Why are children the only people expected to be good at everything?

Facebook Post by Stark Raving Dad, NZ Homeschooling Dad

·Why are children the only people expected to be good at everything?Adults don’t need to be. Someone can be a visionary architect but completely useless in the kitchen. A brilliant chef who couldn’t tell you the first thing about physics. A software engineer with terrible handwriting. A musician who hates sport. An accountant who can barely draw a stick figure.Nobody worries about these people. Nobody says, “Yes, she’s doing incredibly well as a surgeon, but we really need to bring her poetry up to standard.” Nobody gives the successful business owner extra homework because his understanding of medieval history is below where we’d expect it to be for his age.We just accept that adults are good at some things and not others.In fact, we celebrate it. We talk about people finding their thing. Playing to their strengths. Developing expertise. Going deep. Building a career around what they’re good at while happily outsourcing, avoiding, or being completely mediocre at a hundred other things.But children? No, sorry, we have different rules for you. We’re going to need you to do absolutely everything, and show us you can do it all well. And when you can’t, we’re going to get very hung up on the bits you’re struggling with. A ‘well-rounded’ child is a good child, right.Good at reading. Good at writing. Good at maths. Good at science. Good at sport. Organised and tidy. Social. Creative. Focused. Resilient. Articulate. Independent. Cooperative. And preferably progressing through all of it at roughly the same speed as everyone else their age.If you think about what that does to the balance of childhood, it’s crazy. We deliberately hunt out the things children aren’t very good at, expose their weaknesses, then spend years making sure those weaknesses get lots of attention. Usually at the cost of spending more time on what they naturally lean towards.Then adulthood arrives and...we tell people the exact opposite.Find your strengths. Explore them at depth. Specialise. Build on what you’re good at. Build on what interests you. Stop trying to be everything to everyone.Oh. Ok.So...can someone tell me why we don’t just say that from the start? See less