The most useful gift

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The meaning of the quote

A toddler drops her spoon off the highchair, watches it hit the floor and picks it up to drop it again. And again. She isn’t confused about gravity. She’s testing something, one drop at a time, because nobody had to teach her that repeating an experiment is how you find out whether something is actually true.

That single-minded focus is what Eleanor Roosevelt meant when she named curiosity the one gift worth wishing on a newborn, ahead of beauty or riches. The line comes from You Learn by Living, a short book of life lessons she published in 1960, 2 years before she died. By then she had spent decades in public life and had earned the right to say what actually mattered.

Roosevelt chose the word useful on purpose. A fairy godmother in a bedtime story usually hands out looks or money, gifts that impress a room and fade fast. She picked the one that keeps working long after the excitement wears off. Curiosity is what carries someone through a rough first year at a new job, a hobby that takes 10 years to get good at or a subject that only starts clicking on the hundredth try. It isn’t glamorous. It just refuses to stop asking one more question.

Psychologists who study how kids learn keep finding the same pattern. Children who get to chase their own questions, instead of sitting through answers nobody asked for, remember more and stay interested longer. Scientific American reported on some of this research under a name that almost undersells it, information gap theory. The idea is that not-knowing pulls at a person. Close the gap too fast by handing over the answer right away, and the pull disappears. Leave a little of it open, and it drags someone forward on its own.

The move for a grown-up is smaller than it sounds. When a kid asks why the moon seems to follow the car, the easy answer is fast, correct and forgettable. Turning the question back, asking what she thinks and why, keeps the conversation open a little longer than convenient, and that extra minute is where curiosity actually grows. Roosevelt grew up with almost nobody who did that for her, which might be exactly why she noticed, decades later, how rare and how valuable it was.

About the author

By the age of 10, Eleanor Roosevelt had buried both of her parents. Her mother, who made no secret of finding her plain, died in 1892 when Eleanor was 8. Her father, an alcoholic she adored anyway, died less than 2 years later. She grew up afterward in her grandmother’s house outside New York City, convinced she was the dull, homely child nobody had really wanted.

“I was a solemn child without beauty.”

That changed when her grandmother sent her to Allenswood Academy near London at 15. The headmistress, Marie Souvestre, was one of the first adults to take her seriously, writing that she had a superior intellect and was a born leader. Roosevelt later called those 3 years the happiest of her adolescence. She came home at 18 able to walk into a room and expect, for the first time, to be heard.

In 1905 she married her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The man who walked her down the aisle and gave her away was her uncle, the sitting President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. It made her, on the same afternoon, a President’s niece and a future President’s wife.

As First Lady from 1933 to 1945, she rewrote what the job meant. She held press conferences open only to female reporters, which forced newspapers to keep women on staff just to cover her. She wrote a daily newspaper column called My Day for 27 years. In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let the Black opera singer Marian Anderson perform in their concert hall, Roosevelt resigned her membership in protest and helped arrange for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial instead.

After FDR died in 1945, President Truman appointed her a delegate to the new United Nations. She chaired the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, and Truman later called her the First Lady of the World. She wrote about curiosity and the other lessons of her life in You Learn by Living, published in 1960, and died in 1962. She’s buried beside Franklin at their home in Hyde Park, New York.

Resources

• You Learn by Living (Book)
• The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (Video)
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article)
• How the Science of Curiosity Boosts Learning (Article)
• Curiosity: The Heart of Lifelong Learning (Article)