What the circumstances of your upbringing were make a significant difference in how well you do in the world.
—Malcolm Gladwell
Here’s an interesting idea, perhaps not totally supported by science but true enough to jibe with experience: We contain within us, at birth or by an early age, all the virtues and vices we will have in our lives. All our strengths and weaknesses are there, more or less, from the beginning. The question for a parent, then, and for educators and mentors, is: Which of those strengths and virtues will you nourish? Which vices will you allow to fester? In her beautiful novel Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian pour his heart out to young Marcus Aurelius, his adopted grandson. He explains, “I was at 20 much what I am today, but not consistently so. Not everything in me was bad, but it could have been: the good or the better parts also lent strength to the worse.”
We all have good traits and bad traits. What matters, then, what your job is as a parent, is to help your kids nurture their good parts and give them the strength to challenge their bad parts. We need to help them become who they can be. We need to help them be consistent—consistently the best version of themselves.