Do Math, Touch Grass, Repeat
Mud makes math better
My kid likes math, so my kid is going to become famous for doing math
As you get to know parents in various math communities for kids, you inevitably run into parents who have realized their kid is good at math and have decided (without the kid’s input) that their kid is going to win International Math Olympiad Gold, do a Ph.D. in math before they graduate high school, and become world famous for doing math.
At the extreme, they are thinking of pulling their child out of our school (or have already) so that they can homeschool the child and do nothing but math all day (while their child is still in elementary or middle school). Note that this is different from the parents who pull their children out to homeschool because they are 2E (twice-exceptional) or for bullying reasons, religious reasons, or other reasons.
These families have decided to go all in on their math kids becoming math giants.
Math is important
Math is important to our kids because they love it. Math is important to our family because our kids love it, and it’s something we can share with them. Math is important because learning it can be a lifelong pursuit. Math is important because there are rich historical traditions from the start of various civilizations. Math is important because it is hard. Math is important because it’s the language of our universe. Math is important because it’s easier to deal with money in our current society if you understand that the financial system is built on top of and uses math. Math is important because it touches every single engineering field.
But it’s not that important
When you get sick, math doesn’t care for you, but maybe your math colleagues do. When you get a speeding ticket, math doesn’t pay it for you, but the money you earned from your vocation allows you to pay for it. When you need to bake a cake, math doesn’t bake it for you, but it does allow you not to mess up the recipe if you need to scale up/down the ingredients. When you have to make small talk to achieve a mundane goal in life, math isn’t going to ask about the other person’s family; you will have to do that. In many parts of the lived experience of being a human in a human world that needs to interact with other humans, math will facilitate the interactions, but it will not do it for you.
The child's love of math has blinded some parents, and they have lost all perspective.
Professionalization of kid activities is bad, and parents should feel bad
Children have always played games, and there are so many youth sports organizations that we can look at the broader picture to get a sense of what’s happening in our smaller pond of “Kids who love math.”
In sports, travel teams have popped up to prepare their kids for the hyper-competitive environment that has slowly swallowed pretty much all kids’ sports, and books have been written about what it takes to win.
Parents are trapped between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t push their kid, all the other kids get better, and their kid falls behind. And that may cause the kid to drop out of the sport they enjoy. But if they push their kid like everyone else is doing, there’s an absurdly high possibility of injury, burn-out, and losing the love of the game.
In our small town (~15k people), we have met parents who
have their kids play sports 7 days a week (sometimes two different sports practices on the same day)
kids who are on two or three travel teams
kids who were held back in kindergarten so they would be older/strong/bigger in high school and so could dominate their high-school level competitors
drive 3 hours to a game, watch the kid play for 1 hour, and then drive 3 hours home (2 to 3 weekends a month)
are so wound up that they yell at the referees for bad calls at 8-year-old and 9-year-old games
go to a different state several times a month to get coaching from a “nationally ranked” coach.
etc.… (and there are some worse ones that I won’t share because it’s very clear which kid that is and who that family is)
At the same time, organizations have also popped up to push back on those parents and coaches: Changing the Game Project1
As I travel around the globe working with coaches, administrators, and talent identification and development experts…Everyone usually chuckles – uncomfortably – because this is the adultified world of youth sports that many of us live and work in. It makes us uncomfortable because most people I meet can share their own story or example of this scenario.
This is an example of the professionalization of youth sports.
Sadly, the same thing has happened to the math community for kids. If you talk to organizers of math camps for kids/pre-teens/teens, they all say the same thing: in the last 5-10 years, the shift went from camp attendees being there because they love math to most camp attendees being there for the sake of winning and getting into a good college.
By all means, ask your kid if they want to compete, train for the IMO, or pursue a math Ph.D. in high school, but be upfront with them about the amount of work it’ll take (an extraordinary amount) and what they’ll have to give up (pretty much everything else).
Then, listen to and accept their answer. It’s their life. If they want it, help them; if they don’t, help them with what they want instead.
Do Math, Touch Grass, Repeat
“Touch Grass” is intended to insult people who spend too much time online, disconnected from the reality outside their pixelated screens.
Applying it to our slice of the world, we can say that “Touch Grass” is an insult to parents who are too caught up in their kids' love of math and are disconnected from the reality that the world is vast, grand, and full of amazing things.
Math is amazing. Other things are amazing, too.
Given that the kids love math anyway and want to do it all the time, get them outside into the mud and get them dirty. They’ll be all the better for it.