Owning Their Own Ambition
Recognizing and respecting children’s innate motivation
A few years ago, while listening to the car radio, I heard that “kids aren’t born with ambition.” It was one of those annoying “parenting minute” advertorials – a paid advertisement masquerading as sage advice from an expert. Because, you know, summer is coming and kids stop learning then. [Insert eye roll] Anyway, to remedy that learning loss, parents were instructed to assign ten tasks to their child. Then they were supposed to observe which of them interests the kid and then pressure them into ambitiously cultivating those interests. Unfortunately, that manipulative pressure has a good chance of destroying a kid’s basic interest in any topic, let alone any enthusiasm and energy they might have had about pursuing it.
However, kids are born with ambition – i.e. a strong desire to work hard pursuing something they want or need. They are driven, right from birth, to achieve things – to get from one side of the room to the other in an efficient way, to find the words that will make people understand their needs, to feed themselves and tie their own shoelaces, to climb ever higher on the playground equipment.
But what the parenting “expert” I heard on the radio was talking about involves second-hand “ambition.” She was referring to the need schools and most parents have to get kids to do their homework, to turn in neatly written essays using pre-packaged templates, to pay attention in class, to study subjects in which they have little interest, to do well on tests, to focus on some kind of pre-determined-by-adults goal of material “success.” A kid who balks at doing those things is said to be lacking ambition.
However, what’s happening there is that the adults’ lack of respect for human nature in general and for their kids in particular is resulting in a loss of innate ambition. Kids are told they’re not ambitious enough because they don’t share the goals that adults have set for them. They lose their self-esteem because boredom and disinterest in inauthentic situations results in their being told they’ll never make anything of themselves. They become passive followers because they’re never allowed to make decisions for themselves. In short, adults who fail to respect and trust children’s own needs and interests destroy their motivation.
That is actually not surprising because most adults have never seen a kid who has been respected. Unfortunately, many parents are overly ambitious and untrusting or are unable to respect themselves let alone nurture and respect their children. Perhaps someday there will be enough school-free kids around to demonstrate to these adults what happens when people are allowed to remain motivated by their own interests, passions, and goals.