"Who is My Daughter, Exactly?"

I often think about the old question: How much of a person comes from their “native temperament” – the DNA they were born with, and how that influences their behavior? And how much comes as a result of how they were raised – the values they received in their upbringings? This is the infamous “nature vs. nurture” question, for which there is no definitive answer. It is complicated. Are we born with a certain collection of predilections and traits from our genetic inheritance, and that mostly explains who we become? Or are we born a “tabula rasa” on which society can write one script or another? Humans have argued bitterly over the answers to these questions time out of mind.

Well, it seems obvious a person is a mix of both “nature” and “nurture.” But is it 50/50? A bit more of one than the other? Does it depend on the person? Depend on the nature and values of the community in which a person lives? It is mindbreakingly hard to find out exactly why people act the way they do. All you can do is speculate. But how can you not speculate? It is such a huge question. The answers are so important to everything else.

I tend to come down a bit on the “nature” side of the question which relies on the DNA present at birth. “Character is destiny,” Heraclitus claimed. I agree (mostly). But I also concede that the formation of that native temperament through childhood and beyond is also important.

Character has much to do with a person’s native temperament, but so much also relies on how one is raised and “socialized.” It is so enormously complicated. But as a parent you have offspring and they pretty much are who they are, almost from the beginning; this is what experience has taught me. A parent can drive themself and their child crazy by trying to change them. As a father I was determined, within certain bounds, to respect the native temperament of my daughters. Rather than try to change them into what I wanted, I would try to help them become who they were born to be.

I had a student in my class decades ago who was a marvel. She was among the best students I ever had: an almost perfect scholar, as well as a standout athlete. I remember once she wrote an AP English essay for me which she disliked, so came back after school on her own time and asked to write another one. Wow! A local newspaper wrote an article about her where her mother claimed, “Daughters like her are born this way, not made.” I knew the mother, and she was about as driven and on the edge as was her daughter. The acorn does not fall far from the tree, I thought to myself. But this young lady tearing through high school while enjoying so much success was so tightly wound I doubted she would ever be comfortable in her own skin. It would be a struggle. Her virtues were inextricably wound up with her vice; you could not separate the one from the other. She was born that way, her mom said. Yup, she was born that way. Wow. She was quite the spectacle: a genius as flawed as she was talented. I never forgot her.

I bring this story up because of my oldest daughter, who I have thought about often recently. Julia is a senior in high school at the moment. She is a standout student and leader on campus, and is overwhelmed at the moment applying to some of the most prestigious universities in the country. (University of Chicago, Northwestern, Northeastern, Claremont McKenna, Brown, USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, SDSU). Her academic record is close to perfect. Julia is an all-conference tennis player since her freshman year who was winner or runner-up in doubles championships all four years. She is the co-editor of the school newspaper with another young lady. Julia is also the president of two other clubs on campus. She has also a senior leadership position in the school bioscience academy. And she has held an internship with a local orthodontist for years, helping to make computer-designed molds.

That Julia is busy is an understatement. Her life is an unending stream of “to do” lists. She gets them all done.

Then Julia is also applying to college at the moment – all the paperwork, the letters of recommendation, and above all, writing all the personal statements – it has all come close to pushing her over the edge. Julia has been under enormous pressure, even as she’s kind of used to that. She worries that even as her CV is mightily impressive, the same could be said of all the other top students in the country applying to those same schools. She has a point, I concede. It is stressful. Julia is busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger.

I stand back and scratch my head. Why is she doing all this?

Are you not over-extended, daughter Julia? Overly busy? To your detriment? I ask her.

“I like being in charge,” she replies. “I want this.”

Julia has always been attracted to dynamic, smart, successful adults. She can charm them; I have seen it happen. Doctors, entrepreneurs, and other professionals almost think Julia is an adult herself when they meet and talk with her. She appreciates competence and success. (But she does not suffer idiots easily: for that reason, middle school was torture for her.) The idea of being among the best attracts Julia, and she enjoys being at the center: she wants to be at the front. Julia likes “being in charge.” The endless worries of being the co “Editor in Chief” of her award-winning school newspaper – she volunteered for that. The many responsibilities of the person who runs things, and the psychic stress that comes with worrying about what might happen, in addition to what is happening – she sought it out. I never wanted anything to do with that. Where does her drive come from?

Recently I said, “Julia, if you are so busy that you cannot read a book per week for your own pleasure and growth – that is a problem.” She has not had time to read for many months, it seems to me. Julia is a reader – or at least she used to be. The library she has developed in her own room is impressive, even as half of it are books pilfered from my library. But she is too busy to read.

“Too busy to read?” No matter how busy I have been in my life, and I have been plenty busy, I have still read four books a month since I can remember. I make the time for it.

But there are other factors I struggle to understand.

Julia has taken the college application process beyond anything I ever contemplated. She is not alone in this. Most of her friends have “college advisors” who are paid thousands of dollars to help find the right college and tailor applications towards the maximum possibility of acceptance. The average student who gets into Yale has waged a campaign since seventh grade to achieve this. As a high school teacher, I have seen it for decades. All the extracurriculars, the SAT and ACT prep courses, the honors and AP classes, the college visits, the carefully cultivated personal statements – it is an exhausting and complex process to get into the best school.

I told Julia that it did not make a huge difference whether she went to Yale or UCLA, or even (lowly) San Diego State. An English 101 class is not that different for college freshmen from one place to another, I explain. And as important as the campus was where the student lives: New Haven was different from Westwood which was different from San Diego. There were many moving parts in this decision to attend one school over another. And how well you performed when you got there was maybe more important than where you attended.

But is that entirely true? Do do you gain advantages attending a tony private school like Yale or Amherst? Do you gain concrete advantages in terms of personal attention and professional connections at elite schools compared to being one of the herd at public schools like the University of Virginia or UC Berkeley? O even at (relatively) lowly San Diego State? I suspect so. Being around smart ambitious people makes you smarter and more ambitious, the more the better. (The opposite is true, too.)

But I have always thought that a parent has to be honest about what they are about, and I was not going to expend ginormous amounts of energy and money playing the “get your kid into Yale game.” I would instead spend that parenting energy reading my daughter books, teaching/coaching her tennis game, and trying to build character in her generally. I was taking the long-view. Getting into a “good college” was just one step in the longer journey, and not the most important one. I still believe this.

But here is the catch: my daughter wants to play that “please the powers that be” game. She wants to go to Brown, or some similar school. She wants to be on the fast-track towards becoming a Supreme Court Justice clerk or a Stanford Medical School resident. Or to be more exact: she has talent in working as hard as she can, pleasing the adults in authority, and gaining their approval and support. And that is something I never cared about. This has been both a strength and a weakness for me.

If I wanted to be “successful” in the affairs of the wider world – in promotions, in business, in politics, in wealth, in reputation – I would have had to do a lot more people pleasing (ie. “ass kissing”) and self-promotion than I ever cared to do. I ignored advancing into the upper echelons of anything. I was content to live according to my own lights, and I was absolutely honest to my own vision of myself and the world. I bent my life’s arc to nobody else (except perhaps my daughters) and was absolutely candid about who I was. I never had to be a “politician” to get what I wanted. As a result, nobody ever gave me anything. I mostly ignored the rest of the world, and it ignored me.

I was fine with that. I have no regrets. I have lived according to my own lights.

I never saw a meeting at work I wanted to attend. Meetings are horrible, almost every one of them. I have hated them since I encountered them. I go to as few meetings as I can get away with; sometimes I make memes during meetings describing cleverly how I feel about them:

In contrast, Julia goes to meetings all the time. More often than not she arranged and ran the meeting herself. I see this, scratch my head, and ask: Wut?

Yes, my oldest daughter seeks the approval of the people who run things. She engages the world. She wants prestige, money, success – and is willing to pay the price in terms of jumping through endless hoops towards becoming qualified and pleasing her superiors. I am both impressed and horrified.

But Julia has always sort of been like this. She was born this way. I strive to understand what she is doing and why.

Should I be another one of those annoying “helicopter parents” who pays thousands of dollars for a college admissions advisor? Pay for SAT prep courses? Endlessly revise her personal statements with her? Wage that exhausting scorched-earth campaign since 7th grade to get her into Yale? And then once she is accepted to a prestigious university I could broadcast the news to family and friends in an effort to validate all my parenting efforts of the past 18 years? Isn’t this how the upper middle class in America raises their kids?

I have visited colleges with Julia. We have talked about which school would be the best “fit” for her. And I have tried to teach her how to use her mind and move her body almost since her birth: mens sana in corpore sano. Whether through literature or tennis, or whatever else, I have done my best as a parent to build up the best possible person I could – Julia as a “warrior, not a wallet.” But have I fallen short in terms of doing every possible last thing to get her into an ultra prestigious university?

This is what happened. I told Julia this: You apply to the college. You make the decisions. You write the essays. It is your life. You take the front seat, and I will support and applaud you from the back seat. I go further: I think you would be better served, Julia, by reading a few books for your own pleasure and enrichment rather than grade grubbing your teachers after class or taking SAT prep courses on weekends. And should we pay thousands of dollars for college application consultants? “No.” But should I do those things?

I go round-and-round in my head. What kind of child do I have? My daughter is a persistent rule follower and an ambitious young adult. Julia tells me she wants to make gobs of money and climb high in the professional ranks. Good for her. I am proud of her. “Better all this striving than acquiring a taste for heroin,” I console myself. But this never ending struggle to achieve can be exhausting, even just as her father. Julia thinks the powers-that-be are worth pleasing. I never thought so. Is she correct? Or am I? Is she too predisposed to bend to adjust to the world? Am I too stubborn (or lazy?) to play the game? Are we both right? Both wrong? Depending on the circumstances? Depending on the person?

“How can she be so different from me?” I wonder. Julia has half my DNA. She grew up in my house. But, oh my, she is her own person.

Or at least Julia is in the process of becoming her own person, similar and different from her parents. In three months she will turn 18-years of age. And Julia appears comfortable in her own skin – something as important as success in school or career. She knows the difference between right and wrong – the important bases are all covered. My wife and I consider ourselves lucky. Julia is almost an adult ready to live on her own.

I was a super involved parent in h er early years. I read Julia to sleep every night when she was a baby, a toddler, and all the way up until she was around seven years; this was because she demanded it, and would scream bloody murder if I left the room before she was fast asleep. Julia was a most importunate and colicy baby, even as she has been a self-directed and trouble free teenager. If she is a “virtuous and well-governed youth” now, Julia was a riotous baby back then. Oh, how well I remember it! To try and pacify her at bedtime I read hundreds of books to her over the years. This was prime father-daughter bonding time, during a stage of life when that mattered, and it provided us with endless opportunities to talk about everything under the sun through the lens of the children’s literature we shared. There were also all the AYSO soccer games and tennis matches, not to mention the tryouts and practices; we paid the money for it all, and more painfully spent the time, too. So Julia passed through elementary school successfully.

But around seventh grade Julia went into her room, closed her door, and mostly stayed to herself. She retreated from me into herself, as is natural at that age. I let her go, while still keeping one eye on her. “You take charge,” I said without words. It is your life. I always liked the saying that “big leaders [dictators] make for small [fearful] peoples.” Similarly, I suspect hovering, over-involved parents make for cowed, underdeveloped children. For better and/or for worse, I refuse to become a “helicopter mom,” controlling her children’s lives as if they were running for office. Or even worse: a “snowplow mom.” Is there anything more unsightly than that?

It is weird. In parenting you never really know if you are doing the right or wrong thing, with obvious exceptions. It is subtle work. Important work. Exhausting work. Both incredibly rewarding and incredibly frustrating. “It is a marathon, not a sprint.” But you have to be true to yourself and your values as a parent, I think. And then you try to do the best you can with the child you have.

Sigh.

You try the hardest you can with the resources you have – and then you hope for the best.

Maybe one day, Julia, you will become a parent yourself (I hope so). Then you will understand.