Somebody posted something on Facebook the other day that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

The whole post was about how nobody expects adults to be good at everything.

You can be an excellent electrician. Genuinely great at your job, well paid, respected and nobody in your life is sitting you down saying yes, but your backhand is weak, we should get you into tennis on Saturdays. Nobody's worried that you don't sing. You're allowed to be good at your thing and mediocre at the rest of it, and that's simply how being a person works.

Then you have kids, and somehow that rule stops applying.

With kids we go hunting for weakness. Sometimes we find the thing they're not good at and that becomes the project. Math is fine but reading is slipping. He's great at tennis but he's not very social. She's doing well in school but she's not doing great at anything physical.

It's a completely different standard than the one we apply to ourselves, and I don't think most of us notice we're doing it.

Home mixers weren’t built for bread. We fixed that.

Ever tried to make dough in your regular mixer?

The results aren’t pretty: Clumpy texture. Stodgy bread. Overheated motors.

So, we took the same dough-making technology that professional bakers have used for decades and packed it into a countertop machine.

Introducing Ooni Halo Core.

Its secret? Spiral mixing.

In a regular mixer, a single hook chases your dough around the bowl — like someone trying to knead with one hand tied behind their back.

But in a spiral mixer, three synchronised attachments fold and stretch dough as one, replicating the precise and powerful dual-kneading action of a skilled baker’s hands.

The result: Stronger dough, softer loaves and a higher rise.

See it in action

THE PART THAT ISN'T YOUR FAULT

Here's what makes me feel slightly better about it: apparently we're built this way.

Lea Waters, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne who's spent decades on this, puts it plainly: at a basic biological level, even though we love our children, our brains are wired to notice what's going wrong before we notice what's going right. We're scanning for threats. A gap looks like a threat.

So we correct it, because correcting feels like parenting- the same instinct that has us jumping in with notes the second they come off the field. Fixing the weak thing feels responsible in a way that admiring the strong thing doesn't.

But her research also says that focusing on a weakness takes a kid from bad at something to roughly average. That's the ceiling. Average at the thing they're bad at, or extraordinary at the thing they love. Those are genuinely the two options, and we spend most of our energy on the first one.

THE WORD IS DOING TWO DIFFERENT JOBS

"Well-rounded" means two completely different things, and we've collapsed them into one.

The first meaning is exposure. Letting your kid try lots of things so they find out what they like, what they don't, where their strengths are. That one I believe in completely. You don't know your kid yet. The only way anyone finds out is by trying things.

The second meaning is proficiency. Being good at all of it. That's a different thing entirely, that's pressure wearing the first one's clothes.

A child can rarely be really good at math and science and reading and also the best tennis player and also strong in theater. When we hold that up as the goal, we're asking a kid to fail at something we designed to be unachievable.

Exposure and proficiency start from the same good intention. They end up in completely different places.

SO WHAT I DO WITH MY OWN KID

My older son is obsessed with making films. Editing, shooting, watching tutorials- that's his thing and we still push him to try other things.

It’s not because he needs to be good at them. But he's 13, and he can't be so far inside one thing that he stops getting physical activity, stops going outside, stops being social with anyone who isn't in the film part of his life.

There's a better reason too, and it's the only one that's ever landed with him: to make good films, you have to understand people. You have to know how the world works and how different kinds of people move through it. A kid who only ever does one thing has nothing to make work about.

So the exposure isn't a distraction from the obsession. It feeds it.

HE PUSHES BACK, OBVIOUSLY

None of this goes smoothly. When we suggest something new, the answer is a version of "I'm fine, I'm just going to sit here and do this."

The pushback usually isn't about the activity. It's that trying something new means possibly being bad at it in front of strangers, meeting kids who might not want you there, and giving up something you already know you enjoy. Some kids will walk into any room. A lot of kids really won't.

So we bribe them. Not with money, with milkshakes. I’m sure you’ve tried it.

Usually after the first or second time you don't need to bribe again, because either they liked it or they didn't and now everyone knows. A little bribery to get a nervous kid through a door one time- I've made my peace with it. What else are you going to do, reason with a 13-year-old?

THE LINE I TRY NOT TO CROSS

There's a fine line between helping your kid try something and pressuring them, and I don't think most parents feel it from where they're standing. The kid feels it. The parent usually doesn't.

Two things keep me on the right side of it, most of the time.

Give them a real reason. "I want you to do something physical a couple of times a week." Or: "I think you need a social outlet that isn't online." Kids are considerably smarter than we give them credit for, and they can tell the difference between a reason and an instruction. If you can't explain why you want it, that's worth noticing too.

Let them choose. This is the one that actually works. I don't say "you're doing this." I say: here are the three things available Saturday at 11. Which one?

They pick, and because they picked, they own it. Same activity, completely different relationship to it. My whole strategy is basically constrained choice, and I'd say it's the single most useful thing I do.

ONE THING NOBODY MENTIONS ABOUT THIS AGE

Trying new things gets genuinely harder at 12 and 13, and not for the reason you'd think.

The options shrink. When they're little there's everything- soccer for toddlers, music for toddlers, a class for every interest at every hour. Then they hit this age and the organized stuff either gets serious or disappears. If you didn't start at seven, a lot of doors are quietly already shut.

So when your tween won't try anything new, some of that is them. But some of it is that the menu got a lot shorter and nobody told you it was going to.

Which is another reason not to panic. There's less on offer, they're less willing, and the window feels like it's closing. That combination makes parents push hardest at exactly the age where pushing works least.

A Note for My Fellow Laid-Back Parents

I don't think the goal is a kid who's decent at everything. The goal is a kid who's tried enough things to know what they're made of, who's allowed to be brilliant at one of them, and who isn't spending their childhood being quietly audited for gaps.

Expose them to lots. Ask them to be good at almost none of it. Those two sentences can sit next to each other quite comfortably, and I think a lot of the pressure we feel comes from believing they can't.

Your kid is going to be an adult who's great at some things and unremarkable at most. Same as you. Same as me. Same as everyone you admire.

Might as well let them start now.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛