Timetables, milestones, and going off the beaten track

It’s not too late—or too early.

Readers who’ve been here for a while will know that my husband has been working on a book about late bloomers. As you’d expect, it includes lots of people who found their groove later in life.

But it’s also more than that. The book is all about people who make a switch, confound expectations, and carve out their own path regardless of what everyone else thinks and what everyone else does. There’s no cut-off point, old or young, for finding your thing and reaching your full potential.

We didn’t realise it at the time, but there’s a huge overlap here with home education. Homeschoolers carve out their own path. They follow their instincts and break away from the herd. Like homeschooled children, late bloomers are often self-taught in their field of expertise. They might focus on one thing to the exclusion of others. They might not ‘fit in’ with what we expect. And that’s ok.

The most interesting lives, by definition, look a little different from the norm.

There’s more than one path, and reading other people’s stories is a great way to see those paths.

Photo: Jens Lelie via Unsplash

Benchmarked from birth

As parents it is so hard not to compare our children to other children, almost from the moment of birth. Are they smiling on schedule? Are they still waking in the night when the neighbour’s baby sleeps right through? Do they roll, crawl, walk and talk when they’re supposed to?

The CDC says developmental milestones are things that 75%+ of children can do by a certain age. But think about what that means. It means that up to 25% of us don’t hit the milestones on schedule. That’s a lot of anxious parents! And yet pretty much everyone grows up to be a healthy, functioning adult.

Even something as innocuous as clothing makes us look at children through this lens: your baby’s only 3 months old but he wears 6-9 month clothing, or your daughter is 10 but the 7 year old clothes fit best. Are the children too big? Too small? Ahead? Behind? Or are they exactly where they’re meant to be?

Averages, by definition, can only describe average people.

One size does not fit all

The school system operates on the same principle. It runs on the assumption that all children of the same age will be capable of the same skills and of understanding the same concepts. As soon as a child doesn’t fit this timetable, the problem is with the child—never with the timetable. And this isn’t just about children who need a bit more time; there are plenty of children who are capable of more than is asked of them at school, but there’s no way for them to move faster.

I love this article from Derek Sivers, ‘There’s No Speed Limit’. It’s about a recording studio owner who told Sivers he could get him through the music school’s syllabus in record time:

The pace was intense, and I loved it. Finally, someone was challenging me—keeping me in over my head—encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up quickly. I was learning so fast, it felt like the adrenaline rush you get while playing a video game. He tossed every fact at me and made me prove that I got it. In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging classes. When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those six semesters of requirements.

As well as teaching us that every child develops on the same schedule, school tells us that there is a signposted path, and standard obstacles everyone must face. It’s all planned out for you, and it can leave you feeling slightly bewildered when you finally enter the big wide world. What next? Isn’t someone going to tell you what to work towards now?

No such thing as a timetable

But late bloomers show us is that there is no such thing as a timetable, and there are many routes beyond the signposted path. One of the joys of reading about late bloomers is the permission it gives us to go at our own pace, to explore our own interests—or obsessions—in our own unique way.

And this is one of the joys of home education too—your child doesn’t need to have the pressure of being the last one to understand the equation, or of being the straight-A student who always gets everything right. They can just be who they are, where they are (and wearing whatever clothing happens to fit them right now).

It’s not about sitting back and letting life happen. Late bloomers work hard. They prepare, they grind away, they persist in the face of repeated failure. Luck might play a role, but late bloomers are ready for their luck when it comes along.

This is about freeing yourself and your child from the idea of a timetable. There is no timetable for life, and there are no speed limits. Trains run on timetables. Schools run on timetables because how else can you shepherd hundreds of children through the day? But children, and the rest of us, don’t.

It’s not too late—or too early.

The people worth reading about are not the people who did everything that was expected of them exactly when they were expected to do it. That makes for a very convenient child, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting story.

A milestone is a marker on a well-trodden path, but there are many paths. For many of us, and for our children, the route to happiness, success, and reaching our full potential lies off the beaten track.

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If you want to read more about late bloomers, and learn what lessons they might hold for you, you can pre-order Henry’s book.

Amazon US / Bookshop.org US

Amazon UK / Bookshop.org UK

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(PS Some of the links in this post are affiliate links.)