What’s your gift to the world?
We are asking children the wrong question.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
A five-year old will be asked with endearment, a twelve-year old might get the question when we’re wondering about school choices. In the case of an adolescent, we ask the question with genuine interest, hoping for an interesting answer.
We mean well, but in fact we are putting children on the wrong foot from the start. Of course, we don’t know any better ourselves. We want to give them the message that they are free to do what they want and that they are not obliged, for whatever reason, to follow in their parents’ footsteps.
But the question is also something of a trap. It rarely elicits more than pure fairytale wishful thinking (princess, firefighter), or goals presented as desirable by society (being rich, being famous). By the time it reaches adolescence, the question is usually answered with either a reasoned choice of which the youngster suspects it will bring him professional gain; or, ever more frequently, with nothing more than an irritable shrug and sigh (‘how am I supposed to know?’).
My family and I are in the North-East of the United States, visiting friends and relatives. Our first stop is the American host family where my husband lived for a full year when he was eighteen years old. Mom and Dad are still truly mom and dad. Being with them is coming home, as a son and a daughter-in-law. Dad teaches Sobran to fold paper planes (which they then send flying through the living room) and takes his son and grandson for a bike ride; Mom takes care of us like only mothers can.
It’s during a conversation we are having about the second answer (‘how am I supposed to know?’), in a packed little restaurant overlooking the ocean, with glorious food in front of us and the clattering of plates and shouting from the kitchen in the background, that I suddenly have a precious insight.
For we tend to complain about our youngsters, today’s youth. We accuse them of not being as accomplished as we were at their age, of not standing for or believing in anything. We worry about them, witnessing the endless hours passed in front of screens, doing little more than gaming or chatting, seemingly blind to the concerns and joys of real life.
They don’t know what they want to make of their life, Mom sighs.
Actually, it’s not really fair to expect a sensible answer from our children. How on earth is a teenager, swamped in a daily concoction of abundance, quick wins, consumption culture and the survival of the sexiest, supposed to know what it is he wants to do, truly wants to be doing, with his life?
To know such a thing, you need a sense of deeper motivation, to begin with. In that sense, the accomplishments of previous generations are more often than not a poisonous present to our children. If even the stars have come to be within our reach, what on earth might they still aspire to? It shouldn’t surprise us that our youngsters are imploding into comfort or pleasure, especially if we aren’t capable of offering them a better alternative.
For just like we teach our children, step by step, how to behave in socially appropriate ways towards other people, it is our duty as parents to accompany them on their road of discovery, both of themselves and of what might be their deeper purpose in life. Contrary to what we seem to think as soon as we cross the threshold into adulthood, this is not something a child will easily come to by itself. Without that one grandparent, mother or father figure, teacher, who believed in us and said the right things at the right time, we very probably wouldn’t have become who we are now.
And that’s talking best case scenario. For let’s be honest: up to this day, many of us don’t know what we want or would have wanted, either. We have made ourselves relatively comfortable in the life we have, not unlike a little like a kid hunkering down inside a toy castle and pretending the sand cakes are real food.
The concern we feel when it comes to our youth can provide us with a relentless mirror, too. For the deeper meaning of our lives often doesn’t reside in the offices we hold — in other words, what we have ‘become’. To the contrary, adults in the western world are ever more starting to realize that we have cornered ourselves in the chasing of purely material comfort.
What we need is a true, deep meaning, such as can be found in human interconnectedness, or in the sense of being able to mean something to the world, in a fundamental way, however modest. For there exists a point where our heart’s desire and the needs of the world converge, one of the innumerable intersecting points in the kaleidoscope that is life.
Even if we are perhaps struggling with the answers ourselves, I am deeply convinced that, as adults, this is the path we should help our children take their first steps on.
Asking the child what it wants to become, does not leed to more knowledge of the self. It merely creates expectations, fantasies or guilt, in both parent and child, however sweetly wrapped.
A truer question to ask as soon as the child is mature enough to think about it (or perhaps even better: to feel about it), would be this: what would you like to mean to the world? What is the unique talent that might help you make a difference?
It needn’t be anything big, and the asnwer might at first seem insignificant. It also requires a change of mindset from us as adults: there are no easy career paths to be stipulated from ‘taking care of my dog’, ‘playing with my friends’ of ‘making a nice drawing’. But in fact this is right where everything starts.
For in those innocent, spontaneous answers lie much deeper values, pointing at talents or extraordinary gifts: caring, social skill, artistic or aesthetic creativity.
If we have the courage to ask children what they feel to be their special gift to offer the world, and in what way that might make a difference just by being themselves, we are helping them grow in more than one way.
We are helping them get in touch with themselves, and with the things they are good at. We are helping them understand that everyone has his own unique place in the world, and that every talent can have an impact. And especially: we don’t ask them to fill a role that we as parents or as society have drawn up for them. We offer them an opening to listen to the voice of their heart and their soul. They don’t have to ‘become’ anyone, at all, except for who they have been in their core all along.
And who knows, if we have the courage to ask them who they are, in the mirror they hold up to us we might catch a glimpse of who we have been all along — regardless of what we think we have become.
