Let your kid do his own science project

For his science fair project, Jen's son put eggs in different sodas and tracked what happened to the shells. It was good work for a fourth-grader, she writes. But it didn't compare to the other science fair projects, which looked like they'd been done by "a parent with an engineering degree and a free weekend."

"He learned something," writes Jen. "He learned that his work is his own. He learned what it felt like to stand next to someone else’s best and want to do better."

"The kids with the professional projects learned something, too," she writes. "They learned that when the work gets hard, someone will step in. They learned that the finished product matters more than the process."

In her Spanish class, Jen assigns students to write and illustrate a book using their Spanish vocabulary. Every year, a handful of books come back with complex sentences, clean grammar and vocabulary the class never studied. These books "show me what the parent can do," Jen writes. "The student learned nothing. They did not practice the vocabulary. They did not struggle with the grammar. They did not sit with something hard and figure it out. They handed the assignment to someone else and got a grade for it."

The parent was "stealing the learning" from their child.

Children who aren't allowed to struggle eventually "hit something genuinely hard for the first time, and they fall apart," she writes. Resilience "is built by hitting the wall and figuring out what comes next. It's built by doing the egg project yourself, even when the kid next to you has a volcano that actually erupts."

"We cannot build it for them," Jen concludes. "We can only get out of the way and let them build it themselves."

Nowadays, some parents are trying to do college for their children. And students can get AI to design their science project or write their Spanish book.

I built a model of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre for a high school English class using my new pencils for pillars and a lot of cardboard. I was proud of it. Then, as I was about to go to bed, I realized my four-year-old brother had discovered and destroyed it. My mother, eager to protect my brother's life, told me she'd fix it. My older sister stayed up to help. When I woke up in the morning, I saw a much, much better Globe Theatre.

I told the teacher what had happened to my original, and realized she didn't care about my model-building skills. (I had an A++ in the class.) Then I realized the school had a professional model of the Globe, acquired years earlier, which was infinitely better than my mother and sister's version.

The lesson I learned was to avoid arts-and-crafts projects and stick to words.

I did try to help my daughter built a model of an atom in eighth-grade science. It did not go well. She learned that her arts-and-crafts skills far exceed mine, and that I should be used only for last-minute trips to Rite-Aid (open 24 hours a day!) to buy more materials.