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With Your Rule
Can Kids Hide Their Talents?
Dear Holly,
I have a question dealing with a child using their talents. My daughter loves to do gymnastics and is somewhat talented. However she is not interested in competition which appears to be the next step for her. I'm not so sure our family is right for competition, as well, since this takes many hours of practice and then hours for the competitions. I have another daughter who was involved in Irish Step Dance and it was great fun until we started getting into competitions. The other families were attending many competitions and we only went to a few. I felt I wasn't helping my child be successful in the competitions because we didn't attend as many as her classmates. My real question is whether or not this is like hiding their talents - talents given by God - by not taking part in some of these activities and competitions?
Labels: 4th P Parent
posted by Holly at 3:15 PM
3 Comments:
We live in such a crazy age - I swear at times that our society doesn't know the meaning of childhood! :-)
I think your family's desire to not enter into large competitions and the fast pace of childhood competition is just fine. The culture we live in seems to forget their *IS* life after childhood - that in fact, life AFTER childhood is the 'beginning' of our real lives as persons - where we are finally grown enough to begin to apply ourselves to the world and to society.
Childhood is a time of preparation, learning, discovery of the world, exploration of one's God-given talents and needs - not the time of perfection and complete development. Childhood is a process. And from my research at university. competition is something that best applies to young adults and older, when self-esteem issues and personal perspective can best be balanced when 'failure' occurs.
And in a balanced upbringing of the child - leisure time, nature time, time for imaginative play, time for reading and dreaming, time for socializing and play and most especially, time just hanging out being loved by Mom and Dad - is integral to their develoment as persons. Kids today are so busy and so-out-of-the-house most of their waking hours, that there is little time for prayer, love and family. I say let her be a child.
The talents God has given her - both her natural ones like her physical abilities as well as her supernatural ones, like her faith - will all be put to good use as she grows and develops. Meanwhile, provide for her whole-person formation and her ability to 'be' herself, with your love and let life unfold at its natural pace.
I tend to agree with Holly, but would like to take this question one step further. What if the child's unwillingness to compete stems from a lack of motivation, or simply just laziness. Is it O.K. to require this of a child in order to form the virtue of discpline, or would it be better to look for other, less time consuming ways to accomplish this?
In my home, we require our kids to play a musical instrument, some resist more than others. We have stuck with it because we feel that it forms discipline and we are able to encourage a talent that they may be able to use later in life. (They could always teach the instrument, or use it in some other way). What are your thoughts?
My mother tried insistence at music lessons, but I wasn't interested at the time. It has never hurt my professional abilities to sing, play piano and guitar - not to concert-perfection, but to Sunday-morning Music Ministry level. I was 20 when I really became interested in learning to play and sing. It provided a living for myself for many years, and I now serve the Lord thru music at church.
So, I guess for me, I don't consider laziness or lack of motivation a reason to insist upon the overt development of a childhood talent, and most certainly not a reason to force it within modern methodologies of teams and high paced competition.
As I say, childhood has to have some space to grow and be. I think school work alone and chores and other such basic duties already provide enough areas for self-discipline. I have never considered insisting upon something else on top of it if the child is not interested. There are about 10 competent years of childhood and 50 or more years of adulthood. I still consider there is time.
But I also don't say ignore a child's talent. It is a good thing to see each child's individual gifts and begin to foster them. But this can be done by providing them with means - like helping our son get a digital camera and permitting him to use our computer. I just don't think fostering talents needs to mean all the systems and practices and weekend competitions and heavy-duty hype: there has to be some relaxed family time available.
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