I have three children, and they are nothing alike.
Not in personality, not in interests, not in how they move through the world. If you handed me a form and asked me to describe “my child” as a single archetype, I would have to hand it back unanswered. There are three distinct people in my house, each running on their own operating system, and watching that unfold has been one of the great education projects of my adult life.
It has also, quite directly, become a business.
Watching my own children grow into such different people is what led me to build Nia.Africa: an assessment that helps young people identify who they are and what careers might actually fit them. The idea was born at my own dinner table. If three children raised in the same house, by the same parents, under the same roof, could turn out this different, then the old model of steering every young person down one narrow, prestigious path was clearly missing something important. Nia exists because I watched it happen in real time, in my own home, and decided other families deserved the same clarity I was gathering from mine.
I have thought a lot, raising my own children, about the house I was raised in.
You know that house by now. Excellence as the default setting. Mental sums fired off mid-drive, Newton’s laws quizzed at speed, Shakespeare recited on command, all delivered with love, but delivered as a single, narrow definition of what achievement looked like.
My house runs differently.
I still emphasise education. That has not changed, and I do not think it should. But I do not give my children mental sums during car rides, and I certainly do not ask them to memorise the names of rivers in the order we pass them 😉. I am not interested in raising three copies of one formula. I am interested in three children discovering their own particular formula, whatever that turns out to be. I will admit, though, old habits die hard: I do try to get them to know the names of the roads we travel. Some threads from that car, apparently, are worth keeping.
So instead of drilling one definition of excellence into three different children, I try to help each of them find their own strengths, and their own place in the world. It is a slower, less tidy approach than the one I grew up with. It also, I believe, respects who they actually are far more than a single mould ever could.
Part of how I do this is by simply getting out of the way.
I let my children explore sports and other activities freely, the way Msongari once let me explore tennis, hockey, Science Congress, and a mountain, alongside my academics rather than instead of them. I have seen firsthand what that kind of room to explore does for a young person’s confidence and sense of self. I want the same door open for my children, whichever direction they choose to walk through it.
I also want them tech savvy, without apology. This is not incidental for me. I grew up making music on a Wang machine at thirteen, teaching adults mail merge on my school holidays, chasing a software dream the world was not yet ready to hand me. I know, from the inside, what it costs a child to be curious about technology in a house or a system that does not know what to do with that curiosity. My children will not carry that particular cost. Whatever they eventually love, I want them fluent enough in the tools of this era to build with them, not simply consume them.
Here is what motherhood has taught me that nothing else quite could.
You can love three people equally and still need to love them completely differently, because they are not the same person wearing different faces. What settles one child unsettles another. What excites one bores another entirely. The parenting move that works brilliantly on child one can fail completely on child two, and the failure is not a parenting failure. It is simply data: this child needs a different key for the same door.
It takes different strokes to build the world, and apparently it takes different strokes to raise one household too.
My job, as I understand it now, is not to produce three excellent copies of an approved template. It is to notice, closely and patiently, who each of my children actually is, and then help clear a path toward that, rather than toward a path I already had in mind before they arrived.
Nia.Africa was how I turned that lesson into something other families could use too.
At home, it is simply how I try to mother.
Come back tomorrow for Day 22: the country I live in, honestly.
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