With rain-soaked terrain, fallen trees have cut power to my neighborhood with increasing frequency despite a lack of snow. On a sunny day, a text notification comes across my phone that the power is out . . . again. With each such notification, I consider what I have in my refrigerator and how the lack of power will impact my business, home temperature, plans, and attitude. My expectation for consistent power and the disruption of that expectation can send me reeling. These experiences, along with other disappointments, have made me reflect on how our expectations can affect our children and us.
Our hopes and dreams are many. We dream of our children reading early, becoming star soccer players, excelling as students, slaying their AP classes, enrolling at a four-year selective college, preferably Chapel Hill, taking over the family business, meeting the perfect mate at just the perfect age, and, eventually, producing adorable grandchildren for us to shower with love. Rarely are these dreams fully realized. How we anticipate and react to our “disappointments” can shape our – their – experiences.
Indeed, I believe that expectations often paralyze us: they stifle creativity, individuality, and our ability to become real catalysts, and they suppress our growth. Adapting our habits and attitudes and moving beyond our expected roles can lead to innovation and fulfillment. Robert Frost had it right: the road not taken really does make all of the difference. I marvel at how we seem to promote the expected itinerary to our children when our heroes usually traveled far afield.
As your children choose next year’s academic courses; as they consider whether they will take a “different” path by attending community college, by taking a gap year, by learning a trade, by applying for a job, by enlisting in service; as they contemplate any number of paths that vary from our expectations, we, as parents, need to embrace their initiatives (or at least openly consider them). Our children will make some mistakes and take some wrong turns, but their journeys will be profoundly changed, often for the better, by making them their own. I challenge you to monitor your reactions to such “disappointments” - to adapt to new terrain, to pave a new path, and to allow that new journey to exceed your expectations. Do not be constrained by what is expected or by what has been “proven to work in the past.”