It becomes a kid’s whole life to make themselves loveable to their parents, and it eats them alive every day. But their parents don’t know that because they think that everything they do, especially how pushy they are with their child, will make them better. In reality, it just makes that child feel isolated and that they must achieve their parents’ goals before having any fun. Youtuber Simon Kim mentions, “It’s not like if you want to be successful, you have to be lonely.” Some parents are so focused on making their kid become a successful person in the future that they forget that their kids deserve a successful childhood too. Allowing their kids to be creative and express themselves, honestly makes them stand out in a crowd of kids who were always driven to meet their parents’ goals.
Kids, especially young ones, will notice from an early age that their parents care more about their image of their child in the future than the kid they are currently are. As Barry Lopez once said in his essay, it is pretty “remarkable…that children notice these things”. These kids grow up with a sense of making their parents proud to get a little of their parents’ love, or otherwise they feel like they’re a failure. I have always been an A student for my mom. She’s the one who had always pushed me to be better because I had that potential in comparison to my other siblings. Within all of my siblings, we all have something we’re really good at. But my mom doesn’t really look at those because they aren’t a measurement like having good grades. There’s not anything to compare our talents with. Whereas in school, an A is the highest grade you can get. So she would use our grades as a measurement of whether she’s proud of us or not.
The one job any parent is supposed to do is to love their child unconditionally. But this doesn’t seem so easy when you find out a lot of kids feel the need to make their parents proud of them. On top of that, if that kid ever branches out, and finds who they are and their parents don’t love them for them that leaves this gaping hole in their heart. The thing that makes someone someone is their “reason to live”, yet a person that shares the same blood as them feels like they have that place to disagree with someone’s reason. Along with that, there are plenty of parents out there that feel like they should complain to their kids for having to take care of them by feeding them and putting a roof over their heads. If any parent doesn’t want to take care of another person, then don’t have a kid. Get a fish or something.
“I guess sometimes the most beautiful selfless thing can be found in the act of letting go.”
– Simon Kim
Parents should be there for their kids as their support systems. It’s not a parent’s job to mold their child to become someone great. No one should let go of their parents. But if someone feels like that’s what they need to do; that’s on them. By letting go of them, in the sense of not having to please them every second of every day, will make anyone feel so much free as they simply don’t have this pressure to succeed from their parents. This allows anyone to be their own person, and have their own definition of being successful.
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