Every number on the parent’s dashboard is true, and none of them is her daughter.
Take the parent the essay calls the Silicon Valley Tech Mom. She has a plan for her daughter that runs through Harvard toward a career like Sheryl Sandberg’s, and she has more information to steer by than almost any parent in history: test scores, percentiles, admission rates, enrichment programs compared by results. If better information reliably produced better decisions, she would be among the best parents who ever lived. Yet most people sense that something can go badly wrong in a household like hers, and that the problem has nothing to do with a shortage of data.
Her situation is one front in a war between what is measurable and what matters. What do the numbers leave out? The essay’s answer is caring. Caring creates a kind of internally felt compass to navigate an ungraspable reality. It favors action over explanation, because a more perfect description rarely serves the thing you care about.
Why seeing more does not help
The palantír from The Lord of the Rings shows the trap at its extreme. Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, gazes into the seeing-stone for years. What he sees is real, but Sauron, who holds another of the stones, decides what Denethor is shown, and a stream of true things selected by someone else drives him to despair.
The Tech Mom’s dashboard is a gentler palantír. Its numbers are accurate, but they were chosen by admissions offices, rankings and the other parents around her, so they show her a daughter measured against someone else’s idea of success. The view is wide and the orientation is borrowed. Caring supplies the orientation, and accuracy without orientation is paralysis.
Parenting to a destination
What the Tech Mom actually cares about shows up in James Carse’s infinite game distinction. A finite game has fixed rules and an endpoint, and you play to win. A parent playing one is parenting to a fixed destination: Harvard, Sheryl Sandberg, the dream the parent holds for the child. This may work great for one child. It might kill another. The difference lies in whether the parent cares more for the daughter or for the dream of the daughter.
An infinite game has no fixed endpoint; you play to keep playing. Parenting done well is an infinite game, in which the aim is to sustain a relationship where both people continue to grow. So the two kinds of parent watch different things. The finite-game parent monitors outcomes, and what she usually gets is achievement or rebellion. The infinite-game parent monitors the relationship itself, and what that produces is trust. Nearly everything on the Tech Mom’s dashboard is an outcome measure, which is why it cannot tell her how the game she is really in is going.
Suppose the daughter says she does not want Harvard. Her mother can win that argument; she has the earnings data. But caring means seeing the world through another person’s eyes while retaining your own, and from there being right is rarely the most important thing to care about. She can win every argument and lose the relationship.
Caring first, then data
None of this licenses ignoring evidence; “just follow your heart” fails as surely as the dashboard does. But caring and analysis serve different functions, and caring must come first because it determines what the analysis is for. Data without caring is a palantír: it shows you everything and helps you with nothing.
So the Tech Mom is not a bad parent because she lacks data. She has too much data and not enough caring. Nothing in her spreadsheets is false, and if her daughter does come to want Harvard, the numbers will help them both get there. But knowing the difference depends on holding her own perspective while genuinely inhabiting her daughter’s. The dream of the daughter is a projection; the daughter is the person across the table. Only someone looking at the second can tell what the data is for.
References:
- Venkatesh Rao, Caring and Reality, Ribbonfarm
- James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games