Vincent Lindeboom

How do you help children find their own way?

Over the years, I’ve collected quite a few mental tools that have helped me make sense of things.

Mental models, first-principles thinking, ways of examining my reactions and assumptions, and understanding why I do what I do.

Quite a few of those tools would have been useful much earlier in my life.

And then I became a father.

I started wondering whether I could take what I’d learned as an adult and turn it into something useful for my children. Not to tell them what to think, but to help them learn how to think, understand themselves, and find their own way.

So I began writing a practical parenting philosophy for my partner and me. Something we could discuss, agree on, challenge, and actually use while raising our three children.

It covers critical thinking, curiosity, emotional awareness, resilience, independence, and quite a few everyday parenting situations.

I also think the timing matters. Our children are growing up in a world where AI will make it easier than ever to find answers, adopt ideas and be influenced by other people’s thinking.

I’d like them to have the tools to recognise when they’re doing that, and to make up their own minds.

Including when it comes to what we, their parents, tell them.

That’s Raising Children Who Become Themselves.

We’re still figuring out how to put all of it into practice. Which, I suppose, is part of parenting anyway.

How much of what we believe is actually ours?

I’ve always been a little suspicious of rules and beliefs people accept simply because that’s how things are done.

But at some point, I started turning that suspicion towards myself.

How much of what I think, believe, feel and do have I actually chosen? And how much have I just picked up along the way?

We absorb an enormous amount from our upbringing, our surroundings, the people we spend time with, and the experiences we have.

Some of it becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it altogether.

Take the ways we learn to protect ourselves as children. A response to criticism, rejection or insecurity might make perfect sense at the time. But it can stick around long after the circumstances that created it have disappeared.

And there we are, decades later, still running an old piece of software.

I wanted to understand how that works. How our conditioning shapes us, why certain patterns persist, and what happens when we begin examining them rather than automatically following them.

That’s how Living a Borrowed Life came about.

It’s an exploration of the beliefs and behaviours we’ve inherited, the parts of ourselves we may never have consciously chosen, and how we might become a little more the authors of our own lives.

I suspect there’s more of that going on than most of us realise. Myself included.

What if we looked at the whole problem?

I find it odd how easily complicated problems turn into simple arguments.

Take almost any difficult question. There are usually dozens of things influencing the outcome, often in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Yet we tend to focus on one or two, pick a position, and start arguing.

I’ve wondered why we don’t spend more time understanding the whole system before deciding what to do about it.

So I started putting together a method for exactly that.

Break a problem down to its fundamentals. Map the variables and how they interact. Examine assumptions, incentives, dependencies and consequences. Then look at possible solutions, including what we’d need to measure to know whether they’re actually working.

It’s an attempt to move from debating positions to understanding problems.

I call it The Equation Method.

It doesn’t promise a perfect answer. But I think there’s quite a bit to gain from asking better questions before forming one.