Pre-schools with entrance exams. Year-round exorbitantly-priced athletic clubs. Competitive dance studios for six-year olds. Toddlers and Tiaras. Competitive Child Raising seems to be reaching a new level of intensity, all in the name of parental support and enrichment of a child's life. But is it? Really? Are parents fighting their children into the minivan to go to the fifth soccer practice that week because they feel it enriches their child's life? Are they forking out what would have been a nice summer vacation for a fuschia spandex outfit because they want to support their child on her dance team? There's being involved, and then there's "parental involvement". As a new dad, and a teacher, I feel the biggest priority for children is to experience as many different things as possible without being forced to specialize, or "find their passion". As Betsy Brown braun stated in her article, Finding Their Passion…Really?, “Children need to experience a whole lot of life before they should be expected to find and settle down into one "shoe that fits."

The idea that a kid can take an interest that they had at six years old, be it cheerleading, baseball, or pageants, and make that a life-long passion is ridiculous. However, there is a prevailing notion among many parents that once a child finds their passion they’ll want to spend all of their time developing those strengths and will be on the path to a successful future. Often, however, the “passion” that child develops has more to do with the parent’s own hang-ups or interests than it does with the child’s. A child’s interests are cultivated naturally, and organically (that means they change) over time. Children find out what their strengths are, find out what peer groups are also interested, and change from one overriding interest to another. It’s one in a million, the Mozarts and Da Vincis out there,  that find their “passion” at the age of five and pursue that until life’s end. A parents job is to facilitate a breadth of experience early on, and as they grow older, steer them and support them in those interests that seem to be sticking around.

If I think back to my own childhood, I didn’t always like what my parents made me do (sorry Mrs. Murphy, I hated piano), but I only had to stick with it for a single “season” or “year if that was the case. However, if it was something I truly enjoyed, then I could pursue it as far as I wanted with my parents’ blessing and support. In this way I collected my passions along the way; basketball in 3^rd grade, bass guitar in 7^th grade, writing in 9^th grade, and theater in 11^th. At no point was I constrained to one singular activity in which I participated year-round. That’s how you build a commodity, not raise a child, and I think it has a lot more to do with how the parents feel they’re viewed than with how the children feel they’re “enriched”.