I guess it all depends on the person’s outlook. Sort of like making lemonade out of lemons thing versus just being sour. But if this is a young child, it is possible to guide the person as they grow older to look beyond the most obvious career paths. If the person is truly interested with the dance or performing arts world, I imagine s/he would try to find a suitable role within it. I don’t see why they need to be bitter about not being a dancer (very very few people make it to the professional level).
Again, just because you got weeded out of pre-med doesn’t mean you will be bitter about it. That’s what I mean by the difference between interest and ability. If a person is interested in the medical field or health field, chances are they will find a place in it. Doctors and nurses are just the most visible career paths to a young child, so they tend to say “I want to be a doctor” or “I want to be a nurse” - the more sophisticated young children may say “I want to be a surgeon”. Very few kids say “I want to be a dosimetrist” or “I want to be a genetic counselor”. There are far more careers in the medical field than just doctor and nurse.
How do you know? Just because someone believes another person is incapable of accomplishing their dreams it doesn’t mean it’s true.
Paleontologist John Horner was considered “lazy” and “■■■■■■■■” in school and flunked out of college numerous times. Blake Charlton was a special ed student for most of elementary school. He went on to graduate from both Yale and Stanford Med School. David Schoenbrod scored so low on his college’s reading comprehension placement test that his faculty advisor didn’t believe he’d be able to graduate from college at all. He graduated in 3 years, studied at Oxford for 2, then got his law degree from Yale. Maggie Aderin-Pocock was placed in remedial classes in grade school. She attended a university in England and became a mechanical engineer. Carol Greider was put in remedial classes in grade school too, and her poor GRE scores almost kept her out of grad school. While in grad school she made a discovery that eventually resulted in her being awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
These people could have believed all the people who told them they “couldn’t,” but what a waste of human resources that would have been.
Reality. I liked dancing, but never breaking the 5’2" height, I knew there was no future for me. One teacher said I could go to Canada and dance. Not happening. It remained a hobby for years.
I do recall my 5th grade son, saying, “if I got into MIT, could you afford it?” Me, “I’d find a way”
I went to a flagship,for half the price of schools I would rather have attended. It was an awful fit, but I was out in less than 3 years.
So, I wanted my son to expand his wings and fly, reach high, and know that $ would not become a barrier.
Wow. I posted and then got busy with life stuff. I came back expecting no real controversy and most people agreeing generally. It’s funny how differently people view some things.
While I don’t think it’s necessary to tell a 4 year old that they can’t be a mommy, firefighter, Doctor, and astronaut all at once, I do think there are little ways we teach kids a poor message (which is what I think the book symbolized to the author). So many parents teach their kids that if the kid begs for something (“pllleeeeasse Mommy!”) then they get it. After all, please is the magic word. Just one example, I’m sure there are more.
My kids have known for a long time that there of some things they probably couldn’t do. My younger daughter has worn glasses since she was less than two years old. She’s never going to be an Air Force pilot. Or a sharp shooter. She probably wouldn’t have wanted to anyway, but she always knew that hard work wouldn’t be enough. My older daughters breastbone became very slightly crooked when she was about 10. It’s a mild cosmetic thing that hardly anyone notices. She’s never going to be the Sports Illustrated cover swimsuit model though because the swimsuit wouldn’t lay quite right. No matter how much she wanted it, that’s not a dream she could ever obtain. They both are terrible singers. It wouldn’t matter how badly they wanted it or how much they practiced, they will never be musical stars (it’s genetic, I must admit)
The thing is, we see kids (and sometimes parents) on CC who are for the first time realizing as their kids are seniors in high school that even if they have perfect stats and have worked really, really hard and desperately want their dream school… The answer is still no. They don’t have a lot in the way of coping skills because they really believed it when they were told that if they wanted it enough and worked hard enough, they could have it. They don’t always have backups and often they are pretty bitter and angry.
And it’s not just a silly issue. Not when there are teen suicides, eating disorders, cutting, anxieties, etc. I think a lot of kids are missing out on getting some coping skills.
Maybe if more people acknowledged that hard work and deep desire aren’t always enough, there would be more empathy for the people in our society who work so hard and still have so little.
I agree with the people who say that we need to let kids dream, because most of the true achievers were dreamers. It is also important to remember that for every story of someone who refused to give up their dreams in spite of all the odds against them, there is someone who will be buried under those odds. When kids get older, they’ll start to understand their limits. I eventually learned that I couldn’t be in the military like I always dreamed of, after all. It took enlisting, shipping out to Great Lakes, and being informed a month into basic training that Aspergers is actually a permanently disqualifying condition for military service, but I learned. We all do eventually. You didn’t need to tell 15 year old me that, you needed to let me act like a wide eyed fool and learn in time.
@texaspg odds are small. But another 10 year old probably wouldn’t have been reading that magazine or have remembered as much from it. You never know how things are going to work out.
I still say that “we need to let the kids dream” is not mutually exclusive with “we need to let kids know their limits”. Why the (rhetorical) insistence that they are?
I believe that life is a big puzzle that we all fit into in a particular place. Not knowing your place in that puzzle is what “you could be anything” means to me. Fully developing your own unique talents will lead you to where you fit in that puzzle and that is where the realism comes in. The two are not mutually exclusive, one is just a more mature understanding of the world than the other.
“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” - I am a strong proponent of this philosophy. I did change my younger kid intentions and it worked wonderfully for her, she feels that she belongs where she is now. My older was much more realistic about his future. He studied the job market on his own at the very tender age and I have no idea how as internet did not exist in that dinosaur age of our lives. He was a good artist, was taking the private lessons and developed a great interest in art. At the end of his middle school, he mentioned that he knows that he cannot make it being an artist and he is planning to be a Graphic Designer. Frankly, we did not know then what was the Graphic Design, but his logic made sense to us and we let him be.
It was a different story with the younger one. She was a great swimmer and liked to snorkel on our vacations and based on these, decided that the Marine Bio is her thing. Well, aside from the lucky few, there are no jobs for the Marine Bio. It took me couple of years and using my own of experience of being out of work many times, I convinced her that medicine is much better fit for her, and it worked out for her.
Well, maybe all these aspirations at 10 - 12 years of age work for some. Many others will need adjustments based on the more realistic view of the world. At the end, they need to become independent, supporting themselves…and rely on type of luck that is produced by hard work. However, in our family, we never talked about limitations. We talk about the fact that the hard work should produce results. My S. is also using this approach raising his own kids.
I dreamed of being lots of things when I was young–doctor, astronaut, Carol Burnett, a singer. Didn’t end up as any of those but did pursue a science field and now sing in a chorus. You don’t have to be the BEST at what you do to be happy doing it.
I personally thought it was a waste of an article. Kids are supposed to dream. If all people did was think of the limitations to any project/job/creation nothing would ever be started. We’d all be at ground zero. There are many paths.
@GMTplus7 – yes – and if you can find a way to make some money doing something maybe you are not passionate about (but good at), then you can afford a more expensive hobby :). Nice art supplies and woodworking tools cost $$$
@gouf – when I did community theatre for a bit a few years ago, I met several scientists that love to act and sing. One of them has sung opera and currently auditions often and lands small parts on TV shows – the kind that re-enact crimes, things like that. Haha, makes me think, yes, some people can do anything! Me, I have limits . . .
I go to this county fair every year where they have a display of student projects from the local elementary school. A few years ago, they had a writing prompt about careers and I was surprised to see that “Pizza Hut worker” (and other jobs attainable by unskilled 16-year-olds) appeared with pretty much the same frequency as “actress” and “NFL player.”
I don’t think little kids have career goals, for the most part. For better or worse, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is how adults make small talk with kids, and every kid needs something to say. They choose either something they see on TV, or something they see in the community that seems fun.
“They choose either something they see on TV, or something they see in the community that seems fun.”…or more likely something related to their own experiences in life.
*…as long as you work hard for it, have the innate talent needed for it, and have a bit of luck if it’s something that not everybody who is qualified can get.
It seems to me that the only real issue here is when you need to drop the footnote. I don’t need to tell a five-year-old that he can’t be a dinosaur.
I think sometimes kids need guidance on whether their aspirations are realistic, including encouragement to consider paths that are realistic choices for them but that they may not have considered.
Example: In 8th grade, my daughter found out that some of her friends were planning to apply to a selective-entry IB program in our county. She decided to apply too, mostly for the hell of it and because her friends were doing it. She had no expectation of actually getting in.
Then she gave the teacher recommendation form for the program to her English teacher, who said, “It’s about time that I got one of these things from someone who actually should be applying to this program.” This off-the-cuff remark was the only hint that she or I had that she might be a realistic candidate.
She got in to the IB program. She decided she wanted to attend. She signed up for it, did like it, and did well in it. In fact, I think she had a far better experience there than she would have had at our neighborhood high school.
But what if her friends hadn’t happened to be applying? She would never have considered it. And the only “guidance” we received was that casual remark by her English teacher, which would never have happened if she hadn’t already started the application process.
Then again, there’s the opposite mantra that is popular with some here in Appalachia: “Don’t get above your raisin’.” So many kids here struggle to go to college and choose professional careers because there is no precedent for it in their families or communities, and they are not encouraged by parents who fear “losing” their children. So many people end up not fulfilling their potential and I think it’s one reason why this area is so backward economically.
Luck is a big part. But having a mindset to take advantage of a lucky break isn’t capricious or random.
I’ve got someone who works for me who has been unusually successful professionally in a relatively short period of time. Other people in the company thinks she’s “SO LUCKY”.
Lucky? for sure. But she started her career being fluent in a foreign language which is important for most multi-national companies. She raised her hand for the kind of extra assignments which most employees shy away from (serving on the Beta-testing committee for a new tracking system; helping to plan the quarterly town hall meeting; the kind of stuff which involves lots of time but doesn’t actually get your own work done). She is a hard-worker but more important, she’s a smart worker. She uses the 80/20 rule to keep her priority projects in line; she makes sure that any communication that goes out over her name is proofed and perfect and that charts and graphs are accurate.
And of course- she’s ambitious. She asks for feedback; she works on the stuff she’s not great at (hence volunteering for the technology initiative- she was the least tech savvy member of the team when she joined).
So yeah- people are lucky. But not because they are sitting on a park bench and a winning lottery ticket hits them on the head. Lucky because they work hard to maximize the chances that a lucky break will come their way.
