Of fans and fanatics
Like many children, our son prefers to go to the toilet during dinner. The other day he had been sitting there for a while when he suddenly started singing a song. With verse and chorus. My wife and I looked at each other. For the first time in a long time, we thought the same thing: music lessons. Recital evenings. Arias in concert halls. So it pays off that I played him my favourite music early on and ignored the comment that his fluffy cat doesn't like Schubert.
However, our son only sings on the toilet. If we want to impress other people with his talent, we have to invite them round for dinner. This is the misfortune of many parents: their children's exceptional talent is often so subtle that only they can notice it.
«He has a high level of emotional intelligence,» a mother recently told me in the playground about her son, whom I had previously observed kicking two other children in the arse.
Education is always projection. And when it comes to our children's abilities, the magnifying glass is often particularly large. If they make a paper cut, they are at the beginning of an artistic career. If they cut a carrot, we can already see the gourmet chef. And if it just sits around and picks its nose, we recognise the essence of a philosopher.
We often see our own dreams reflected in our children's talents and the hope that they will not experience the same disappointments.
All parents should be fans of their children - without becoming fanatics. «Am I living out my own repressed desires here?», you should ask yourself, for example, when you are about to buy your child a saxophone for their fifth birthday.
We often simply see our own dreams reflected in the talents of our children and the hope that they will not experience the same disappointments. But dreams cannot be generalised. Everyone wants something different. Everyone experiences their own successes and disappointments.
The ethos of time
My mum used to tell me about her childhood with passionate pathos. What all these stories had in common was that talent always seemed like a burden. «Just don't stand out» was the ethos of the time. «Be like everyone else.»
Today, the pressure to individualise in our society is so great that you can't start early enough to find a role for yourself. «Be different» is the order of the day. And then be that different until you can turn it into a business model on social media.
Children are characterised by the fact that they are still nobody. Their greatest talent is curiosity. However, this also means that one moment they are passionately playing with the physics box (and we are already studying the application requirements for Cern with feverish eyes), but for the next two years they don't give the box a second glance.
If there is one thing we as parents should really encourage, it is this openness. Children still have enough time in their lives to be someone. Let them be nothing at first - except a child.
Nevertheless, we recently invited a few friends to a concert evening. We gathered in front of the toilet with the chairs. We had piccata milanese and the well-known aria «I Like to Move It, Move It».
