Quatting
I’ve been fascinated by Hindi having words that differentiate between “doing it yourself” and “making others do it”. The most obvious and literal example is the “Karna” and “Karana”. It gets (more) complex with certain words like “Kaatna” which become “Katvana”. But this post is not about those. Why did I write it then? Just to explain the title. When you do it, it is called “Quitting”. When you nudge, help, or let others do it, what would a Hindi speaker call such an action? You got it right. The title: Quatting.
Nonsensical stuff aside: I wrote something serious (of sorts) for my daughter’s school magazine (of sorts). The title of that piece was “The Art of Letting Her Quit”. What follows is a faithful reproduction of that article. You will not find the usual nonsense (foolishness, irreverence etc.) in it. To your inner Pangram, it may even appear to have been AI-written. But trust me, that’s what I write when I write serious (of sorts) things. And Claude was trained on those. Right? No? Okay. Now to the article. Serious-mode-on.
Alright, readers! It’s confession time. When our daughter started school (10+ years ago), my wife and I built a (secret) objective of introducing her into one “performance art” and one “creative art” (among other things). We were clear not to push for it to be her profession, unless she genuinely wants it to be. No, our daughter wasn’t taken into confidence when setting it, thanks for asking. Now, this is a mid-term review of sorts as she is in the final stages of middle school.
I am not going to bury the Lede: After going through them for the better part of the last decade, in the last two years, she has quit both the classes we had signed her up for. Art, two years ago, and recently, Carnatic music as well. Said like that, it sounds like a pattern I should be worried about. My daughter wouldn’t like this framing (and she will read this, sigh!). But I promise you (and her) that this write-up goes deeper than what that statement suggests at first glance.
Let’s do the story of Art first, because it’s simpler. Everything was going fine with it and she continues to do well at it. Good enough to win an inter-school competition just last week (you can say I am proud), that it makes “she quit art” a totally misleading headline. The sequence was as follows: The classes started producing diminishing returns after almost 6 years. She started showing some disinterest and this created some friction with her art teacher. To be honest, the class did slow down a lot at one point (the grunt work of drawing human figures over and over again, apparently, is not optional). As teachers are wont to do, this teacher as well started comparing her to other kids in ways that didn’t go down well at home. We first wondered if we should simply shift to a different teacher who could bring in newer styles and methods of teaching but decided against it. What let us stop the class confidently was Inventure’s own art studio, which turned out to be genuinely excellent. It provided real guidance and better structure to learn art, sitting there at the school. In a sense, the outside online class became redundant. To be clear, this one (to stop the class) was our call, not hers. We topped up the schoolwork with the odd summer programs (like bottle art, apparently that’s a genre now!). None of us agonized much over this. This was a fairly seamless switch. Her hands kept moving, one class or another, at one frequency or another.
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The Carnatic music decision is the one that is nuanced (and why this write-up came into being), because this time we (purposefully) didn’t make the call. She did. The pattern is similar: During the 5 years of learning, she’d cleared multiple levels of Bridge Academy exams. And cleared them with distinction, I should say. Her teacher started inviting her to perform alongside young professional singers who we considered far more advanced than her. That was gratifying. But that meant trips to Thiruvaiyaru a few times a year, a concert within Bangalore every few weeks, and a level of practice that was fighting for the same hours as everything else that she’d taken on at school. She keeps a high bar for everything she takes up, which meant even the inquiry journals and chart work took more time than a normal person would consider appropriate. And then there are the extracurriculars with art competitions, CMC challenges, and Round Square participation. With these demands for trips, music class became less about music and more about logistics. For the most part, logistics lost the battle. Her teacher noticed the drop in commitment, took it personally, and got cold about it. My daughter is not built to shrug that off, so she took it personally right back. It also didn’t help that the next Bridge Academy exam (one thing that might have given her something concrete to aim at) was still three-odd years away. Guess even I wouldn’t try staying motivated for a milestone that far off while my teacher was giving the silent treatment.
In March, on one of those days when the teacher was indifferent, she told us she wanted out. We asked her to sit on it rather than act on the feeling of the moment and find out how complicit were we in creating that situation. This wasn’t to make her feel it was her mistake. We wanted to teach her to separate the thing that happened from the thing she’s choosing to do about it. She sat with it and decided to keep going.
In July, after a few more rounds of indifference with her teacher, she came back wanting out again. It appeared more serious this time. We did the same drill — sleep on it, come back once the feeling had passed. She did and still wanted out. I asked her a few questions, without pushing her one way or the other. It was nothing as tidy but it involved a combination of Franklin’s famous pro-and-con list, Munger’s inversion move, and Sivers’s ‘Hell yeah or no’ question. We didn’t hand her any of these frameworks directly, obviously, she’s just thirteen. She came out the other side still wanting to stop. So, come Vijayadashami, we do one final guru vandana, thank the teacher for all the years of teaching, and we’re stopping. We will indeed continue learning specific Keertanais independently — of which we find there are many options online.
As parents, we kept circling back to a few questions, though. With two exits in two years (even if it was after more than half-a-decade of work), a reasonable person is allowed to ask whether my daughter is someone who bails when things get hard. Or whether she’s just too thin-skinned, getting more rattled by a teacher’s cold shoulder than the situation really called for. A third, even less flattering one, too, appeared in my head. Are we letting her decide or are we subtly nudging her towards something we want? I have seen several parents hit this wall when the kid is about 14 and start winding down the extracurriculars to point the kid squarely at academics instead. They would lead them to some respectably dull but well-paying career: banker in the 1980s, software engineer in the 1990s, investment banker in the 2000s, product manager of the 2010s, and AI-scientists now? For a moment I genuinely wondered if letting the music go was my own version of it, wearing the costume of “respecting her decision.”
It was then time for my own version of “sleep over it”. As these things usually happen, over a walk the next day, things got clearer. I was just being too paranoid and needlessly self-critical about it. She didn’t walk away completely from either of the pursuits, nor did we (subtly or otherwise) push her into the decisions. Art has been chugging along well through the school. As for music, she still likes it and has only walked away from a specific, rigid pipeline tied to fixed venues and a fixed calendar. Somewhere there’s probably a version of learning it that fits around a kid doing five other things. We just hadn’t found it with this teacher. So, her decision is not a cop out. She still wants to learn it, at her own pace. This decision might just be a great example of she having figured out where her effort was and wasn’t worth it. This is better judgment, frankly, than I see in plenty of us grown adults who suffer from sunk cost fallacy. Nor is it a push from us into the respectable career of the epoch. Letting her continue with the class so I don’t get this feeling is a form of pushing too, ain’t it?
Parenting, after all, is a set of tradeoff decisions, all of which you will likely regret in the future. The roads diverged, and this time, I decided not to pick one for her. She owned the decision and will own its consequence too. Hopefully, that’s the meta learning she takes from this episode.
