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Perspectives on Childhood, Education, and Parenting Mission Impossible: Predicting a Child’s Long Term Future
Tom Northrop
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– Daniel Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness
By Tom Northrup
As a kindergartner, the boy received a failing grade in “Self-Control,” and by seventh grade, things hadn’t changed much. His science teacher, frustrated by his inability to pay attention, angrily informed this son of a local physician, “You’ll never be a doctor!”
In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (2021), authors Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein explain why no one can predict the future with much accuracy beyond a few months.
They cite two decades of research by psychologist Philip Tetlock in Expert Political Judgment (2005) in which he evaluated the predictions of 300 experts, including journalists, academics, and high-level advisors to national leaders.
The results were “stunningly unimpressive” due to the ”humbling reality that all of us (expert or not) are limited by intractable uncertainty” (what cannot possibly be known) and “imperfect information” (what could be known but isn’t). The Noise authors concluded that “detailed long-term predictions ….are simply impossible.”
I believe that understanding and accepting our limitations as parents in predicting the outcomes for our children help us become more effective. An important corollary to this realization is that trying to micromanage (“helicopter parenting”) our children’s lives is similarly fruitless, and often harmful.
Robert Evans’s advice in Family Matters (2004)—“prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child”—is sage counsel.
A better approach for parents and teachers to evaluate children’s academic and social growth is to consider every few months whether the child seems to be gaining strength, making progress.
Several decades ago, I recall multiple conferences (every four months or so) with the father of one of our students. He would begin each of our meetings with the question, “How is Judy’s (not a real name) trend line?”
In this case, the “trend line” always seemed to be moving in a positive direction. Had it been flat or negative, we would have considered what adjustments we, as parents and teachers, would need to make. Assigning blame to the child or to each other would be counter-productive. Incremental progress is always the goal; patience is essential.
As schools reopen locally and nationally after this challenging past year, a major worry for many parents is whether their children can “catch up.”
My experience informs me they will—in time— if the adults (parents and teachers) in their lives interact respectfully, establish clear expectations, evaluate progress regularly, and accept that there may be setbacks from time to time.
The science teacher’s prediction—made over 75 years ago—cited in the first paragraph, about her student’s prospects of becoming a doctor not surprisingly was inaccurate. This man, now retired, Tom Northrup has had a distinguished career as one of our country’s leading medical researchers, and in his “retirement,” edits a renowned medical journal.
Despite the teacher’s mistaken forecast that probably was made in frustration, we can be confident she was proud of her former student. And perhaps she motivated him to prove her wrong.
Long-time educator Tom Northrup is Head of School Emeritus at The Hill School in Middleburg.
