Give Them the Building Blocks

Your child does a little toddling sprint toward milk and cookies. A friend goes, “Ha! A little Bolt in the making!” Or the little one scrawls a crayon drawing that may or may not resemble anything at all. “Ha! A future Picasso!” A first dip in the deep end of the pool becomes an Olympic gold medal in swimming; a barely audible reading of a class essay becomes a storied career as a White House speech writer. We love the small accomplishments the kids in our lives show us, and we do hold on to the hopes we have for them of great things to come: prestigious careers, enviable skills, talents that they are able to market at least well enough so that we’re not still buying groceries for five people when we’re seventy.

But mainly we just want them to have fun. As adults we have built and continue to build things for ourselves and our families, either literally or figuratively or both, with the ideal outcome being the duplication of our work ethic in our youngsters: a grownup’s idea of fun. To inspire others, especially those little snug-a-bugs, to achievements of their own, is a source of true satisfaction.