Be the best?
Art : Bonsai Girl…
By Sakuan.
So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that statement “be the best.” I’ve come to a conclusion that that’s the wrong way to look at life, hence the wrong thing to teach your children. I came to think about it when I remembered how a lot of parents encourage their kids to be at the top of their class, both academically and sports-wise. In order to fully understand the concept, I put myself in a parent’s shoe, I asked myself, “what would I tell my child in regard to his or her school performance?” would I tell them… would I encourage them to be the best in their class, take the first place every time? And trust me I really thought about that for a long time and the conclusion I came with was NO. I came to that conclusion when I put myself as each child’s parent in that class, I acted like all the kids in the classroom were my children. So I imagined myself standing in front of the classroom and telling them, “hey you need to be number one, you need to be the best.” Then I came to realize that’s not fair to them because it’s impossible for all of them to take the first place, that would be torture. I thought about it, what I was to tell the class was the same advice I should give my child, it had to be something that’s fair or close to fair and made sense. I came up with, “strive to be your best don’t strive to be the best, compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not what someone else is today.” That made sense to me because my experience in life so far is that not everybody can be a winner, in a marathon there’s only one winner, in a competition there’s only one winner. If you got a D in your last test, aspiring to pass everybody in the next exam and be number one isn’t healthy and in the grand scheme of things, it’s not practical. I feel like the practical thing is to aspire to do better than a D. It’s not fair to force your kids to be at the top of their class when circumstances won’t allow them to. One example, maybe the kid in your child’s class who’s always at the top has expensive tutors that their parents are paying for, and here you are expecting the child that you don’t provide such resources for to beat the other kid, how is that fair? Please help me understand… PLEASE…
