The Foreign Language That Changed My Teenage Son’s Life
Even as a little kid, my son Max had a way of immersing himself in the subjects he cared about. The first one I can remember was Thomas the Tank Engine. Max had a hand-me-down wooden train track set up on a low platform in our living room, and at age 3, he would spend hours toddling around the outside, pushing trains and telling made-up stories, lost in the world of Thomas and Percy and Gordon. “Hamilton” came next, the soundtrack on repeat in the car for months, then a brief but intense dive into Mixels, a discontinued Lego collection, and then another into a Roblox game called Bee Swarm Simulator. With each one, Max would go deep, finding satisfaction not just in the playing but also in the experience of plunging himself into a new and unfamiliar world and mastering all of its contours.
