Today, I am addressing a question I receive every time Emir is cooking live on Facebook:
Why doesn’t Yaya cook along with Emir?
When we talk about enabling our children we have to be objective. This is not about making them do things based on our needs or personal expectations towards independence! This is all about learning how to focus on their individual interests as we help them develop that independence in the most motivating and natural way for them as individual human beings.
Do I feel my daughter needs to cook to gain skills for independence? Of course not. I feel I need to keep supporting her own individual dreams. She loves cameras. She adores telling stories. She wants to have her own YouTube channel and to be an actress. She loves drawing, she loves fashion, she is in love with the beauty of the world and she is feminine and strong at the same time. It is not her dream to cook, and that is completely fine.
To families and parents, I invite you to set aside the preconceived notion that for a person to be functional he or she needs to know how to cook or clean. A person needs to develop his or her own unique abilities to be not only functional but happy; otherwise, we are trapping our children in our own limitations instead of looking at their possibilities.
There are two simple questions that can really help you enable your child as you support his or her strengths:
First and most important: Do they want to do this?
It’s not about you or anyone else, it should be all about them. “Does my daughter, Ayelen, want to cook? No, she doesn’t.” Okay then. What does she want to do and how can her personal interests be developed in a way which will help her independence and life skills?
The second question once you have realized what they want to do: Can they do it?
If the question is yes, go ahead and set a plan to give them the opportunity.
- If the answer is no, take a moment to really analyze the situation.
- What does your child already have?
- What do they need?
How do we provide what they are missing in order to help them grow their passion and fulfill their desire?
They are kids and young people so passion doesn’t come with functionality. It will take time, repetition, and consistency to develop new resources and abilities to master their goal.
When parents learn to make this distinction they can really help their children be happy, feel complete, and live with passion and motivation. And this applies to every child, and in reality, to every human being. Who we are and what we want for ourselves should always be our first question. How to get it comes second. Both answers help us set our life’s goals to live with intention even in the hardest of times.
