A few years ago, at a party in Washington, D.C., I started a conversation with a small, dark-haired, middle-aged woman standing next to me at the dessert table. She said her name—Najmieh Batmanglij—and I recognized her as the author of one of my favorite cookbooks, “Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey,” the dog-eared paperback from which my husband had just that week cooked a cumin-scented rice polow with lentils, dates, and currants. Najmieh and I talked a bit about the Persian cuisine she’d been studying, writing about, and preparing for years, and eventually the conversation turned to our kids. I mentioned that mine, then ten and thirteen, were into music. She mentioned something about her son playing in a band in New York. “What’s it called?,” I asked. “Who knows? Maybe I’ve heard of it.” “Vampire Weekend,” she said. Uh, yes, I ‘d heard of it. Anybody who listened to indie music at all had. They were four clean-cut Columbia grads who’d met in college and quickly created one of the most distinctive sounds and styles in contemporary rock—brainy, winsome lyrics peopled with characters out of a Whit Stillman movie or a Salinger story; a catchy, sunny amalgam of Afro pop and Anglo-American New Wave. (A friend of mine’s toddler had taken to singing, “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” from the backseat of the car.) Najmieh’s son was Rostam Batmanglij, the band’s multi-instrumentalist, co-writer, and producer.

It was the Fall of 2010; Vampire Weekend had released its second album earlier that year and had been touring for most of it. Najmieh said that she and the moms of the other band members—Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, and Chris Tomson—had stayed in regular e-mail contact. Their correspondence dated back to the early days of the band, when Vampire Weekend had toured in a secondhand van that the moms all worried about.

There were two children in the Batmanglij family, and Rostam’s older brother, Zal, was a filmmaker in Los Angeles. I hadn’t heard of him then, but a year later Zal would make his directing début with “Sound of My Voice,” a creepy, well-wrought psychological thriller about a Southern California cult, which Zal co-wrote with his friend from Georgetown University, Brit Marling, who also starred in it. Zal’s forthcoming movie, about an eco-terrorist group and the young woman who infiltrates it as a corporate spy, also stars his co-writer Marling, along with Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page, and Patricia Clarkson.

That was the last I saw of Najmieh until a few weeks ago. With Vampire Weekend about to release its third album, “Modern Vampires of the City,” on May 14th, and Zal’s movie “The East” due out at the end of the month, I started thinking about the Batmanglij family and the particular alchemy that might have produced two such creatively successful children. I asked Najmieh if we could meet to chat about it, and she invited me for tea, which meant, since she was hosting, not just tea, but an array of Persian treats—warm baklava she’d just made, a tray of white mulberries and pistachios, little cucumbers, which Najmieh peeled and salted while we talked. It wasn’t exactly that she was dispensing parenting advice—the conversation was looser and wider-ranging than that. Still, after talking with her, and later with Zal and Rostam, it seemed to me that some of the attitudes Najmieh and her husband, Mohammad, held about family life were inspiring enough to be distilled into a little list. Since it’s Mothers Day weekend, and this is the Internet, here goes:

Model creativity by being creative yourself, and in so doing, give your kids a realistic sense of how much work is involved.

“My parents never really explicitly did anything to suggest that being a creative person in terms of your occupation is the goal,” Rostam told me on the phone from his apartment in DUMBO. “They never forced anything down our throat. They led by example. I have a lot of memories of my Mom up at 2 A.M. with a copy of her cookbook and some ancient manuscripts and another copy of her cookbook marked up with black Sharpie, just covered in comments. I feel like I have some of that, always wanting to make things better, revise and revise, when I’m producing a song.” Her books, he said, “keep getting better and better. It’s like one book she’s been working on for twenty-five years.”

(Najmieh’s “Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies,” published in 2011, is her most beautiful yet; its design was inspired by her sons, who told her she needed an update and had to include more practical information—what pots to use; where to buy ingredients; what kind of salt was best—for a new generation. The cover will remind fans of a Vampire Weekend album—no surprise since Rostam designed both—with its white borders, and airily-spaced, white Futura font.)

Rostam’s experience suggests a possible benefit to working at home where your kids can see some of what you do and how you do it. In his case, he eked out an extra creative bonus. His mom was sometimes so caught up in her cooking that she neglected to switch out the two CDs she had in her kitchen for years, and that Rostam remembers playing on repeat: Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints” and the soundtrack of the movie “The Big Night” (lots of bouncy Louis Prima and Claudio Villa). “When you get to the point where you know something in-and-out like that,” Rostam said, “it starts to sink in and affect who you are.”

Be open-ended in your expectations of your kids’ lessons and activities.

Najmieh said that both Zal and Rostam revealed what became their life-long interests at an early age. Zal saved his money for a camera as a kid, and he was always “fascinated by the characters of people who came to the house. He was very observant, always. And he made us laugh. We called him Woody Allen.” Rostam was drawn to music and Najmieh enrolled him in flute lessons when he was six or seven. But, Zal said, “My parents let us get into these things without expectation. They didn’t expect results out of the investment. We were never made to play for people at parties. It never felt oppressive.” Rostam practiced his music a lot in private, in his room. (One result, Zal said, was that “I had a shock when my brother turned out to be as good a musician as he was.”)

On the other hand, creative activities as ends in themselves—or even as self-contained competitions—were more than fine. The Batmanglijs had an annual contest, for instance, in which they would each draw a portrait of the family, including the dog. The winner was not necessarily the best executed portrait but the one that showed the most personality and style. Rostam says the respect for a distinctive personal style stays with him to this day. “That’s one thing that’s been really important to me with music—that the identity is preserved and recognizable. In the band we are always talking about wanting songs to sound Vampire Weekend-y.”

Don’t be afraid to be D.I.Y.—or let your kids go that route.