Posted By Daisy on July 13, 2010

I know I’m veering off from completing our series on the Taxonomy of the Too, Too Parent class, but I promise this post will become relevant to our up-coming conversation about Gladiator Parents.   Gretchen Ruben over at the fabulous Happiness Project site is conducting a poll asking whether our parents enrolled us in some activity that we didn’t ask for at the time, and whether we are happier for it.   I will be very interested in her findings and I suspect there will be quite a range of answers.   Sometimes, encouraging a loved one (child, spouse, friend) to try something new is a wonderful thing.   But it depends on your motivation.   I know a lot of parents either see evidence or are told that their child has a “gift” for something — an innate talent – and are anxious to make sure that talent doesn’t go to waste, hence enrollment in classes, purchase of equipment, and rigorous practice schedules.  That’s all well and good if that talent or gift also aligns with the child’s passions.   Our passions are what we are innately drawn to, those things that fascinate us, whether we have talent in that area or not.

Sometimes our gifts and our passions overlap, which can be wonderful.   Sometimes they don’t though, and that’s ok too.  At the end of the day, our gifts are useful tools, but we aren’t apt to truly blossom and shine unless we’re also tapping into our passions.  I was apparently “gifted” in math and hard science.  Being a people-pleaser, I tried to conform to expectations that I should become an engineer or something similar.   All the while though, the subversive part of my brain knew it loved the social sciences and it kept making escape routes and bargains.   Once I fully and consciously embraced where my passions really lay, things got easier.    My subconscious brain made this possible, finally, by failing — and I mean SPECTACULARLY failing — my college physics class.    It was then that I felt the freedom to change my major and lap up all those poli sci and anthro classes.    (Still a people-pleaser, the end result of all that was to go to law school, which was still an imperfect fit, but that is a story for another day.)

Why does any of this mean for parenting?   Look for both the gifts and the passions your child comes to you with.   Yes, you can help uncover these by offering a broad sampling of activities, but don’t let the sound of applause when your child exhibits his or her gifts tune out the quieter signs of resistance from a child whose passions lie elsewhere.

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Categories: On Parenting
Tags: gifted, happiness project, motivation