Helping Children Follow Their Dreams

young girl playing guitar

There is a lot of talk about all the things that parents are supposed to help their children learn in life. It is the parent’s job to teach responsibility, to mold them into valuable citizens of the Earth, and prepare them for the tough road of life ahead. This road often curves behind the pine trees, which can sometimes blind their sight. Manners, etiquette, respect, integrity, dignity, perseverance, persistence, goodwill, compassion, and selflessness are just a few of the life traits parents try to instill with punctuated enthusiasm. But where is the passion in all of that? In the attempt to do what is always right, expected, and noble in the eyes of psychologists and child experts, something important is being lost and forgotten. Helping children follow their dreams is, indeed, the most important job of being a parent!

The Importance of Supporting Your Child’s Dreams

The dreams of one child never seem to fit the dreams of all. As a society, we are often critical of the dreams of others, holding them to a personal standard of worthiness. Unfortunately, many adults do the same thing to children. Why waste time reading books, riding horses, or learning how to play the violin when you could be a baseball star? Why work to volunteer your time and think about joining a mission after high school when you could go to an Ivy League college? Why spend your Saturday digging in the dirt when you could be evolving and perfecting your tennis game? It seems that no matter the age of a child, their vision of life often conflicts with their parents’ vision.

It cannot go without saying that many parents choose to live through their own children, wishing to turn them into what they wished they could have become had their own dreams not been squashed by external expectations. Why does allowing a child the opportunity to follow a dream of their own scare so many parents into a frenzy?

Helping children follow their dreams requires two qualities. The first is openness. Remaining open to the possibility in life and believing that your child can, in fact, be successful—whether they play sports, video games, instruments, or dream up inspiring stories about knights and fairies. You wouldn’t call the Harry Potter series a waste of time, would you? The author of that series admits openly that the ideas were a gift of childhood, and that is exactly where it all began for her. Openness means listening to what your child says and noticing the way they look when they are doing things. If you watch most children at soccer practice, you can quickly spot the difference between those who are there because it’s their dream and those who are there because it’s a dream their parents are hanging onto. Sometimes, even the best player on the team is only the best because they are being pushed so hard to perform. Eventually, this pressure makes the child question their own dreams. They begin to wonder if they really know themselves as well as they think, and they become followers of a life that doesn’t entirely belong to them. Dad says, “See, I was right. I knew you would be good!” Their own dream, however large or small, gets pushed back to the subconscious, where it may remain unspoken even into adulthood.

The second quality parents need to help children follow their dreams is faith—not the kind that brings you to your knees to pray in hopes that they will be okay, but the kind of faith that puts wind in the sails of childhood imagination and creativity. These are the same sails that make Santa Claus real, and when enough breath is put behind them, children can, do, and will accomplish anything. But first, someone—preferably a parent—must believe in them! That same parent may have to set aside remorse, regret, or even pent-up anger that their own dreams may never be realized through the sweat and blood of their offspring. It may be difficult, but it is necessary.

There are few people in this world blessed enough to know what it feels like to live out a dream of their own. Many of the rest of us have endured a life of being led, directed, and orchestrated into occupations, pastimes, and sometimes lives that don’t belong to us internally. One easy way to remember how important it is to help children follow their dreams is to remember what you used to dream about. While spending countless hours daydreaming about learning how to be the first human to ever fly may seem pointless, futile, or impossible to a parent, to a child, they already see themselves with wings. They are just looking for the permission to fly!

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