many hours in a day, years in a childhood and directions a life can take. Choosing something also means choosing against something. That’s life, and part of growing up is making peace with that.

But children are not born with the foresight to understand which of today’s decisions may close doors years from now. For much of childhood, that foresight has to come from us.

My seven-year-old cannot know which opportunities he may want available to him at seventeen. A fourteen-year-old cannot fully comprehend what he might be removing from his life at twenty-five.

I can understand more of that than they can. That’s one of the reasons they have a parent.

Parents Have the Foresight Children Don’t

It isn’t a choice not to become a doctor if you never did the schoolwork that would allow you to study medicine. By then, the door has already closed.

That is why school has always been important in our family. School is my children’s job, and I expect them to put their greatest effort into their job. I don’t know what professions they will choose, and I don’t need to know. But while they are too young to grasp the consequences themselves, I am not prepared to watch academic possibilities disappear because a twelve-year-old doesn’t currently see the point of algebra.

The same principle applies to a smartphone. Give a fourteen-year-old unlimited access to one and something else will lose. Perhaps reading. Sleep. Sport. Concentration. Conversation. Boredom. Time spent doing absolutely nothing. Attention is finite, and teenagers are no better equipped than the rest of us to resist technology specifically designed to capture it.

I don’t expect a fourteen-year-old to calculate those trade-offs consistently. I do expect myself to.

This is one of the fundamental gaps parenting exists to bridge. For a three-year-old, our greater foresight may mean stopping him from climbing somewhere from which he could fall and knock out his teeth. For a seventeen-year-old, it may mean refusing to let him get into a car driven by someone who barely has a driver’s license.

The decisions become more complicated as children grow. Our responsibility to use the experience they don’t yet have remains.

Freedom Later Requires Limits Now

There is no contradiction between limiting children and wanting them to become free adults.

Freedom later requires limits now.

I limit choices today because I want my children to have choices tomorrow. I decide that school matters. I decide that a smartphone does not get unrestricted access to my teenager’s time and attention. I decide what standards of behavior apply in our family. There are things worth learning before a child is old enough to appreciate why they matter.

This can easily be taken too far. Keeping doors open does not mean stuffing childhood with lessons, activities and intellectual pursuits. I have no interest in producing optimized children whose calendars resemble those of corporate executives.

Children need freedom and boredom, too. They need afternoons in which nobody is teaching them anything, improving them or driving them somewhere. They need to play, waste time, invent things and learn what to do when nothing has been organized for them.

Parental foresight is not about maximizing input. It is about judgment. What matters enough for me to insist upon? What doesn’t? Where does my child need my direction, and where do they need space?

Those decisions shape the range of possibilities they will eventually inherit.

Raising a Child Who Can Go Anywhere Takes More Than Academics

The possibilities I want to preserve go far beyond school and future careers.

A person can have an excellent education and still find large parts of the world difficult to enter. Education opens certain doors. Social competence, practical ability, cultural fluency and adaptability open others.

I think about this in very ordinary terms. A young person should be able to help the farmer next door without feeling above the work and sit down for dinner in a grand hotel without feeling intimidated by the room. Knowing how to change a tire is useful. So is knowing what to do when a table is laid with four forks and four glasses. Judo can teach something classical dance doesn’t, and classical dance can teach something judo doesn’t.

The individual examples aren’t the point. Range is.

The more environments children understand, the less of the world feels inaccessible to them. They can talk to different kinds of people. They can be guests. They can travel. They can contribute when there is work to be done. They can arrive somewhere unfamiliar, observe what is expected and find their feet.

That, to me, is what it means to raise a child who can go anywhere.

It isn’t about preparing them for one particular kind of life. It is about making sure they are not unnecessarily excluded from lives they may one day want.

Savoir-Faire Is Essential

This is also why I consider savoir-faire essential.

It can sound old-fashioned because we associate it with etiquette, formal tables and knowing which fork to use. But savoir-faire is much bigger than table manners. It is the ability to understand the environment you have entered and move competently within it.

Imagine a twenty-two-year-old invited to a business lunch as part of an application process. Of course they can look across the table and copy the person who knows how to hold the knife and fork. They are perfectly capable of learning on the spot.

But now their attention is occupied by something that should have been automatic. I would rather that attention be available for listening, thinking, noticing the person opposite them and making the case for why they should get the job.

That’s the real value of social competence. What you already know how to do no longer demands your attention. You are free to concentrate on what actually matters.

The same applies to introducing yourself, making conversation, speaking to someone much older than you, being a good guest or navigating a culture different from your own. These aren’t decorative accomplishments. They make more of the world accessible.

The Doors Change With the World

Preparing children to move confidently through the world cannot mean preparing them for the world we grew up in.

Artificial intelligence is an obvious example. Understanding AI is rapidly becoming part of basic competence. Children growing up now will study and work in environments in which using it well may give them an enormous advantage.

But knowing how to prompt an AI model isn’t enough. They also require enough knowledge to recognize when its answer is poor, enough intellectual independence to think without it and enough judgment to understand that technological possibility does not settle a moral question.

Fifty years ago, none of that would have appeared on a parent’s list. Today it belongs there.

The specifics change because the world changes. The principle doesn’t. We look ahead as far as we reasonably can and prepare children for a world they cannot yet see.

You Can Only Choose From What You Know

Eventually, the balance shifts. The decisions become theirs, as they should. Their lives belong to them, and they may walk straight past doors I spent years helping to keep open.

I am perfectly comfortable with that.

What matters to me is the difference between rejecting a possibility and never having had it.

You can only choose from what you know. You can only turn down an opportunity that was actually available to you. And you can only decide that a particular world isn’t for you once you know enough about that world to make the decision.

That is the long view behind many of the decisions I make while my children are growing up. Education matters because it preserves possibilities. Health matters because our bodies determine much of what we can do. Languages give access to people and places. Social competence makes unfamiliar rooms easier to enter. Practical competence makes us less dependent on someone else solving things for us. Boredom matters because a child needs to discover what comes from within.

I cannot give my children every possible future. Nor would I want to design one for them.

But I can take seriously the years in which my choices help determine what will later be available to them.

And when the choosing finally becomes theirs, I want to be able to look back and know that I tried my level best, to keep as many doors open as I could, for as long as I could.