Quote:
|
By the way, as far as post #36, we definitely encouraged skills with our kids that were not "useful" or were not "academic" in nature. We were and continue to be very very very into their extracurricular pursuits which I have to say have been lifelong passions of theirs. They continued these in college as well. We encourage that and those areas may not have any bearing on an eventual career. One of my kids actually turned her EC pursuits which began as a preschooler through high school graduation into her college major and career path in fact. Of course we also encouraged her academic achievements in the classroom but these other interests have become her lifelong passion and now her career pursuit.
|
I'll use the example from my own life again. When I was a kid, if left to my own devices, I would have played video games literally
all day long, heck sometimes 24 hours straight without sleeping. That was my "EC".
Now, maybe you might be one of the few parents who might have actually encouraged your kids to do that. But my parents certainly did not. Nor were they exceptional: I think every kid on my block had an addiction to video games and had parents who were trying to stop or at least limit them. But hey, we were all improving our "hand-eye coordination", right?
What that shows is that most parents won't encourage just any old EC, they only encourage [i]certain[i] EC's that they think are useful, and my parents certainly did not think video games were useful at all. Maybe they were wrong - maybe right now I could be a professional video game player making millions in endorsements. I guess we'll never know. But it doesn't matter. What matters is that they, for whatever reason, didn't think it was useful.