Teach Your Children Well

Teach Your Children Well

October 5, 2013, 23:48
Filed under: autism, disability, Parenting, success | Tags: children, choices, growing up, parenting, role models

Today I slept,  I slept all day,  I haven’t slept off my exhaustion,  but I have made a start.  Now it is 23:04 and I haven’t written a blog today.  I have said that I will post every day of the year, and integrity is simply doing what I say I will.

I was talking to Neelam about Leonard Bernstein’s Omnibus programmes and she reminded me of the interview with Bernstein’s father who was asked, “Don’t you regret trying to stop your son learning music?” To which Bernstein’s father replied, “I didn’t know he was going to grow up to be Leonard Bernstein!” I am watching a program about the LP “Elvis Presley”” and it occurs to me that Bernstein senior was right to some extent. It is our duty as parents to try and protect our children, and it is their job to take risks. However we need to recognise when it is time to get out of their way and support them in their choice, if they’ve pushed hard enough to get past our objections we need to trust their choice and let them make their own mistakes, but until they have shown their determination we don’t have to make it easy for them. 

I think the problems come when parents want to take risks with their children, particularly when it is to satisfy their own frustrated ambitions. I do believe that there should come a moment when our children discover that we were not always the stable safe people we now profess to be, but it should not come to soon.It is our job to provide our children with a solid foundation and their’s to leap from our foundation and fly. At the moment it’s my job to sleep,  hey I’m a grandfather,  I don’t have to be dangerous,  that can wait until I wake up tomorrow!

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