Dreams

Every infant‘s first breath is filled with his parent’s dreams. The swaddling clothes, wrapped tightly around flailing arms and legs, are woven with expectations that might once have been spread over as many as ten, or twelve children.

No longer fostered by wet nurses who hang their charges up in rows along the wall, today’s children still find themselves on foreign ground. The blacksmith’s son is tended to by the music teacher’s wife and the scribe’s child by a dairy maid. Is it any wonder that conflict arises?

Leaving home at the same tender age as Hansel and Gretel, our children don’t even have the benefit of the old stories. It never occurs to them to take along a piece of bread in order to find their way home. They simply wander off into the world, knowing that their parents are too busy to notice.

Over wrought, over worked, under educated in the most important subject they will ever deal with, parents stumble along hoping that nature will succeed wherever they fall short and by some stroke of luck, these tiny creatures they barely know will turn out to be race car drivers or doctors, lawyers or teachers. And the top few percent do, because they will succeed no matter what.

Unfortunately many children simply flounder on desperately trying to impress the ones who gave them life, trying to get their sea legs under them before they even see the harbor, and being eaten alive by the orcas who throw themselves upon the shore looking for unsuspecting pups. Promising new lives are ended before they even begin.

Tough love is not the same thing as neglect and power plays. Saving face and impressing the neighbors is not the same thing as success. Parenting is not a soap opera chocked full of emotional drama that can be turned off twenty three hours a day.

Slow, steady, consistent and kind, the rules for living must be put in place one at a time until they stick and each child is independent, successful and mature. The formula stays the same, but the data changes all the time.

Dreams, or nightmares? It really depends on the parents.