Handing a four-year-old a real kitchen knife sounds like the setup to a parenting disaster, not a philosophy. Yet that is exactly what MacKenzie Scott and her then-husband Jeff Bezos did with their own children, and by the time those kids were seven or eight, power tools had entered the rotation too. When Bezos later explained the reasoning behind it publicly, he traced the whole approach back to a single blunt line from Scott. "I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid," she told him, a sentence he still describes as one of the best parenting philosophies he has ever heard. It is a strange thing to admire out loud, and that is exactly what makes it worth taking seriously.
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