Again,tell all that to Mozart's childhood.SwiftSpear wrote:The brain isn't that easy to developmentally guide. There are fundamental genetic personality differentials between people, and there are SO SO SOOOOOOO many little factors in a persons developmental history that are somewhere between insanely hard and impossible to really nail down from a parenting perspective. Parents by enlarge just CAN'T guide their kid into one field or another, it, largely speaking, does not work almost at all. There's just too much inherent difference between people, even genetically.Gota wrote:Depends what sort of kids you want to create.
If you want everyone to be as similar as possible than yes.
if you want a wide range of people with different outlooks and experience and ideas than maybe setting up a single mold is not the best idea.
Also the "let them choose what they want" is more of an illusion...
When you can do something extremely well in many cases your motivated by your own ability..
I wonder if Mozart wanted to be say...a banker...after he became famous for his music.
any way you look at it to be extremely good at something and stand out of the crowed you need to start doing it as early as possible.
Giving children the opportunity try many different activities gives them the opportunity to develop a breath of life skills that they can take in many different potential directions. Even entirely ignoring that if left to their own devices kids will do this as much as possible anyways, it should be taken as fact that parents should encourage their kids to do many different things and not be too focused on any one thing. I don't see how that can be construed as a "mold". I'm not, nor would I ever say "your child should do exactly 30 minutes of soccer, and then exactly 30 minutes of piano, and then blah blah...." The whole point is that after trying something a child may like it more or less than other things and conversely spend more or less time on it, and therefore naturally guide the development of their skills into an area that they are interested in.
If you don't like "do what they want" then replace it anywhere I said it with "choose to not be forced to do something the absolutely hate", because that's more accurate to the meaning I'm trying to convey. If my parents decided when I was 4 years old that I was going to be an accountant and that was the only thing I was going to be trained to do from then on, I DEFINITELY would have killed myself by now. Computers and language teaching (the two fields I'm studying right now) respectively may not be supremely fun and everlasting sources of happiness for me, but I'm pretty satisfied with them, and the amount of related stuff that I absolutely hate doing is far outweighed by the stuff that I find rewarding and satisfying.
There are so many blend people in the world...
Their childhoods might have been very liberal and they did all they wanted but how many of those became exceptional, how many remembered after their lives ended?and how many more remembered hundreds of years after their lives?
a child does not know what he wants, in most cases and surely not what he will want as an adult.
Oh sure you can give kids a general education and let them choose when they are adults but how will they compete in their chosen profession with those that have been going at it for their entire childhood or most of it?
How will thye rise above mediocrity?
Maybe sometimes the question is, indeed,"do you want a happy person or a brilliant one?".
There are always regrets in life, if you married and have a family,if you devoted yourself completely to your work or art or traveled around the world etc etc...
Who says the regrets followed as a consequence of being focused on one specific thing and being exceptionally good at it are worse than the regrets of mediocrity/commoness or other life style choices?
