By the end of this letter, you'll know how to set your children up to achieve their dreams.
I've written about how my parents' divorce impacted me negatively. About the patterns, wounds, and beliefs I picked up through that experience and how painful and limiting they were. But, I haven't written about what my parents did right that positioned me become the man sitting here writing you today. Together they taught me the foundations of achieving my dreams. And that is what today's letter is about.
Teach your kids to aim high and pursue their dreams with all their energy.
I remember being 14 years old and trying out for the best hockey team in town. I was a year younger than most kids who made the team. Of the 16 boys making the team, 3 or 4 would be my age. All my Mom said about that before tryouts was, "Pick the fastest kid on the ice and keep on his butt." There was no talk about hedging my bets or preparing to be cut. She simply told me to aim high and work as hard as I could.
I did. And I made the team. Mom had taught me Lesson 1 about achieving dreams: aim high and work very hard.
That was a great start, but there are two more parts to setting your kids up to achieve their dreams that I still had to learn. My Dad taught me the second.
Lots of parents have an idea of what they want their kids to be. They have ideas about what careers are acceptable and which aren't. I experienced very little of that growing up. My Dad is a lawyer. At no point did I experience pressure to become a lawyer (if anything, the opposite 😅). Instead of focusing on what to become, my Dad taught me how to think. He'd ask me questions he knew the answer to, just to get me thinking my way to the answer. Through this, I developed the capacity to pursue whatever I wanted.
When your children grow up and face the world, they move from having complete information and instructions for how to succeed—curriculums and tests—to having incomplete information and few instructions for how to succeed. You've got to teach your kids how to think if you want to set them up to achieve their dreams.
The final part of setting your kids up to achieve their dreams is the thing I've seen most parents get wrong. I know many people who have spent years, sometimes their whole lives, doing something they dislike because of a fundamental mistake of their parents.
Ready for it?
You've got to support their dreams (while enforcing high standards).
Does your child want to direct movies? Support them in that. They want to be in the NFL? Support them in that. Do they want to be in the circus? Support them in that. I don't care if you know most people don't make much money in whatever they want to do. The very best make lots of money in every vocation. And the truth is you have no idea. You have no idea how your child's life will play out. Directors of movies may be in extremely high demand in the future. Or maybe their skill set will become valuable for a reason you can't predict. I don't know, and neither do you. But we do know that if your child is doing something they don't want to do, they will underperform and be unfulfilled. That is a fact. There is no way around the truth of what draws their interest. They don't choose what interests them, and neither can you. So support them in it. Be their call to adventure. Invite them to dream bigger, learn more, and be their best. Help them explore why they love whatever they love so you can coach them to choose the best path given their interest. But coach them through pursuing their interest, not replacing it with whatever you think is best.
It's not clear to me how, but my parents gave me the sense I could achieve anything and be anything I wanted to be. They didn't tell me to become one thing or another. They didn't dissuade me from studying what I wanted to study or becoming what I wanted to become.
Instead, they enforced high standards. When my grades got too low, my Dad forced me to drop my least favorite sport. When I wanted to attend a local college, my Mom said, "No. you're going to University". She didn't tell me what to study, but she did tell me where to. Dad didn't tell me what to become, but he did tell me I needed to excel.
Together, they taught me that I can achieve anything I set my mind to. Which, I hope, will help your family as you use the tools we build at Fawn Friends to help you raise your children to be successful and happy.
Your kids don't have a choice about what interests them, and neither do you.
No matter how much energy you put towards persuading your children to be interested in specific work or a specific life, your effort is futile. They don't have control over what attracts their attention, so neither do you. You only get to choose whether you'll help them get on their authentic track or you force them to wait until you're far enough away that they can do it on their own. And you should hope they do, because if they don't they won't be fulfilled. They can't be.
This Jordan Peterson clip does a great job of explaining what I mean. 
To summarize, here are the Three Secrets To Helping Your Child Achieve Their Dreams:
- Teach them to work hard
- Teach them to think for themselves
- Support their dreams while enforcing high standards
If you do, they will live a life you're proud of and they will look back on your support with immense gratitude.
The hard part of all this? When they tell you they want to be something you think isn't right, you'll probably feel fear. That's natural. You've got to process that fear without it getting in the way of how you show up for them. This is delicate. Put energy towards getting it right.
Peter
p.s. I sense you're doing a fantastic job as Mom or Dad—keep it up.