Part 3: How to prepare your 10 year old for college

In the second article, we looked into school strategies which help prepare students for college – as five year olds, 10 year olds, and 15 year olds. The key is helping students grow as engaged learners who are taught how to think. They need to be reading critically, writing effectively, and communicating compellingly. That is a flight path toward competitive college admission. So much more important than this, though, is the preparation this path gives for children into the fullness of God’s created intent for them. They grow as young men and women of character who can and do make a difference in the world.

Today, we look at what families can do together with school to educate and grow our children. Chrissy and I have four incredible children, now ages 30, 28, 26 and 24. It always amazes us how different four people can be who come from the same parents, grow up in the same home, and go to the same churches and schools. Certainly we see commonalities which reflect family values and shared beliefs. But they learn so differently, they communicate so differently, they are motivated differently and, of course, they respond differently.

So, for you and me as parents, does it make any sense to speak of common ways we can prepare our kids for college? I actually think it does, as long as we become students of our own children, learning and treasuring their uniqueness. What common course can we pursue to prepare our kids? Let’s put it under the titles of discipline and passion.

Both seem basic, but both often get lost in our day to day parenting. Specifically, in our preparation of our children for college and life after college, why does it make such a difference to cultivate both discipline and passion? Oversimplifying, it is simply because we have to do many things we don’t like to do so discipline is essential, and we’ll never do things with full engagement, creativity and excellence if we haven’t found things we are truly passionate about. And it’s easy to parent in ways that discourage one or both of these.

In a few words, I’d like to teach my kids that work is good, and it produces fruit. Work at what is set before you, so you earn the opportunities to work at what enthuses and engages you. And grow to be engaged and enthused by more and more that you encounter in your walk through life.

How might my parenting interfere with this growth? “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” A great title for selling books but, for most children, is that how you end up learning algebra? Or picking up after yourself? Or facing conflict and disappointment and daily struggles? I want to encourage my children to find their passions, but I want them to grow their passions also. Through disciplined pursuit, find engagement and enthusiasm for things that you once thought too hard or too boring to deserve your effort.

Some parents naturally find it easy to encourage children in their passions. But taking the next step to model and encourage the expansion of passion is a path not so easily encouraged in my parenting. Can I leave my child eating only candy and no vegetables? Can I just accept that he’s just not interested in much? Can I challenge myself to pursue more things passionately to share that love with my children?

And for other parents, it’s easier to stay the course of discipline and duty. It’s good for you; you need to do this; you ought to do this. We don’t always get to do what we want to do. True, but is it somehow less noble to like or love what I’m doing? Is it frivolous to stoke the fires of passion about what I find natural and intriguing and engaging and enthusing? Do my parents show me that they truly love to do things of value, things which are hard, things which are rewarding?

Would Edison have tried all those ‘failed’ light bulb filaments if he hadn’t gotten in touch with a passion or two? Would Einstein have had his 1905 in the patent office – producing papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion, any one of which could have won him the Noble Prize – if he wasn’t passionately seeking to know and explain the universe God had made? Would either have succeeded if not through discipline in the hard and seemingly fruitless times? Don’t you think our children have the best opportunity to achieve the pinnacle of their potential if they have both discipline and passion for the pursuit?