christine

What were some ways your parents cultivated agency/independence/intrinsic motivation in you?

If I asked an easy question and my dad would tell me to think about it figure it out myself. He would get annoyed if I asked too much because “I wasn’t using my head”. It was assumed I was smart and capable.

One time I got frustrated while doing a math problem and my dad stopped and addressed my attitude— that fundamentally our mindset towards learning was fun and stemmed from curiosity towards problem solving

My mom, somewhat out of necessity, gave my sister and I ample freedom to take care of ourselves, such as biking between locations, spending hours in the library waiting for her to to pick us up, etc

I think this one was key— my mom had a positive reaction when I brought up my own ideas or things I wanted to do. I expressed interest in something? Cool! She was encouraging & set me up to be able to explore that interest.

Hand in hand with the above, sometimes I wanted to do mildly risky things, like scramble on rocks & climb trees, and later on travel solo. I'm sure my mom was nervous but she would mostly let me do the thing.