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March 17, 2009, Always Learning:
Kirby, my oldest, is 22. He spoke at the HENA conference in Arizona on March 7. He said three things that surprised me. One was that he explained that when he was young his parents (me, one of them, and I was sitting there) hadn't told him "no" much, but had helped him see the possible outcomes of various decisions, and then supported what he decided. So he was saying we had helped him figure out how to make decisions, early on. And now that he's grown, I've seen him make some really good ones. He's just moved into a house with his apartment-mate and another friend, and a fourth is moving in next month, I think. They did a great job, it seemed, of deciding whether, how and when to move, and pulling it off in an efficient way (in the two days before he left for the conference in Arizona).Pam Sorooshian, who was also there, added:The other two surprising things, for the record, were he totally bragged up his brother Marty (who wasn't there), and he credited Pokemon for the trajectory that led him to the job he's in now. I hadn't thought of it that way, but when he told it, the whole picture came flooding back, of why he started hanging out at Active Imagination in the first place (the gaming shop in which he worked from 14 to 19).
And he was really nervous but willing to take the risk of totally blowing the talk. We had a conversation about it, and I said something like, "Think about the kids whose lives will be happier because their parents just see you up there talking." I meant that they'd see an unschooled young man being willing to do that — to travel, spend a weekend, to stand up in front of an audience, to talk about personal stuff in public — that the fact he was willing to do it was a message itself, aside from what he actually said in his talk.In response to Pam, I wrote:-pam
He missed three days of work to do that, too, and he LIKES his job.His days off had been Wednesday and Thursday, and they spent those moving from an apartment to a house. So he took three days of his vacation to go and hang out with his family and friends of his mom's, basically. Not a lot of people his age would do that as cheerfully as he did, I think.
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