Like father….
I have a son. I’ve loved being a dad for the last 14 years or so and my relationship with him is constantly evolving. It’s great.
We’ve got to the stage where we’re good mates as well as being father and son. When we have a kick about down the park it’s on almost equal terms now. If I have a number problem I’ll get him to do the sums because he’s better than me at it. I’m learning more about biology when he revises than I did a school and with his English, I’d ruin his spelling if I helped.
The only homework I can help him with now is music and that can be a big danger. You see, I had and still have a lot of dreams. In many ways people would say I’m living my dream, earning something of a living playing music and making CD’s. Travelling around and meeting various celebs, doing the rock’n'roll thing. But there’s a problem.
You see when I was 14, I wasted so many opportunities. I got into a lot of trouble and any dreams remained dreams for twenty years. Not that all that time was wasted. I got my life back on track but ended in a 9-5 desk job – it took some big events to shake me into actually acheiving some of my dreams.
But here’s the the thing. 20 years has gone, I can’t get that back. As obvious as that sounds its really easy to unwittingly try and get it back though your kids. There’s the old cliche that says “I don’t want my kids to make the same mistakes that I did”. All very noble but there’s a problem with that.
If I hadn’t made the mistakes I made I probably wouldn’t have a family I have now. I wouldn’t have learnt half the lessons I’ve learnt and I would probably be in that 9-5 desk job.
Last year my son and his mates started a band. They have some big dreams and a way to go. He also started playing with video editing and started a diploma at school studying creative media. And I crashed in with my ideas – homework I could help with. But instead of helping we started falling out more. I’d get cross with him, he’d start to say he was bored with the stuff he was doing and not do as good a job. It got pretty heated and one day my wife told me what the problem was. She said that I had to stop trying to live my dreams through my son.
I stropped, sulked, said I wasn’t and then realised I was. I had to let it go, let him ask me for help when he needed it but otherwise let him do it and learn.
The same with the band. They’re learning to work together, to play better and to cope with triumphs and failures. Stuff I’ve been learning for a while. It’s no good me trying to tell them what will work or how to handle a failure. That wont teach them as well as the experience itself.
So why am I saying all this? Doing what I do, I get to meet a lot of artists. And a suprising number are young teenagers being ‘managed’ by their parents. Sometimes it’s great and it works but a lot of the time it’s like the parent wants the success more than their son or daughter.
The entertainment industry is incredibly unforgiving. I had to step away and think hard about whether I’d want to put my son into the ring without the training or the gloves. If it’s meant to happen then it will, I don’t need to force it and neither to the rest of us parents who have talented kids.
Don’t treat your childs life like an x-factor commodity. Let them discover their dream themselves and be there for them.
