How to Raise High-Agency Kids

In defense of laissez-faire, higher-order parenting

There’s a lot of discourse about identifying exceptional young founders, like the benefits of autism, attending specific high schools, working at certain companies. But a more telling pattern I’ve seen is their sense of agency—the ability to act with purpose, curiosity, and ownership.

Unfortunately, I’ve met too many high school students grinding through half-assed science fairs, debate tournaments, and robotic volunteering—not because they care, but because “it’ll look good [for college apps].” The tragedy isn’t just the wasted hours. It’s the slow erosion of agency. Kids today are marinating in a culture that conflates busyness with ambition. They’re trained to sprint toward checkboxes, not to ask, “What do I actually value?”

If our goal is raising resilient, visionary problem-solvers, we need a serious re-evaluation of how we parent, mentor, and motivate the next generation.

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“Should I take the SAT or the ACT?” - 6th grade student

His classmates leaned in, clearly curious too. My first instinct was to laugh: You’re eleven years old. Shouldn’t you be worried about who’s going to be “it” in tag, or which girl you have a crush on?

But this is the Bay Area. By middle school, kids here can explain blockchain better than most adults, and parents shell out $200/hour for after-school enrichment (Kumon, AoPS, coding bootcamps). By eighth grade, “coolness” was measured by which private high school’s acceptance letter you flaunted.

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“I’m scared if my kid is dumb.” - OpenAI researcher

One of the smartest people I know confided this to me, and it’s understandable: parents often worry if their children can thrive in a world that feels hypercompetitive. The general default response is to push kids harder: forced violin practice, AP cram sessions, and a relentless focus on straight A’s. This “Tiger Mom” approach, popularized by Amy Chua, works for a small subset of kids. But for every wunderkind, there are ten others without high innate self-regulation who resent the external push, struggle with anxiety and depression, and cannot wait to quit X, Y, Z once they taste freedom (aka college…far, far away). Even Chua’s memoir admits her daughter rebelled at 13, forcing her to soften her approach.

The problem is that the Bay Area does not need another Amy Chua. It already has its own version of aggressive tiger parenting where status is about intellect—or at least, the appearance of it. Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted American culture has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.” He rightly points out that American culture often prizes social “normalcy” over academic or technical excellence—and that in a hyper-competitive global economy, this can breed complacency. Yet his remedy of substituting sleepovers with math tutoring oversimplifies a deeper issue:

Especially in the Bay Area, the problem isn’t mediocrity—it’s misdirected excellence. Kids under Chua’s parenting style rarely have a choice in their own extracurriculars from elementary through high school. (I doubt being vice-president of the National Honor Society is a dream to most.) Sure, it can produce a passable overachiever who knows how to get A’s. But to produce someone capable of real vision, high agency, and contrarian thinking, the irony is that that overachiever may be ill-prepared as we approach an era where AI handles rote tasks and the knowledge economy demands more creativity.

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There’s a middle ground I call “laissez-faire, higher-order parenting”:

This isn’t neglect. Kids still need structure: bedtimes, boundaries, and exposure to diverse ideas. But where traditional parenting might fixate on short-term achievements, higher-order parenting shifts the focus to what really matters in life in the long-run—like genuine curiosity, happiness, financial security, or social impact. In other words, it’s teaching kids to ask bigger questions and find their intrinsic motivators.

Take my parents, for example. They didn’t obsess over my “C” in geometry. Instead, they challenged me to find an interest that combined joy with financial independence. At 12, I became a slime “entrepreneur” (one sale); by 15, I moved on to fashion design on Depop (fifty sales) after Project Runway inspired me. That freedom to fail—and learn from it—shaped my mindset far more than any class.

Critics argue: “But what if they waste time on the ‘wrong’ / trivial things?” It’s a fair concern, but higher-order parenting focuses on fostering long-term values, which emphasizes creation over consumption in order to achieve them. Here’s the truth: The grit that fuels a viral TikTok hustle can fuel a startup. The teenager obsessed with fanfiction today might be tomorrow’s Pulitzer winner. Grit requires interest. And we can’t pressure someone into loving something.

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I’m 19. I’m no parenting expert. But I’ve watched enough Bay Area burnout cases—and also seen the ones who thrive—to recognize a pattern: Many of the kids who’ll shape the future aren’t the ones with perfect résumés. They’re the ones who spent adolescence chasing curiosities. So to parents: Stop fearing standardized tests or B-minuses. Fear raising a kid who can’t think for themselves. Give them books, tools, and permission to fail. Then support from the sidelines.

The world doesn’t need more passive overachievers. It needs more kids who can say, “I built this. Not because someone told me, but because I wanted to.”

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Thanks to Peter Bennett, Aidan Smith, Derrick Li, Jacob Cohen, Michael Wang for reading drafts of this.