One of the problems is people see things in black and white, when life has many shades of gray. I agree totally that the idea “you can be anything” is idiotic but so is the idea that you shouldn’t shoot for high goals, either, because 'that’s impossible". One of the biggest drivers of a kid’s growth is imagination and dreaming, and the thing that drives me most up the wall is parents telling kids that ‘that isn’t how you do it’ or “that’s impossible”, the magic of kids is that they can dream the impossible, and if it isn’t beaten out of them, it can often happen, genius and breakthroughs don’t come about by parents who from a young age tell a kid they should do something solid in life and stop dreaming, the parents for example who tell a kid the only thing in life is to go to an ivy league university and become an investment banker (and that is not a knock on the ivy league schools, lots of people came out of there who could dream and do amazing things, it is the parents at fault).
I saw this plenty of times growing up, and I wanted to smack the parents. Kid wanted to play little league baseball, and the stupid parent telling him/her “why, you’ll never be good, your a klutz”, the kid who wanted to try and instrument, and being told “you’ll never be good at it”, you name it. The point of “you can be anything” is to try and stop kids from self limiting, and better, not necessarily listen to what adults tell them (the worse thing an adult can tell a child,when they imagine something outlandish , “stop acting like a kid, grow up”…I would love to tell them they would have been saying that to people like Einstein and Feynman, who in some ways never lost that ‘being a kid’. The point being that there is nothing wrong with playing baseball or taking an instrument or whatever, as a kid, they should believe that anything is possible (and here i am talking younger kids).
That doesn’t mean that you should not be realistic, either, especially as kids get older. So while there is nothing wrong with young kids taking ballet lessons or gymnastics, or playing baseball and getting instruction, at that age telling them go for it is fine, even though as a parent you know it would be highly unlikely they would be able to make it. For one thing, you don’t know, there is a ballerina with the NYC Ballet these days, she is a tall young African American woman, according to conventional wisdom, she is too big, too tall to be a ballet dancer (and someone also should look at Peter Maartins, the artistic director of the NYCB, he is like 6’ 3, and was a top level ballet dancer in his time). All those parents supporting their kids in things like football and baseball should or have to know the odds of them becoming ball players professionally is dismal, yet what is wrong with being on traveling teams and such, if the kid gets something out of it (on the other hand, supporting that and not the kid who is bright and wants to go to a robotics program or a chess program is idiotic, too, or worse, the kid who is good at baseball, not also supporting him/her wanting to play chess). There is a time when you realize you aren’t going to make it, my son played little league, was okay at it, enjoyed it, but it wasn’t his passion, but the thing is, by the time kids hit about 11 or 12, a lot of those dreams are going to die by themselves, by that time baseball and sports become more restrictive, and with things like ballet and gymnastics those not good enough already know that, just by looking at what is around them. A lot of that realism comes about when the kid sees the world around them changing.
Sometimes too it is the parent who loses sigh of reality, I have seen the kids talented in a sport who want to drop it, because it no longer interests them, or because they realize that down the road, they won’t make it, so they want to play it more casually, without all the travel teams and coaches, and perhaps play in college, but the parent, with the dreams of MLB or the NFL or whatnot, won’t let it die.
Realism is telling the kid, at an appropriate age, about what the world is really like, and letting them make their own decisions. I get into trouble a lot on the music majors forum, because some kid will come in, at 16, 17,saying how they just got the passion for music, picked up an instrument, and their goal was to get into a good music program and then become a musician with a top orchestra, and I’ll tell them the reality, that it will be unlikely they would be able to achieve their goal, and while I might offer other suggestions, like keep playing the instrument in college but major in something else and then as an adult they could potentially keep playing, if not as a pro, as a semi pro or amateur musicians and still have it. On the other hand, there have been people, who claim to know how difficult music is, saying “why would you let your son major in music, it is impossible to make a living, why support a dream like that?”.
What that of course misses is my son went on his path with his eyes wide open, as we did. For example, though as a violinist they train them to be soloists, he knew a long time ago that he likely had neither that kind of talent or in reality the desire, to try and become one, he always has been more into ensemble playing. Likewise, because he was around a lot of adult musicians, he knew the reality of that world, so he wasn’t dreaming it as much as trying to live into it. He still is, but he knows, he isn’t like some kids at his stage of development, thinking he will be the next Perlman, pursuing the competitions, and so forth shrug. On my part, I also understand that what he is going through is going to be incredible life lessons no matter what he does, whether he goes into the academic side of music and teachers, or ends up doing something else as a vocation, none of his ‘dreaming’ i believe will be wasted.
I think in the end it is like everything else in life, it becomes what is age appropriate. A 6 or 7 year old kid getting into baseball big time and dreaming of being a great baseball player is a kid dreaming of something bigger, a kid at 15 or 16 doing that when it is obvious he/she isn’t good enough is a different thing. Far too many parents apply their story, their own view, to the world of kids, and throw a bucket on things when it is kind of idiotic to do so. In the movie “October Sky”, the father is constantly berating his son’s fascination with rockets and space travel, wants him to do the practical thing and work in the mines…kid ends up winning a science fair and going to college on a scholarship, and working for NASA.The fetish these days that there are only a few acceptable tracks, that if you don’t go to an elite college and study something ‘useful’ you will be trash, kind of needs balance, and maybe the idea of ‘you can do anything’ is a nice counterbalance to that, and in the end, it ends up being something in the middle, hopefully:)