I was chatting with a close friend about our high school days recently when a touch of melancholy entered her voice. ‘I forgot I used to play in the orchestra,’ she said, ‘My grandfather kept telling me how it wasn’t going to get me any jobs, and I hated hearing that so much that I stopped.’
The trope has been worn to the ground in media: the big bad greedy parents quash the improbable artistic dreams of their passionate, misunderstood children, the children defy them and become great international successes. We don’t often see the version where that impetuous child runs off, spends their trust fund on an expensive arts degree, only to realize that the market is more competitive than they realized, that their talent is less remarkable in the big city than it was back on the farm, and that in this economy they’ll be lucky to land a minimum wage job.
So when an adult tells a child that they aren’t going to make any money doing what they love, culturally they have to step into the role of the bad guy. This isn’t fair: these admonitions come from a place of love and experience or understanding of poverty.
But they aren’t very helpful.
I asked my friend: what skill did you end up learning instead of cello?
Unsurprisingly, she didn’t have an answer.
. . .
Let me be clear: I was an impractical child and I very much regret not having developed useful skills while I was a teenager. I wish I had taken a computer programming or a shop class; I wish I’d gone to a trade school and learned to do something sensible like carpentry or plumbing; I wish I’d been told a little less about ‘following my dreams’ (I didn’t have any) and a little more about earning a living wage.
But I regret equally that I rejected and devalued artistic pursuits on the understanding (largely self-imposed) that they were impractical. This wasn’t a real judgement, but a fear of being thought soft or naïve: it took me as far as scorn and self-discouragement but not far enough to take any practical steps.
In the Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis writes about the effect of certain kinds of purely discouraging instruction on young minds:
It was with this simple cynical ‘pleasure in my own knowingness’ that I applied myself less earnestly to art, music, writing, any interest that didn’t include a clear path to worldly success. ‘I know this isn’t useful’, I thought with self-satisfied inattention, without bothering to find out what was.
. . .
Quitting the orchestra doesn’t mean that you go to medical school: it just means that you quit the orchestra. And with that, you quit building the skills that come along with it: teamwork, knowing when to stay quiet and when to play fortissimo, the experience of seeing practice pay off, an activity to write on your resume or college applications — not to mention the ability to play the cello. You’ve lost the friends and connections you might have made by joining local orchestras and the keys to a lifelong hobby that could be an important emotional refuge, pleasure, or even just a party trick.
But more than that, I think, you lose a habit of tenacity and the sense of continuity that comes along with it. You lose the sense of follow-through that is key to practical success. You lose the sense of involvement that’s part of what makes grown-ups grown up — a sense, incidentally, that becomes increasingly difficult to develop as the world becomes increasingly virtual.
It’s not very difficult to take your career in a new direction or learn a new skill when you’re 20, or 25, or 30. But it is very hard to recover the drive to create and explore — to be interested, invested — after many years of not trying.
When you’re young, you have a particular advantage. When you’re a teenager, most things occupy so much more space in your world than they do when you’re an adult. I’d be willing to bet that the music you discovered when you were 13, however embarrassing, still feels realer and bigger to you than the (much better) artist you came across last year. Children have a remarkable capacity for attention and passion when it comes to things they care about. But discouraging impractical interests doesn’t necessarily mean that this attention and passion is redirected towards something more useful; I think instead it often comes to lie dormant, and the child is robbed of a valuable set of tools and a certain investment in their own life.
. . .
The answer isn’t exactly revolutionary. Encourage everything. Not scary bad things, of course. But even activities that your kid is going to look back on and cringe at (fan art? bad poetry?) have a use. Even unlikely goals (getting into Juilliard, singing on Broadway, writing a bestseller) provide a helpful forward focus. Resist the urge to pepper discussions of goals and interests with too many reality checks, comparing an exciting activity to practical goals. This usually only has a discouraging effect.
But actively encourage developing practical skills and forming realistic goals as well. When I was a teenager, I didn’t have a clear idea of what this looked like and I needed to be pointed — and perhaps pushed — towards activities that could lay the foundation for a future career.
The important thing is not to create an either/or dichotomy. More times than not, this becomes neither/nor. Both/and tends to sort itself out.
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This post was previously published on A Parent Is Born.
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