Panamerican Peaks Project

In today’s Wall Street Journal’s article “In Defense of Being a Kid”, James Bernard Murphy (professor of government at Dartmouth College) looks at the recent debate around childhood discipline and preparation for adulthood. As a father of two teenage children I have followed this debate with interest for some time. It struck me that what he lists as blessings of childhood also come close to describing many of the joys of adventure. Below I intersperse some of my thoughts on those in between parts quoted from this article.

Amy Chua, the “tiger mother,” is clearly hitting a nerve—especially among the anxious class (it used to be called the upper class), which understands how much skill and discipline are necessary for success in the new economy.

What Ms. Chua and her critics agree on is that childhood is all about preparation for adulthood. Ms. Chua claims that her parenting methods will produce ambitious, successful and happy adults—while her critics argue that her methods will produce neurotic, self- absorbed and unhappy ones.

It took economist Larry Summers, in a debate with Ms. Chua at the World Economic Forum in Davos, to point out that part of the point of childhood is childhood itself. Childhood takes up a quarter of one’s life, Mr. Summers observed, and it would be nice if children enjoyed it.

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Children are not merely adults in training. They are also people with distinctive powers and joys. A happy childhood is measured not only by the standards of adult success, but also by the enjoyment of the gifts given to children alone.

Now the author goes on to ask what the unique blessings of childhood are:

First is the gift of moral innocence: Young children are liberated from the burdens of the knowledge of the full extent of human evil—a knowledge that casts a pall over adult life. Childhood innocence permits children to trust others fully. How wonderful to live (even briefly) with such confidence in human goodness. Childhood innocence teaches us what the world ought to be.

When you are touring other countries by bicycle you do meet a lot of people along the road or in small towns. You experience basic joys – like the freedom of the road, discovery and wanderlust – and you have basic needs and desires – like finding food, shelter from the elements or a safe place to stay overnight. Other people recognize this intuitively and connect with that. Such basic motifs and needs unite people across different cultural, religious, economic and ethnic backgrounds. Many of the people you meet may give you directions, water and food – some may even invite you to stay at their place. They show human goodness and you trust them fully. I think such innocent connections remind us again of what the world ought to be.

Second is the gift of openness to the future. We adults are hamstrung by our own plans and expectations. Children alone are free to welcome the most improbable new adventures.

The most improbable new adventures – I felt free to welcome those during my journey, and while I did have some expectations, I never felt hamstrung by them. Not quite knowing what the new day will bring is part of the allure of heading out on the open road…

Third, children are liberated from the grim economy of time. Children become so absorbed in fantasy play and projects that they lose all sense of time. For them, time is not scarce and thus cannot be wasted.

Becoming absorbed in a project to the point where one loses all sense of time – that’s part of the experience of Flow, a concept in positive psychology I have written about previously. When you’re out in remote wilderness – such as the ice-fields around Mount Logan or the salt flats on the Bolivian altiplano – time takes on a different meaning. While the time of day still matters for practical reasons (daylight, temperature, etc.), the day of the week loses all importance, and one is indeed liberated from the grim economy of time.

Finally, we parents are so focused on adult superiority that we forget that most of us produced our best art, asked our deepest philosophical questions, and most readily mastered new gadgets when we were mere children.

Asking deep philosophical questions requires us to take time for introspection, step back from the routine of everyday tasks and schedules, focus on the big picture. More than at any other time I found myself contemplating the purpose and the intrinsic joys of my actions. On the recumbent bicycle the daily pursuit of the horizon seemed like a perfect metaphor for the ephemeral pursuit of happiness.

Tragically, there is a real conflict within childhood between preparation for adulthood and the enjoyment of the gifts of youth. Preparation for adulthood requires the adoption of adult prudence, discipline and planning that undermine the spontaneous adventure of childhood.

Here I’d prefer to use the word change over conflict. For example, even though I’m not young anymore – at least not by childhood standards – I enjoyed the gift of health, mobility and energy. I’m not so sure that prudence, discipline and planning necessarily always undermine adventure. It’s a balancing act: Venturing out into remote places is an adventure. At the same time, you want to be prudent and prepared enough that you don’t get yourself into serious trouble. I wouldn’t want to head out into the middle of the Salar de Uyuni without enough water or at least some tools to fix possible mechanical defects. But you also don’t want to plan ahead every detail of your journey either; many of the most wonderful meetings with local people resulted precisely from the need to improvise in unforeseen situations.

Parents are deeply conflicted about how to balance these two basic demands: raising good little ladies and gentlemen, while also permitting children to escape into the irresponsible joys of Neverland.

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… But as parents we are stuck with trying to balance the paradoxical demands of both preparing our children for adulthood and protecting them from it.

As the current dustup shows, many parents today would benefit hugely by taking a reflective time-out from teaching our children to discover how much we might learn from them.

Well said. – While kids can’t stay young forever, adventure is a good way of staying fit, remaining young at heart and experiencing childlike joys transcending the many confines of adulthood.

It’s my son’s birthday today and he is turning 13 – ah, those teenage years ahead! When I drove him to school this morning he was obsessively checking his email and text messages on his new iPhone. He bragged about how many Birthday related texts he was getting on Facebook and thus how ‘popular’ he is. “So how many ‘friends’ do you have on Facebook?” I asked. “About 500.” I raised my eyebrows. “And Sarvenaz (his 20-year old sister) has over one thousand!” he adds to my astonishment.

1000 friends? I may barely remember 1000 faces, and I certainly could not even remember all their names, or have a meaningful relationship, much less a true friendship with that many people. Inflationary times for the friendship currency? The number goes up; the value goes down? Certainly some people are far better than me at remembering names or details about the social life of others. But what does the notion of ‘friend’ mean when it comes by the thousands?

I remember Dunbar’s number of about 150, named after anthropologist Robin Dunbar. According to Wikipedia, this number “is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person”. On my LinkedIn network I used to only accept invitations from people I knew well enough that I could make meaningful statements about them, say to a headhunter who was checking a reference. And indeed my number of 1st degree connections – a better term than ‘friend’ – is currently 154. The average number of their connections is also similar to that (159), thus spanning a number of around 25,000 2nd degree connections. That’s a lot of people you could get introduced to by a mutually well-known person. And for the purposes of finding a job (as I am trying to do now) or experts in certain areas, this is very helpful.

While Dunbar’s number limits the number of strong ties, thanks to social networks we now have the tools to maintain much larger networks of weak ties. And as sociologist Mark Granovetter has pointed out in his influential paper ‘The Strength of Weak Ties‘, in marketing or politics, weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties. We stand a good chance of finding the next job via an unexpected source, a person who knows other people and companies neither we nor our strong ties know, hence the strength of those weak ties.

It is interesting how many people seem to appreciate maximizing the number of their Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers. People love getting attention, and the size of their network seems to boost the size of their ego. While it is true that someone with a million followers will be heard more than someone with a hundred, a big following is not the same as big influence. In a rigorous analysis of Twitter data, authors from the HP Social Computing lab point out that popularity is not the same as influence. To quote from the conclusion of their paper on ‘Influence and Passivity‘ paper: “This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it. Moreover, since our measure of influence is not specific to Twitter it is applicable to many other social networks. This opens the possibility of discovering influential individuals within a network which can on average have a further reach than others in the same medium, regardless of their popularity.”

Networks are certainly valuable for each of us individually. Likewise, a network’s value increases with its size. Hence a social networking company’s valuation correlates with the number of members. I thought it was interesting that analysts have put an average value of $50 per member – hence the astronomical valuation of Facebook with 500+ million members leading to $25+ billion. I don’t know how this number is arrived at. When I think back to my bike trip through the Americas, seeing those predominantly young and poor kids in Central- and South-America updating their Facebook accounts at Internet kiosks, assigning a monetary value of US$50 to their free membership seems optimistic, to say the least. I can’t help but thinking that some of these valuations will undergo a ‘correction’ just like many of the hyped business models of the dot.com era came down for a hard landing around 10 years ago.

Lastly, dealing with average value in large number of connections is complex and often surprising. In their excellent book ‘Making Great Decisions‘, the authors Henderson and Hooper give us something to think about: If your business has, say, 100 customers, then statistically 80% of your profits come from just 20% of those customers. So numerically, each one of the ‘good’ customers is on average 16 times as valuable to you as any of the ‘other’ customers. (1/4 of the number bring in 4x profits, that’s 16x profit per customer). I suspect the same is true with regards to influence and value in social networks as well. As with customers, so it is with friends: It’s important to know who the ‘good’ ones are, because they matter so much more.

If business contacts are about making money, social contacts are about making a difference. Which brings me back to family and close friends. Regardless of the size of our own social network, we will always have a much smaller number of strong ties, and those we value disproportionately because they make a big difference in our life just as we do in theirs!