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What Gen X Gets Right About Parenting
To raise a true prodigy, forget about success
At around 11:15 p.m. on May 30, all eyes were on the eight competitors still remaining on the Scripps National Spelling Bee stage — the soon-to-be “OctoChamps” who would be crowned joint winners, breaking the record for most competitors to tie for first place and setting off a media frenzy.
But as a mother of two, and as an anthropologist who has attended 15 spelling bees around the country in the last six years, my thoughts were with the parents. In that dramatically lit, cavernous ballroom in Maryland, I watched them watch their preternaturally poised children — 12-, 13-, and 14-year-olds — who had been on stage and on live television for eight hours over the course of the day. And even though I had seen it first-hand while writing my book, Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success, I still struggled to comprehend the relentless preparation those children had undertaken to maintain that level of concentration.
Their remarkable performance in this competition illustrated many things: diligent practice, orthographic prowess, and grace under pressure. But more than anything, these children demonstrated focus — an enviable ability to marshal years of study into two-minute feats of mental clarity, under incredible pressure, when it most mattered. Also striking was how cheerful, pleasant, and, well, normal these spelling champions seemed. Did their parents somehow instill this superpower? Were these kids born prodigies? Or was something else going on here?
The answer I heard again and again as I spoke with “Bee parents,” as I’ve come to call them, was the same: They had seen a spark. Something had ignited in their child when they competed, and they had painstakingly fostered it.
The OctoChamps, like hundreds of others who made it to the National Spelling Bee, found something deeply exciting and inspiring about this competition. Some are good readers, others love language, and they all set out to conquer the dictionary. They didn’t do it alone, though. Several parents told me it was their child’s dream to win, so they made it their own dream as well.
Most Bee parents are, like me, Generation Xers (born 1965–1980). Our generation…
