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I know, I know. You didn’t sign up for this. You signed up for piano recitals, travel soccer, honor roll bumper stickers, and the quiet but relentless competition of drop-off line one-upmanship. You signed up for the myth that your child would be “well-rounded,” which is just a polite way of saying “overextended, sleep-deprived, and quietly resentful by age 14.” And here I am, asking you to consider something deeply unsettling: What if your kid just… didn’t? Not didn’t as in “failed out of life and moved into your basement with a pet ferret named Tax Evasion.” I’m talking about a far more radical concept—what if your kid simply did less? What if they weren’t optimizing every waking second for future résumé bullet points that will one day be skimmed by a 26-year-old hiring manager eating a sad desk salad? What if they underachieved? Take a breath. I can hear the collective pearl-clutching from here. The Cult of Maximum Potential We’ve built an entire parenting culture around the...