The Parent Talk: “Greatness” and Motivation

What is it with us parents – why can’t we just let our children be? Of course, encourage them to explore the world around them and their own responses to it, encourage them to build a relationship with the world and other people, but why put this heavy burden of our expectations on a little guy’s or a little girl’s shoulders? After all, these are all our own expectations that don’t have anything to do with our children’s passions and fulfillment.

So our son loves music. With every atom of his little being. We greatly enjoy his passion for music. Quite frankly, if I spent any time wondering what my son would be like and what he might like, music was the last thing that came to my mind. I certainly don’t consider myself very musical, and my husband seems to be more musical than I am, but playing music is not his passion. Rather, I thought, my son might love mathematics, like my father did (and like I did, the path I abandoned way too early in Serbian quite inflexible school system). Or, he might develop a passion for solving computer problems, like my husband, and he might delight in computer security and analyzing the codes that seem to me like they are beyond comprehension for any regular member of the human species. Or, like my husband, he might develop love of plants and animals, or of photography, or maybe, he might even love writing. My last thought was always, I don’t know, I don’t care, it’s none of my business, but I hope he has a passion, or two.

Now, at the age of two and a half, he loves music more than he loves anything else. I can’t even remember how old he was when we first noticed his passion for music. Maybe it was Goran Bregovic and his music that Andrei first fell in love with.  Sometime last spring, when he was about eighteen months. He would watch videos of Goran Bregovic and his orchestra’s performances and play his toy drum along. He spent many hours pretending he was playing a flute or a horn or whatever instrument he saw in the videos while using all sorts of objects (some random PVC pipe we had lying around, pen, syringe, etc.). Or he would play his drum, flute recorder, xylophone, toy piano – for hours.

Then, his toy drum broke. For several days I listened to Andrei using a toy tambourine as a drum, and that was more than I could stand. I ordered bongo drums online and paid for express shipping, hoping for a more pleasant if not less loud sound.