Specializing In Your Children

Adam Smith, who is sometimes known as the "Father of Economics," taught about various benefits to specialization. One is that as you do something more, you become better at it and come up with innovative ideas that you wouldn’t come up with if your mind was always going back and forth between less-related tasks.

One way that a lawyer specializes is through learning a lot about one area of law, like criminal law, or to be even more specialized a lawyer might focus on criminal defense where the death penalty is being sought.

BUT that is not the only way that a lawyer can specialize. Lawyers deal with two main types of information, the law that applies to a certain client’s case and the facts of the case. For example, the law regarding a death penalty case would include various U.S. Supreme Court cases interpreting the 8th Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause. The facts would be that Harold had a troubled childhood, allegedly killed somebody in such and such place at such and such time, and he does not want the death penalty because of x, y, and z.

It is common for a person to ask their lawyer who is working on  one type of legal issue to help with a new and different legal issue that arises, even if the lawyer is not known for being an expert in the area of law of the new issue. For example, you might ask the person who defended you against criminal charges to later help you with a contract or civil law suit that arises. Why? Because you trust the lawyer, and it’s helpful that the lawyer knows some of the facts about you, even if the lawyer will need to do extra research to understand the area of law.

Parenting has some interesting parallels. My wife and I want what’s best for our children, and yet the only specialists that we pay to help them so far are their doctor and dentist. We have never considered paying a potty-training expert, reading expert, singing expert, socializing expert, or an expert in helping children be good siblings. We do send our daughter to a nursery class for an hour on most Sundays, but honestly that is so that my wife and I can get spiritually fed, and we hope she is spiritually fed there but we would bring her there even if she wasn’t. We feel that we are the best mortals to teach her what she needs to know about her Heavenly Parents, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.

Why aren’t we interested in experts in all those topics I mentioned earlier? Because what matters most is being an expert in our children themselves. Knowing what sort of tones, activities, loving touches, rewards, and discipline work with them will help us teach them all the basics of being a good human more effectively than hiring somebody who studied one of those areas for years at a university. Of course, we try to learn what we need to from prophets, studies on children, potty-training experts and so forth, but we are the ones who know them, and hopefully who have their trust.

I have learned George, with his unique personality, likes toys and being held more than textbooks.

Being an expert in a person won’t earn worldly renown, but it does build a beautiful relationship, and it allows teaching to happen with children who are new in the world and need somebody who knows them and who they can trust. Thinking about this has strengthened my testimony that children “need more of [our] time, not less.”