Parenting & Family Quote by Dave Eggers

Eggers is doing something sneakily radical here: he treats confidence not as a personality trait but as infrastructure. The line lands with the plainspoken insistence of someone who’s spent time in classrooms, workshops, and nonprofit meeting rooms, watching talent get smothered by low expectations and a lifetime of being talked past. “Some of these kids just don’t plain know” isn’t condescension so much as an indictment of the systems and adults who should have been mirrors and were instead erasers.

The repetition - “how good… how smart… how much they have to say” - works like a drumbeat against a culture that measures young people by compliance, test scores, or trauma. Eggers refuses the sentimental “at-risk” framing; he’s not marveling that kids are resilient, he’s pointing out that they’re already equipped. The tragedy is informational and relational: they haven’t been allowed to see themselves clearly.

Then he pivots from diagnosis to method. “You can tell them” is deliberately modest, almost unglamorous. No grand program, no savior narrative, just attention as a practice. “Shine that light” flirts with inspirational language, but he reins it in with the final clause: “one human interaction at a time.” That’s the subtextual rebuke to the idea that change is only real when it’s scalable, monetizable, or hashtag-ready. Eggers’ intent is to make mentorship feel both urgent and doable, while quietly asserting that voice isn’t discovered in isolation; it’s conferred, rehearsed, and strengthened in the presence of someone who actually listens.