So often I over-hear mothers asking their little ones a questions and I tell myself "No I will never ask my son that question".
What will you be when you grow up? That is the most common and often repeated question. Mothers I asked claim that the question will set their children thinking about their future, would make them ambitious and will encourage them to study harder. I love the answers they receive, I will be a bus driver, a barber, I will be an engine driver, a policeman. I hear the mothers mutter things like" you are too young to answer that","Hey those jobs wont make you as successful as dad". I cannot stand the pep talks mothers give soon after the answers. "May be you should be a doctor, or a computer engineer, may be a bank manager". Thanks to the ignorance of childhood, the child sees heroes in the 'workmen', the barber, the cobbler, the tailor and the bus-driver.
How today's mothers and indeed parents have forgotten that all little children grow up to be characters- Chacracters they the parents influence heavily and will be formed before the child turns six. How they seemed to have forgotten that children are not born with the sole purpose of pursuing a career and making money. How they have ceased to remember that children are made in the likeness of God and they distort this God-likeness to petty ambitions and drives for success. How they fail to acknowledge that long before the lives of their children are over their careers will be over. Then these children will roam the face of the earth with bitterness and resentment, loneliness and sheer lack of identity.
I will never ask my son what he wants to be when he grows up. My desire is to bring up as a 'man after God's own heart'. So someday soon I will tell him what Martin Luther King said "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well"
What will you be when you grow up? That is the most common and often repeated question. Mothers I asked claim that the question will set their children thinking about their future, would make them ambitious and will encourage them to study harder. I love the answers they receive, I will be a bus driver, a barber, I will be an engine driver, a policeman. I hear the mothers mutter things like" you are too young to answer that","Hey those jobs wont make you as successful as dad". I cannot stand the pep talks mothers give soon after the answers. "May be you should be a doctor, or a computer engineer, may be a bank manager". Thanks to the ignorance of childhood, the child sees heroes in the 'workmen', the barber, the cobbler, the tailor and the bus-driver.
How today's mothers and indeed parents have forgotten that all little children grow up to be characters- Chacracters they the parents influence heavily and will be formed before the child turns six. How they seemed to have forgotten that children are not born with the sole purpose of pursuing a career and making money. How they have ceased to remember that children are made in the likeness of God and they distort this God-likeness to petty ambitions and drives for success. How they fail to acknowledge that long before the lives of their children are over their careers will be over. Then these children will roam the face of the earth with bitterness and resentment, loneliness and sheer lack of identity.
I will never ask my son what he wants to be when he grows up. My desire is to bring up as a 'man after God's own heart'. So someday soon I will tell him what Martin Luther King said "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well"
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