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Adora Svitak: An example of what kids can accomplish

I was speak­ing with a 16-year-old friend yes­ter­day, and I was reminded how capa­ble kids and teenagers can be, if we let them be so. When I saw the video below, deliv­ered by 12-year-old Adora Svi­tak, I had to say some­thing about this.

We, as adults, very eas­ily and com­monly under­es­ti­mate kids and teenagers. In return, they meet our low expec­ta­tions of them. Take a look at the fol­low­ing videos first, and I’ll come back to you afterwards.

Adora Svi­tak, at just 12 years of age, is a bet­ter speaker than the vast major­ity of adults. She is intel­li­gent, artic­u­late, and insight­ful. Is this excep­tional for a 12-year-old? Maybe. But I think only because she has been raised in a dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ment, not because she is intrin­si­cally dif­fer­ent from other kids.

We raise or lower our­selves based on what is expected of us and how we are sup­ported (or not). That is true of chil­dren, teenagers, adults, and seniors. It is true of all human­ity. Think of your own expe­ri­ence, and you know it’s true.

Most chil­dren will not have the same breadth and depth of expe­ri­ence as most adults. How­ever, some chil­dren will have seen more, heard more, learned more, and done more than adults 2 or 3 times their age. Life and expe­ri­ence is not a num­ber — it is what you do with your­self and what you actu­ally go and do, learn, and expe­ri­ence. Who ever said that a child’s expe­ri­ence must be lim­ited to what they learn in school and watch on pop­u­lar TV? Who ever said that chil­dren need only learn from the school cur­ricu­lum and no more? Who ever said that a child’s only pur­pose is to learn at school and just play afterwards?

Adora is a fan­tas­tic speaker and pre­sen­ter. Why? Because she’s worked at it and because she’s prac­ticed. That is the same as for you and for me, no dif­fer­ent. What is dif­fer­ent between her and most kids & most of us is that her par­ents have given her an envi­ron­ment where she can do this, and have given her the foun­da­tion and sup­port — from an early age! — to ful­fill the poten­tial that she has already at 12 years of age.

When I talked to my 16-year-old friend yes­ter­day, yes, she joked around as a teenager will, but she is also intel­li­gent, capa­ble, immensely cre­ative, and respon­si­ble. What struck me as an absolute dis­con­nect, though, is the way her par­ents — as she recounted to me — focused so much on her poor per­for­mance on a school test that her father got upset enough to not even speak to her for 2 days afterwards.

Par­ents, bless their hearts, wish the best for their chil­dren. Yet, unfor­tu­nately, I think par­ents very often focus on the wrong things. School is impor­tant, yes, but school is not an end in itself. It is sim­ply a means. It is part of life’s jour­ney. A mark is not the be-all and end-all. Yet that is what par­ents focus on. Mine did. Per­haps yours did, too.

What I learned, though, when I went for my sec­ond under­grad­u­ate degree, is that one’s focus should not be on the marks. It’s not even on the study­ing. It is on the end result that you want to achieve. In my case, I wanted to be capa­ble in the field that I’d cho­sen, to be the most pre­pared I could be, and go out into the world and make a mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence. That change in per­spec­tive, from the marks-focused view I’d inher­ited from my par­ents to the achievement-focused view I adopted, made all the dif­fer­ence for me. I went from being a good but not par­tic­u­larly note­wor­thy stu­dent to being the top achiever in my class.

My long-time friend from pri­mary school, a den­tist soon to start spe­cial­iz­ing in pedi­atric den­tistry, tells me he had the exact same expe­ri­ence. A change in focus from the what, to the why — from the mechan­ics of study­ing and get­ting marks, to the end achieve­ment beyond edu­ca­tion — made all the difference.

It is the same with chil­dren. Help them to focus on what they want to achieve in life, not on the mechan­ics of marks. We ought to expect more of our chil­dren than the shock­ing medi­oc­rity (or worse) that our edu­ca­tion sys­tem expects of them. Par­ents ought to expect their chil­dren to com­pre­hend more than just basic read­ing and text­book mathematics.

Chil­dren can be ana­lyt­i­cal, insight­ful, artic­u­late, and yes, pow­er­ful. I see great poten­tial in my teenager friend, but fear that it will not be nur­tured. I see Adora Svitak’s accom­plish­ments, and am excited about what peo­ple — at any age — can accom­plish if given the right envi­ron­ment and sup­port right from the start.

The world is what we make of it. Adora knows that. She’s try­ing to teach us that in words, and by exam­ple. All chil­dren are capa­ble of doing what Adora is doing. It is up to us, adults, to make that a real­ity and not just a dream.