Our Kids

At a recent homeschool conference I went to I heard a very engaging and informative speaker who touched on the topic of embracing who your child is instead of trying to change them. Here is a story she told about her family. They were traveling across the country speaking and she told her DH and 4 kids that they would have Mexican food when they stopped that night, everyone seemed noncommittal and fine with it (she has 3 boys and one girl all teens). That night as they drove in she spotted a seafood restaurant and said hey how about seafood. Everyone was excited about seafood except the daughter. It wasn’t that she did not like seafood but that she had been told they were having Mexican for dinner. Everyone else in the car teased her, told her to lighten up, go with the flow and all those kitschy sayings. It was only years later as the mother began to study how we learn that she realized she was not accepting her daughter for who she was, she was instead expecting her to go with the flow since that is the way the rest of the family was, easygoing and spontaneous.

The end of the story is a happy one with the mother accepting that she had a daughter that did not like change, did not appreciate spontaneity, liked things the way they were and such. The daughter has gone on to use all those gifts toward helping to build water supplies for third world countries where she applies her stick to it attitude and desire for organization and planning to benefit others (and herself).

I have to tell myself this story often in my head when Lela refuses to budge on the slightest things. She likes things the way she likes them, she likes things where she likes them and she likes to do things the way she likes to do them. I know in order for her to be successful she (and I) have to embrace these qualities that make her who she is and will enable her to become the successful adult she is destined to be.