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.

When he wanted company on these journeys, I was often the one who went along. I logged serious hours by his side, shunting wooden trains onto sidings and leading my digital bees on a search for pollen. I hunted down old Lego packs for him on eBay and took him to Washington to see the Jefferson Memorial. I occasionally would try to steer him away from the video games and toward the history books, but mostly it didn’t matter what I thought. His interests were his interests, and he explored them the way he wanted, not the way I did.

There was a part of me that felt proud of his deep dives, but if I’m being honest, they often made me uneasy. When you’re a kid, knowing a ton about obscure subjects can be an early sign of intellectual curiosity, but just as often, it can be a symptom of misfiring neurons, an omen of future mental struggles. Sometimes the child who can tell you everything there is to know about dinosaurs or baseball statistics