Even as a young child, Paul Tough’s son had a tendency to go all in on new interests. “Max would go deep, finding satisfaction not just in the playing but also in the experience of plunging himself into a new and unfamiliar world and mastering all of its contours,” writes Tough. During the pandemic, Max—a shy kid—took up birding as a hobby, and Tough found that he began to interact more with other people. Then, when Max was 12, he decided to learn how to speak Russian, a seemingly random choice that ultimately opened him up to a whole new world. In this essay for The New York Times Magazine, Tough recounts a father-son trip they took to Uzbekistan, where Max could immerse himself in the language he had been studying. The piece is about learning to navigate and communicate in a foreign place, yes, but—more importantly—is about a parent learning how to sit back and watch their grown child navigate the world on their own.
There was a part of me that felt proud of his deep dives, but if I’m being honest, they often made me uneasy. When you’re a kid, knowing a ton about obscure subjects can be an early sign of intellectual curiosity, but just as often, it can be a symptom of misfiring neurons, an omen of future mental struggles. Sometimes the child who can tell you everything there is to know about dinosaurs or baseball statistics or the solar system grows up to be a groundbreaking scientist or a brilliant entrepreneur. Sometimes he just grows up to be a guy who never moves out of his parents’ basement.
As I watched Max walk off with a group of foreign strangers into an unknown land, it felt like a glimpse of my future, and his. I was slowing down, and he was speeding up.
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