Dream Catcher or Dream Maker
I want to be a professional basketball player. I am 5’1” and poorly coordinated. But being a professional B-ball player has always been my dream. My parents do not want to be the people to tell me that I cannot catch this dream no matter how fast I run. They do not want to destroy my dream. Is that a good idea?
Many kids with disabilities have lots of dreams they are chasing to catch. Some of our students want to be professional rock music stars. It looks like a great gig. All of that money and all of that adulation. WOW! Seems great. Truth is most folks without disabilities aren’t going to do that. But suppose a child wants to be something more mundane. Maybe my child wants to be a veterinarian. She really loves animals and wants to work with them. For starters there are no schools of veterinarian medicine in Maryland so she would need to go to the school in Virginia that has an agreement with Maryland. And it is very tough to get in as you might imagine. Well what if my child loves to cook and wants to be a chef in a restaurant. That should be easy. There is more to being a chef than just being a great cook. The hours are LONG. The pressure intense and there is often a lot of noise and hollering in a commercial kitchen. Can your child handle all that?
Most importantly when is the right time to tell my child that he/she is just not going to catch that dream.
The truth is the sooner we help our kids look at reality the better. Making informed choices for adult careers is not destroying dreams, it is making different dreams come true.
As parents and teachers we need to make the full reality of any dream we want clear. There are more variables to choosing a career than just “liking” to do some part of the work. Sure it is important to want to work with animals if you are going to be a veterinarian. But there are lots of other “work with animals” jobs that have different demands that might more reasonably fit a person’s skill set. Working with our kids we can make differing dreams come true. And we should. We do not serve our children’s best interests if we waste the career preparation time available to us letting our children think they can catch that dream. We need to work with our children to engage all of their talents and align those talents with the demands of another dream that together we can make come true.
Working with the advantages available we can make dreams come true for our children and stop chasing the ones that are just a bad fit.
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