Personal Development - Dreams
Can I indulge my child in her dreams? Surely, I need to prepare her for the disappointment she will feel when the world tells her she isn’t good enough? I feel it’s my role to protect her from this pain and distress!
Since the start of the year, this blog has been exploring children’s personal development and our impact upon it as parents. Children’s dreams of the future often come up in my work and many times I have been asked whether we have a responsibility to temper our children’s castles in the sky. Whether we need to protect them from the heartache of unfulfilled fantasies.
My answer is always, “Let them Dream.” As the safe haven for your children, we are also the guardian of their imaginations. Cradling and containing their hopes and aspirations, we give permission for them to become whatever they transpire to become – removing expectation of who we obligate them to be.
Our concern to protect them from pain is, in fact, a concern for ourselves.
Hear me out.
It is hard to accept that our children will feel uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings throughout their lives, even though it is totally unavoidable. The parental role is to provide a safe, loving and compassionate container within which these feelings can be processed while they learn – over a very long time (20 years or more) – how to contain and process feelings on their own.
Why not minimise pain? Surely it makes sense to protect our kids as much as we can? Of course, we protect them from the intricate details of big-ticket adult issues such as financial concerns and from exposure to inappropriate material on TV or the internet. Yet when we protect (distract/trivialise/belittle/shame) them from their own feelings, we prevent our children from understanding what feelings are and we reduce their capability to deal with disappointment and hurt when they are older.
The longer we protect them from disappointment, the more impactful it is when they finally face it. This comes thick and fast at tween/teen time when they become increasingly independent combined with a dramatically changing body, lifestyle and level of responsibility.
So our role is NOT to remove, distract from or trivialise the pain, but to support our children as they navigate it.
What we are concerning ourselves about when we try to prepare them for disappointment, then, is the pain WE will feel when we contain and process their discomfort and hurt.
Tempering dreams serves to anticipate and try to minimise our own pain, but as L.R.Knost beautifully wrote: “It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.”
Children who can think beyond the realms of possibility are adults who create a new future. The genius German scientist Albert Einstein emphasised the importance of sticking to what you want to do, even when others think it's 'unrealistic'. "The person with big dreams is more powerful than the one with all the facts.”
So let them dream. And let them dream BIG. When they tell you their aspirations, ask them for more information. Get them to draw pictures, to describe what their dream looks like and to get enthusiastic about it. Dreaming big means having the mental freedom to think about what you really want out of life and forget about all the reasons why you can't make it a reality. It means having high standards for your life and setting the bar high for yourself. Yes, there will be disappointment on the way – and hurt and pain – and as parents, we are there to teach children to navigate pain, process it, allow it to be metabolised and seen and to allow it to pass through. We are the emotional buffer.
I leave you with the words of another titan of inspiration, Maya Angelou:
“A person is the product of their dreams. So make sure to dream great dreams. And then try to live your dream.”