Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘flexibility’

Being parents means our job is to prepare our kids for the future, particularly for the unfortunate event of us stopping to be there for them. Whitney Houston made the phrase “I believe the children are our future” famous singing The Greatest Love of All.

Yeah, well, this is exactly it: we need to stop thinking about how we used to be and focus more on how things are for our kids right now and how they are likely to be for them in the future. Lingering in the past is possibly the biggest disservice we can do for them.

We must grasp the idea that our kids’ life is going to be incredibly different from ours and that there is really no way to know for sure what it is going to be like. In fact, it is likely to keep changing all the time and very rapidly, which means we need to build them for change.

Last year, I wrote a post about the 8 worst ways to treat your kids. I get comments on my posts – some of them support my views, while some of them disagree or challenge the ideas I write about – and this post was no different. You probably know that bloggers love comments, but it may be surprising to you that bloggers absolutely love the challenging ones, because they create even more opportunities to write their opinions.

Recently, I received a comment from Sandie, a mother who thought my top 8 tips were “out of line”.

I started writing back, but then I realized it probably needed a bit more attention, so here is Sandie’s comment and my reply. Enjoy!

Creativity is a learned skill and can be developed at any age and under any circumstances. Parents do not need a lot of resources and most of the tips and ideas described are easy and cheap. However, they do require that parents apply their own creativity and appreciate creativity as an important component in the success and happiness of their kids.

20 years ago, I worked in a project called “Creative Thinking”, where I learned that creativity does not have to be an inherited quality. The project aimed to prove kids as young as 6 or 7 years old could learn the laws of physics. We found that could only be done when the kids learned to think “outside the box”. I worked in Creative Thinking for 4 years and left to develop the broader “Garden of Eden” program, because I thought young kids needed other things besides physics.

Creativity is more important for kids today than knowledge. Kids know a lot more than we knew when we were their age, but for them to step up and be successful, they need something extra. They need to be able to assess where everyone else is going and become unique and different.

We went to sleep late at night in our room at the guesthouse in Thailand. The street was full of tourists and we wondered how on Earth we were going to wake up at 4:30am to prepare for our flight back home. We could set our hand watches, but I knew that my internal clock would do the job. I only needed to look at my watch before I closed my eyes, see the time and tell myself to wake up on time.