I remember the day I had to start thinking about my higher education and what I wanted to be in the future. I remember that I felt under pressure at least two to three years before making the final decision. I realised, “Boy! This is just the beginning. You haven’t even scratched the surface as yet.”
Ask a six-year-old or seven-year-old girl or boy what they want to be when they grow up. Most of the time they’d answer in a split second unless they have more than one favourite game, favourite toy, favourite cartoon, or favourite activity.
Why is this?
Children are in touch with themselves and often express things as is. It is acceptable that they don’t have the knowledge and understanding of the dynamics yet, in fact, what they can’t understand, don’t know for their age is less harmful to them. They can dream, be magical, be creative without knowing the mechanics of how and when things will happen. Boom! It just happens in a second. Cumon, you know what I mean! There’s an ambulance and an ugly looking car, then suddenly a red car which looks like a Ferrari comes along and then a helicopter at the same time. What a party! With all the sound effects as well and guess what? Toys even come with readymade people in them these days. Most of the time they’re good looking. How awesome is a child’s world? You get to have a Ferrari and a helicopter almost instantly. As a child, you’re permitted to do what’s closest to your heart and what you feel in your own time. No rules, no laws … it’s a free world.
I will always remember one specific memory while I looked after a five-year-old girl. I was in a certain phase of my life where I felt shattered that I failed with a certain venture after all my efforts. This five-year-old girl always told me she wanted to be a doctor. Me and the cat called “Rubio” (means blond in Spanish) were her usual patients. Rubio was less “patient”. The moment she told me she wanted to be a doctor I started to fill her surrounds up with anything doctor related to keep charging her with her dream. The plan was to get her to understand as much as possible about what doctors need to know without making it boring or pressurising. The more things that kids are in touch with and learn about helps them become certain about lifelong or more long-term decisions without regret. It almost gives them the base for their purpose and success. By saying this I mean if you got a teenager on your hands that wants to be something (hopefully something good and healthy), and nothing will stop them be it a financial situation or a setback then this means you have partly done a great job. By this, I mean that he/she has made an informed decision.
It is important to be present. Every question you answer, the way it’s answered, is mimicked. Most kids see their parents as superheroes and flawless because they lack the knowledge, understanding, experience and dynamics and therefore your patterns are ingrained into them on the subconscious and on the conscious level. Paying attention to their questions, behaviour, and the way they consume information is important. E.g. a child who learns through playful activities rather than a child who takes in knowledge from a book needs a different approach. Paying attention will tell you more than them if they prefer to do more creative things or if they want to do things on a more intellectual level.
Teaching a child to make informed decisions along the way can save their life i.e. anything from choosing their career, making tough decisions, choosing a partner, assess if they’re in healthy or unhealthy situations, awareness etc.
There can be the creative child who is a doer and then the intellectual child who can tell you about chemistry, and what happens if X does this to Y etc. What you really want is to create a middle ground where the creative side meets the intellectual side. I feel that courage comes more from the doer because you act on your thoughts and in my life, I’ve seen highly intelligent people who followed the high credential road couldn’t manoeuvre their feelings well, so they get hurt more because they lacked courage in bringing their inward knowledge outwards so that they could defend or protect themselves better or what they stand for better.
Life is complex and there is so much choice. In today’s world kids are learning to be more apt and adaptable. They are consuming information very quickly as they have grown up in the world of the Internet. Not everything going on in your generation and the past generations could be relevant to the world they’re entering so as a parent it is important to also push yourself to be current. This will create better engagement, connection with your child and also you will be able to foresee what might be around the corner in case they’ve missed it.
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by either purchasing one of my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to reevaluate them.
