Hi everyone, welcome back! Last week I examined the various reasons why you are already important and valuable especially when your mind doesn’t think that you ‘do’ anything important or valuable in this world. This week, since it’s that time of the year when kids are in the process of getting their grades for the current year and are moving on to next class/college, I would like to examine the importance of grades in one’s life/future. So, here is my belief for this week.
Belief: If my kid doesn’t get the 99.9% grades, they will lag behind their friends and peers and will end up being NOT successful and therefore NOT happy in life!
Because today’s post is going to touch a lot of nerves (especially in the Indian and similar communities), I just want to remind everyone before I begin to write, that this is only my point of view and you, as a parent, as a reader of this blog, are free to choose whether to agree or disagree :)…its ultimately your life and therefore your choice!
Alright, so here is what I believe – I believe that this is the biggest lie that we teach our kids which is that if they work very hard to get very good grades when they are in school or college, life will be smooth sailing forever!! And this is the biggest lie because as I have mentioned in my previous posts, life happens to everyone; even the ones who are highly intelligent, highly accomplished, amazingly beautiful, amazingly talented! Life spares absolutely no one! And because life happens to everyone, it will still throw curve-balls, it will still bring disappointments, it will still be full of failures, it will still be about heart-breaks and heart-aches regardless of what grades your kids get in their school/college. But because as parents, we focus completely on our kids grades and expect them to get the best grades among their friends and peers, what we are unconsciously teaching our kids is that life will NOT happen to them if they get very good grades!! Life will not bring along disappointments to live with, life will not bring along failures to learn from, life will not bring along heart-aches to endure; life will be without all these things or challenges only if they can get the best grades!!
On top of that, when we tie everything to getting good grades, we also teach our kids that their success in life, their happiness in life, their own value and worth in life, pretty much their entire life is totally dependent upon whether or not they can get really good grades. And because these are just kids and they are still learning what life is really about, they believe their parents and buy into their lies. And because they buy into these lies, they begin their journey of ‘working very hard to get the best grades’ even though they may know deep down in their hearts that it’s not what they are really capable of doing because not every kid can score the highest grades! And what this journey does to a kid is it creates unimaginable fear inside them and out of this fear and not for the love of learning they try to do their best and make their parents proud and happy. And yes, some kids are able to pull this grades thing off, however, the rest of the kids, they become either huge disappointments for their own parents and just live with it; or some other kids, even in the face of disappointments, they are able to grab on to their own will power and creativity and do their own thing. But there are some, who, because they can’t bear to live with their parents’ disappointed faces, choose to end their lives instead! And you only need to grab a newspaper to get an understanding of the rapidly increasing number of such kids! But you know what the irony in all of this is, each and every single one of these kids who choose to end their lives, when they were born, their parents must have been very proud and thankful to have them in their lives. They were their parents’ perfect little kids when they were born but somewhere along the way all that changed because life happened! And even though their grades may not have mattered in the bigger picture of life, yet, they didn’t even get a chance to create that life for themselves because someone else thought it was their job to create it for them.
But I would like to ask you, as a parent and as an adult, do you realize how absolutely ill-equipped you will be leaving your kid if you do not teach them about the realities of life; about the challenges that came into your own life and what you had to do to overcome them; about the heart-aches that you had to face and the sadness you felt in your own heart and how you learned to live with it, about the failures that you encountered in your own life and the things that these failures taught you about yourself and life itself! Yes, let’s take every opportunity we can get to talk and teach them through our own examples about these realities of life and watch how their confidence grows; how they begin to understand that life is not just about getting good grades, it’s also about reaching for that feeling of love even though you don’t think you can love any more. It’s about getting up one more time to try again even though you don’t think you can even manage to get up any more. It’s about learning to let go of the hurt and disappointment even though you don’t think you can forgive what was done to you. It’s about learning how to be happy and to accept and appreciate even the small things in life even when you think you didn’t get what you wanted from life. This is what life is really about…to me, what’s it about to you?
And as always, feel free to leave a comment, if you feel like leaving one. And until next Friday, live life 🙂
