Creative Living *family members often try to “protect” children from failure, but what is failure?

How do you feel about creative industries? Because you will find that I will be enabling you to see how valuable creativity is to our abundant world with just one example. Children need to express themselves in ways we possibly cannot remember; and even as adults many of our things are relating to the creative industries. 

Many parents are scared that there are few ‘jobs’ in the arts, but that is limited thinking. As I promised I said I would share with you the abundance of creative industries, in ways that you may or may not understand. 

First of all would anyone want to tie themselves to a ‘job’? With hindsight many elderly people who were denied their dreams of working in arts or creative work and ideas of inventions. The main reason I personally work with children is to pass on the encouragement that I lacked as a young girl. Constantly being told “you can’t do that because ......” for all kinds of strange and creepy reasons my family gave reasons why I couldn’t do something so I would change and then I wanted to study architecture but was told “no it’s too hard for you, just get a job” I then went to study architecture attaining firsts sometimes first pluses and I was in a group of students who knew my full potential.

But my family were busy thinking of ways to get me to do what they wanted me to do and think little about my interest in architecture. The amount of times my mother would tell me “I want a baby, I don’t care who it’s with or if you aren’t married I just want a baby” and it is now said to me that the pressures on my mother and aunt came from their mum, my grandma, what a cop-out!

It can be said that many parents and family members try to “protect” children from failure, but what is failure? There are many things as I mentioned that are designed and we take for granted. How about I tell you the story of the biggest ‘failure’ who’s success surrounds us every day? His name is Thomas Edison.

As a young boy at school he was sent home with a note by his school teacher who strictly instructed Thomas to take it straight to his mother. So he did. She read it and he asked what was in the note. She told him “we have sent your son from school because he is far too intelligent for us to give him the time needed to expand his learning” he felt proud. And his mother homeschooled him. 

And as we all know he invented the light bulb, but he failed by conducting 50,000 experiments that failed until his undaunted faith in his idea to conduct electricity into a light element invention. He went on to invent many items that were modern for his time, a great success. Yet when dealing with his mother’s personal effects following the bereavement of her, he came across the note she kept from the school teacher and it said something extraordinary. 

Inside the note was “your son is an imbecile and we cannot waste our time educating him, please do not send your son back ever again”. His mother gave him the gift many ‘well-meaning’ family members do the opposite of. She gave him an unwavering confidence in himself, unafraid to ‘fail’ not once not twice but over 50,000 times until he got to where he was and still is in history and every home with access to some kind of electricity!

So why hold children back? There is no truly good reason, and the effects of success may be so hard for many people to accept. As expressed in the quote here by Jen Sincero.