Challenging Your Kid’s Intellect

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Challenging Your Kid’s Intellect

Setting: A dinner party at the Croom’s place

There is plenty of wine and plenty of good conversation. During the discussion, a question comes up: Should your child Major in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer, or Math)?

Somehow, I turned out to be the bad guy in this discussion, which is OK because I can certainly be that dude.

My wife and I are the reason this discussion came up—we have been debating this for quite some time.

Now I know what you’re thinking, Armond doesn’t like to debate with his wife?  You are correct; unless…I believe it is important.

I say I want our children to major in STEM; my wife says that our children may not have the aptitude for STEM—and that is where we have a problem. What we say and what we think about our kids matters.

I am a man fathering daughters. I do not know what it is like to be a woman. I will never know what it is like emotionally, physically, nor mentally. I can try to understand. After all, I have a lot at stake here—I’m a girls-only dad.

It is important to me that my daughters are better than their daddy in every way. Women are often told that they are not as good at STEM; therefore, I don’t want my wife putting that foolishness in their heads. I know that’s not her intention; however, that’s how I view it.

I want to instill a high level of confidence in my girls—fight the power, ladies.

Smart VS Access

I do not believe that one person is smarter than another. I believe that some people have access, while others do not. I cringe when someone says that they are not smart—face palm. Not being smart is not the issue; that person just hasn’t been exposed to the information in a way that they understand.

Sometimes we get discouraged when we see others understanding something faster than us. More than likely, they have been mentally stimulated more than we have. For instance, I am not as strong as Jon Jones, a UFC fighter. That doesn’t mean I could never be as strong as him. It also doesn’t mean that I could never beat him in a fight. It just means that I would have to train enough to get to his level and have the confidence to do so, but I certainly could do it.

Challenging Our Kids

Before I get to why I would advise my children to go into STEM, I have to reach back to a video I once watched that asked a lot of interesting questions. I thought it was compelling, and I knew that one day I had to be prepared to answer the same questions from my children.

Watch at least 30 seconds of the video.

I am dead serious when I say that I don’t care what my children end up doing. What I care about is their happiness. However, I have extreme reservations about an 18-year-old, knowing what they want out of life. I know that idea is based on my own biased history of not knowing exactly what I wanted. After all, by my account, I should be retired from the NBA. I do remember a small number of people wondering why my dad was telling me to keep my grades up.

“I mean, why,” my grandfather once asked. “He will make so much money in the NBA.”

Well, we know how that worked out, right!

My Reasoning

Since God didn’t give me pamphlets with my daughters’ names on them and directions on how to make their light shine the brightest. I have to try my best to guide them to the opportunities I feel will accomplish this.

One of the hardest things I have to teach you as a financial planner is the following:

• The more you save, the more you will have.

For some of you, that makes sense, but there are millions of people out there who are riddled with debt that need to know that, the more you save your money, the more you will have.

The hardest thing that I have to teach my daughters is the following:

• The more you learn, the more options you will have.

So, if my children ever look at me and say, when will I ever need geometry? My answer is simple, your brain is a muscle that needs to be worked out. I have no interest in going to Orange Theory and working out. Honestly, if I could lay in my cozy bed every morning, that would be awesome. However, I know that it is imperative to my overall happiness to workout and exercise my body. I also understand that the heavier the weight, the stronger I will get, and the harder the classes, the stronger your brain gets.

Why Stem?

So, why STEM?

Our discussion at the dinner party turned passionate at one point; apparently, it is not nice to tell someone that their major is not as hard as others—I get it.

To be clear, I didn’t major in STEM either. I have experience with STEM, but I majored in finance, and STEM is a lot more complicated than finance.

Whatever your major was, it was hard because college is hard, right? Let’s be real though, some majors are harder than others.

I am going to challenge my kids as much as I can, and I will advise my daughters to challenge themselves as well. By the time they get out of my house, I want them to know that they can do whatever they want. I don’t want them to short change themselves before they know what they really want out of life.

Honestly, some of us adults don’t know what we really want. Why wouldn’t we push our kids mentally to give them the best opportunities; they could always transition to a different career if they choose to do so. Whatever challenges that are met with, they will have the mental capacity and the confidence to meet those challenges head-on because we have set them up to win.

Many parents whose kids want to be sports stars tell their kids to keep their grades up.

Now, everyone seems to understand this concept.

People: Well, Armond, they may not make it in the NBA, so they need something to fall back on.

People: Armond, they should go to college, so they have a better opportunity to get a good job.

Armond: Well, why not encourage STEM?

People: Well, they have to follow their passion!

What!?

I feel like I am coding right now, and as soon as I say STEM, we get an error message. We’re essentially saying the SAME thing.

Mckenna: I want to be a chef.

Daddy: Yeah, well, that might not work out for you.

McKayla: I want to be a barber.

Daddy: Yeah, well, that might not work out for you.

McKinley: I want to be a firewoman.

Daddy: Yeah, well, that might not work out for you.

And YES, I am judging their career choices according to the income they provide—duh, I’m a financial planner. Sure, you can make good money doing the things my daughters want to do. I won’t argue against that. I will argue that through STEM kids have the potential to make more money.

If one of my daughters is lazy, they can at least make more money doing STEM.

I am also saying that the transition from STEM to chef is a lot easier than the transition from chef to coding! I am not discounting a career as a chef; I like to eat. However, I want to make the transition easier for my kids. If my daughter finds out that she really doesn’t like being a chef, then she can transition back to STEM. She’ll have a lucrative backup plan.

Because after all, this could happen:

Mckenna: I want to be a mechanical engineer

Daddy: Yeah, well, that might not work out for you either, but at least you have the confidence to do what you want to do.

This is really about challenging my children to push themselves mentally until they ultimately decide what they want to do. I don’t want to encourage a passion that doesn’t turn out to be their passion. I don’t want my kids sitting around unhappy because they thought that they were only good at one thing.

My advice—you have to push your children; tell them, do what you love kiddo, but good parenting involves challenging kids.

So, to answer that young man’s question or to answer that inevitable question that some of us have…

No, I do not use Pythagoras’ Theorem regularly, but if I needed to relearn it to accomplish a goal that I set out to achieve, I have the CONFIDENCE to do so. Confidence, or lack thereof, is what keeps people from challenging themselves in ways that could ultimately lead them to happiness, so I will continue to challenge my kids’ intellect.

If you haven’t already, buy The Financial Effect e-book to get more insight on how to make financial decisions for your family, also subscribe to my blog.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

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