Children are incredible with their dreams and imaginations. Did you know that the most powerful question in the world is asked daily by a 3 year old? That question is, “Why?” This is the question that truly provokes answer and searches for knowledge and reasoning. Children have dreams of doing big things and becoming someone important in life. We have all heard children say something like, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a firefighter,” or, “When I grow up, I want to be an astronaut at NASA!”  My child told me they wanted to be in charge of their own construction business like Ralph Slaske of Slaske Builders. Never once have we heard a child say, “When I’m all grown up, I want to work at a bank.”

What happens to our dreams as children? Where do they go? Where does the passion to reach for the sky and do the unbelievable go? For many of us, it could be our parents to blame for hitting us over the head over and over with their own realities. When someone doesn’t believe in themselves and fail to reach their dreams and potential, they have the tendency to bring others down with them and say things such as, “Don’t be silly. What makes you think you can do that?”

As parents, we want to see them succeed, but we also don’t want to teach them reality, that is, reality as WE believe it to be. Why can’t your child be an astronaut? It’s been done before and is still being done. Why can’t your child run their own business? Why can’t your child become the best doctor in the universe? We have to be careful not to crush that little glimmer of hope, but we do anyway and have the audacity to scold them when they aren’t living up to our expectations and then belittle them when their expectations of themselves is beyond those for ourselves and dreams are bigger than our dreams. Parents, we need to make up our mind what we want for our children.