What Does It Mean to Let Your Children Truly Follow their Dreams?

Allowing your children to follow their dreams sounds like the right thing to do, but what does it mean in practice? A mother explores.

As a child, my earliest dream was to become a doctor. By the time I reached middle school, I wanted to study social work and work for the betterment of people. During my boards, I was clear in my head that I wanted to study English literature and psychology. 

Never did I dream of being a teacher. But eventually, I took up commerce and later on became a teacher. While my dreams kept on changing, my parents always supported me. After I gave up my teaching job, I started to write and fell in love with blogging. Today this is what I do for a living. 

That is also the reason that I don’t try to enforce my dreams on my daughter. I have heard, lots of parents saying that they have many dreams for their kids.  But for me, it is always, “you dream, I enable”. I want to empower my daughter so that she can make her own decisions, face failures and learn from her own mistakes.

Here’s what I have learnt from my parents and follow myself diligently. 

It’s important to be flexible

Currently, my daughter aims to be an artist, but you know kids are so fickle-minded that they might want to be anything tomorrow. My neighbour’s son was doing research in one of the IITs and all of a sudden he decided to be a drummer. The best part was that his parents were very flexible about it. So, for kids nowadays, parents need to be flexible with their choice of career and their financial plan should be able to support their dreams.

Hence when I consulted with a few parents from my daughter’s institution, ICICI Prudential Life’s Smart Life became the product of my choice. With a choice to decide between various types of funds, the plan gave me the liberty to choose how to grow my money with the added advantage of securing my kid’s ambitions from any unforeseen events in life.

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Now, I’m sure that no matter what my daughter wants to be, she not only has my emotional support but also my financial support

My daughter is not me; her dreams could be bigger!

There is a huge difference between my daughter and me – she pursues her dreams more passionately than I did at her age. She is very passionate about art and wants to pursue it professionally. My husband and I searched for the best colleges around the world and discovered that the costs were huge.

Moreover, a few years back when we were trying to change our daughter’s school in Gurugram, we were looking for a school that supported co-curricular activities more actively. That’s when we realised how huge education costs are. This is when we realised the importance of prior financial planning. In order to make those dreams a reality, I need to support them with practical planning and foresight. Another life lesson that my parents taught!

Secure your child’s future in your absence

Sometimes when my daughter faces difficulty in completing her project work and seeks advice, I worry how she will manage in case I’m not around to take care of her needs. Now that she is 10 years old, I have started preparing her to become independent and be responsible for her own work. As parents, we always want to be there for our kids. However, we often forget to think about what would happen if we are not there. 

Hence, my husband and I started looking for insurance plans to secure our child’s future and ICICI Prudential Life was the obvious choice for us. Their insurance plans put us on the front foot, with the advantage of securing our investments for our child against any unforeseen events in life. 

Thus, as parents we must be enablers to our future generation. There are a plethora of career choices other than being a doctor or an engineer. We need to make sure we don’t make our kids feel left out in their choice of career. The other day my daughter told me, “Mumma I want to be an artist but most of my friends want to be a doctor, engineer or astronaut”

That’s when I read out this quote by Robert Frost to her, the same one that my Dad had recited to me when I shared with him my apprehensions about giving up a job and to start dabbling in the world of words. 

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, 

And that has made all the difference”.

I think when you are sure of your children’s secure financial future, you will always feel secure enough to give wings to their dreams. 

Image via 123rf.com

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