Memo to parents: There is no one path to success for children — whether for school, work, even religion

By following an unconventional parenting path, Latter-day Saints Gabrielle and Ben Blair have learned to buck conventional parenting wisdom — and, along the way, remove a lot of the stress that comes with raising kids.

These anxieties, for instance, may sound familiar:

• “Our daughter has basketball. Our youngest son has Little League. And our oldest son has gymnastics and a few makeup classes. I guess that means no family vacation this summer.”

• “Our son has fallen dangerously behind on his grades. There is no way he can get his GPA up in time for college applications. Heck, he’s even talking about dropping out of high school.”

• “My child has left our church.”

Those scenarios all struck a chord with Gabby of Design Mom fame and Ben, co-founder and president of Newlane University, and they address each one and much more in their new book, “The Kids Are All Right: Parenting With Confidence in an Uncertain World.”

Here are excerpts from The Salt Lake Tribune’s recent “Mormon Land” podcast with the Blairs, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as they discussed their parental journey:

Tell us about the makeup of your family and what you concede is the rather unconventional traveling you’ve done.

Gabby • We have six kids. They are currently aged 14 for the youngest and 27 for the oldest. So five of the six kids are 18 or older now and are adults officially. And, yes, we’ve had an unconventional path as far as where we’ve lived. We met at BYU. … We moved to Greece, and then we moved back to Provo, then to New York for eight years. … We were in Colorado for a year and a half. Then we were in France for a few years, then Oakland for six years… and then we’ve been in France again, the second time, for five years.

You state matter-of-factly at the start of the book that you “never wanted to write a parenting book.” So why did you?

Ben • Part of the reason … is we know parenting is so personal and so fraught. And the stakes seem so high, and it seems just as likely that we’re going to say something that’s going to offend someone and not be helpful as to help someone. … But then we also had a lot of experiences, and I would really point to Gabby’s life and her blog, and that she’s kind of been a forum for parents to express their anxieties and fears and hopes and ambitions. … So I feel like we’ve had this kind of privileged perspective on what is making parents stress today, and how parents are getting more and more stressed, and how the stakes of parenting seem to be so high.

How can parents help their kids find opportunities to participate in sports and other activities without overextending the family?

Gabby • We found it really overwhelming, especially when this started happening even at ages 4 and 5. At T-ball, I’m going, “This is taking a lot of time for our family for T-ball. What is this about? … What really is our goal here?” … One of ours was just that we … wanted them to know how to participate on a team … working together toward a common goal. …We can accomplish those through community T-ball. But if it’s overwhelming, we can also accomplish those goals in another way. We could get together with neighborhood families and just go play T-ball once a week in a more casual setting.

What did you discover about the various paths for education — from private schools to public ones — for kids?

Ben • We totally bought into that idea of there’s a reliable path to success, and your role as parents is just keep your kids on that reliable path. And we found through things like our kids stepping off that path and getting to know a lot of other people who didn’t follow that path that, first, it’s not such a reliable path. I mean, there are a lot of people who have hewed really closely to that path but then didn’t end up how they would have imagined. And then there are a lot of people who were nowhere near this path, who didn’t follow anything like this path, but followed a really circuitous path to get to another landing and have a fulfilling life that wasn’t a straightforward path.

Gabby • We’re huge fans of public schools. … What we have found is that, with a core group of involved parents, the school is going to be great, whatever the school is, whatever the location, whatever the resources. … We could see it so clearly in Oakland. … Education is important. So the idea that only some people deserve a good education is ridiculous. Everyone benefits if the community is educated. And the way America is set up to do that is through public schools, and supporting your public schools benefits the entire community in every way.

Many Latter-day Saint parents want their children to go to BYU, one of the campuses. But if they don’t get in, or their kids make a different choice, their parents sometimes get disappointed. What do you tell them?

Gabby • The reality is if your kid didn’t get into BYU and that’s really important to you, then they can try it again as a transfer student, for graduate school, for law school, for business school, whatever. … Seeing our kids take these other paths also taught us about the miracles of community college, which we weren’t very familiar with at all. Neither of us had attended community college. We just didn’t know much about it. And one of our kids ended up attending Berkeley Community College in California, located right next to Berkeley University, the famous university, and really enjoyed their time there. … The community college had a program that if you … got good grades in XYZ classes, you could be guaranteed transfer into one of the prestigious University of California schools like UCLA. And a lot of states have similar programs, where if you attend a community college, they’ll have a path to their best universities in the state. So what happened is that child ended up going to Berkeley, the top public university in our country, and got great grades, got a full scholarship there.

You write about having a child reject The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. What was your initial reaction?

Ben • My first reaction was maybe not shock but surprise. And I think I also felt like this was probably a difficult thing for my child to communicate with us. Another one of my responses was keeping in mind that I recognized this was difficult for this child to express. It was kind of an indictment on me, like why have I made this conversation a difficult, kind of a taboo conversation, a taboo subject for my kids.

Gabby • The child had originally written us a letter about it because, I guess, they didn’t feel like they could just come and have an open conversation. And I was a little surprised by that. I thought we had done a better job of making sure they could talk to us about anything. … We ended up writing a letter back. That letter is in the book, and that letter was shared with all the siblings. … We don’t want them to feel like they have to hide anything. They can be themselves and just tell us what’s going on.

So how can parents view it when a child rejects their faith?

Gabby • Think of it as like giving them a gift. You gave them this gift that you thought would be really helpful to them, because maybe it was really helpful to you, and so this was important, and you gave them this gift and thought it would assist them throughout their life. But the thing is, with gifts … we don’t get to control how … the recipient receives that gift. They may reject it outright. … They may find it useful and helpful, and it’s really helping them thrive. But if it’s not, if it’s something that they’re like, “This isn’t working for me. This doesn’t help me,” then they’re going to reject that. And that’s fine. It’s not like a personal reflection on you as a parent. You just gave them a gift and that gift didn’t fit them, it didn’t work for them, and that’s OK.

What is your overarching message to parents?

Gabby • I’m just going to point to the title: “The Kids Are All Right.” It’s going to be OK. … We now have lots of adult kids. We can look back and see so many of the times we were so stressed out, and we were talking to friends and leaders and trying to get advice. We were saying prayers about this horrible problem that we were so stressed out with, and it just ended up resolving totally. It wouldn’t have mattered which direction we went.

Ben • I’ll read a passage toward the end [of the book] where we tried to articulate what [healthy parent relationships with adult children] could look like:

“We have a full, meaningful, free, flowing, noncoercive relationship with our children. We understand and respect one another’s boundaries. We’re all independent, but we enjoy one another’s company. We value one another and the experiences we’ve shared, even if some experiences were painful. Without sugarcoating our time together, we deeply appreciate and trust one another. We can work easily with one another on a range of projects across a range of spheres, over extended periods of time. We have a good understanding of one another’s strengths and weaknesses. We communicate easily with one another. We ask for advice and ask to hear one another’s perspective. We appreciate what we have learned from one another. We can challenge, disagree and debate, but these don’t threaten our relationship, even as our relationship is dynamic and continues to develop and change over time.”

Editor’s note • To hear the full podcast, go to sltrib.com/podcasts/mormonland. To receive full “Mormon Land” transcripts, along with our complete newsletter and access to all Tribune religion content, support us at Patreon.com/mormonland. This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.