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What it appears to boil down to in the article is: do what's best for your kids by taking your ego out of the picture. JK Rowling did the Harvard Commencement Speech in (IIRC) 2008 in which she speaks of failure, where she basically tells the audience of students (along the lines of) "For you, just being ordinary is a failure." It was the Michele Zavos one that reminded me of this, where she's talking about her daughter basically following in her footsteps to become a lawyer, and was on the path to go to Harvard. > So she’s now 19, and she’s the youngest assistant cook they’ve ever had. And then I guess after about a year and a half, she says, “I’m going back to school.” And she does not do well at all, and she says, “I don’t want to be here.” She gets a job in Boston as the kitchen manager of the Beacon Hill Friends house. We go out to dinner, and she says to me, “Mom, I think I want to go to culinary school. Are you disappointed?” And, sort of your whole being a parent flashes by. And I thought, I better get this right. I said to her, “You know what, Add? Even if I am disappointed, here’s what you say to me: ‘F--- you, Mom, it’s my life.’ She sort of flinched and said, “My therapist said that, too, but not like that.” It was really funny. It kind of eloquently paints the angst of a teenager against her mom just wanting to do what's best for her. However, that situation plays out very differently when you've got a parent who wants to live vicariously through their own child's successes as determined by the parent. From the objective view, I totally screwed up. My dad had his own rags to upper-middle class story, and my parents only wanted what's best for me and wanted me to succeed. I wanted to be--I feel there should be a drum roll here--a novelist. I've lived my life predicated on the belief that "well if it all fucks up, at least I got a story out of it." So far it's served me well. I'm married, own a house, have a kid and one on the way, two dogs, and I did it all early. I sleep pretty good at night, because I get to walk into my kids room, stroke his hair and I go to bed with a smile on my face. My brother is the success. He did well, better than my father. Except, I don't know if he's happy and he basically broke of most communication. All I know is he keeps himself very busy, and seems to drink a lot. I think I've got a bottle of Scotch stored somewhere for a special occasion, but I'd be hard pressed to actually rustle something up to get drunk off of. I haven't drank at home in almost three years, me and my wife used to do Fuzzy Navel Wednesday before my kid was born, but that was about our extent after we bought our house, which is about where I hit my own metric of success and where I actually became happy, or at least satiated. So I think the trick to raising successful children is teaching your kids to set their own criteria for success. |