About a week ago, I came across a succinct summation of Einstein's life that listed major milestones in his rise to prominence. In addition to the scientific discoveries you might expect, the summary included the births of his children, and in that information I noticed something curious. Most, if not all, of Einstein's brilliance is coupled with and coincidental to the birth of his children, assuming that he was around for the child. Absent for the birth of his first bastard daughter, she doesn't seem to correlate with any breakthroughs in his life in any fashion, although he did finally get a job (as a patent clerk, an embarrassment for a PhD). When I mentioned this to my hiking buddy, he confessed that he noticed the same thing in himself. He also told me he wasn't surprised at all that I noticed that, absent any experience myself as a father.
Birth of a child appears coupled to an increased, albeit transitory, awareness of the world around a person. Flashes of inspiration and increased information attend a new concern for, awareness of, and attention to what goes on around you when you have someone for which you look out and for whom you are responsible. Since young children are not capable of noticing, responding correctly, or watching their own back, the parents of young children find themselves not only laden with responsibility for this but also with an increased capacity so to do. Although it seems designed specifically to protect the young, the increased intuition often manifests itself in flashes of brilliance tangent, skew, or even completely exigent to that specific realm of accountability. Ergo, parents often discover and make the best contributions of their lives concurrent with their tenure as parents. However, for most parents, this increased acumen fades with time, and they resort back to their basal state when the children increase in self-sufficiency.
Parent intuition is a well known phenomenon. Over the past several months, I saw many videos, pictures, and articles identifying the innate parental intuition of parents with extremely young children when those children were in danger. Almost without paying direct attention, these parents caught falling children, stopped dangerous accidents, and otherwise were able to, with their spider sense, rescue the innocents from danger. When I was young, my parents knew when there was something wrong, even if they were totally erred about the reason for my consternation. My hiking buddy and my friend in Philadelphia both indicated that some of the ideas of which they are most proud were developed concurrently with the birth of children. In essence, their "brain children" came along in many cases with their real ones.
Not everyone with children has brilliant ideas and not all brilliant ideas are linked to children, but those with children report a different perspective. When your focus changes, you see things differently than you did before, which gives you insight you lacked previous to that event. maybe things fit together better or make more sense or maybe you actually find the motivation to study them. My mother had to go back and reteach herself things so that she could help us, and some of that learning experience with someone who's learning it the first time gives a greater appreciation and a different degree of comprehension now that you're learning it for something more than taking a test. I find in teaching that I make new connections or find better ways of expressing things a I talk to people learning something for the first time, and even my med student who is retaking general chemistry for a better grade is learning things he didn't know. If nothing else, children invite you to revisit, to question, to investigate, and to apply things you think you already know for a different purpose because you're trying to help someone else become better than you.
Perhaps one reason I haven't contributed more to the world as yet lies in the fact that I don't have any children. One of my students yesterday afternoon pointed out that I seem to know quite a bit about quite a wide array of topics. I confess that I'm not as smart, intelligent or wise as many people think, including myself betimes, but he has a point. Imagine what I might be able to deduce, conclude, develop, engineer, postulate, or produce if I were a father or ever had been. My hiking buddy, although his youngest child is 24, still experiences flashes of brilliance. Despite my lack of children, he notices these flashes in me. He thinks that I would make a great father and that fatherhood would also make me greater. Although I cannot prove that Einstein's children evoked some of his greatest contributions to science, their timing cannot be coincidental. I am old and wise enough that I no longer believe in coincidence, only the illusion of coincidence. We all think of Einstein as an old man, and many people don't know he had kids, only that he had a niece. However, his ideas were older than that. He brought them to America after he was much older, so they were only new to us. Until he became a parent, Einstein was a moron, doomed to an ignominious and lackluster life in a patent office. His insights became apparent as he became a parent. Imagine what you learn even if just about yourself by becoming a parent and raising hemi-clones of your own.
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