What do you do to help inspire your preschooler? What do you want your preschooler to feel inspired by?
I don’t often think about excellence when it comes to my daughter. Like all parents, I want her to be happy when she grows up, to be sure. I would also like her to make enough money to live a comfortable life. However, as a girl who was interested in science, I felt plenty pushed towards excellence as a child and I am reluctant to do much pushing.
Yet here I am in the city that is hosting the Winter Olympics. While I have my qualms about the amount of money that the Olympics costs, I do love the athletic aspect. I have never been a phenomenal athlete, but I have done a lot of swimming and some running in the past. In fact, after my daughter was born I decided to train for a marathon, mostly to raise money for diabetes research and partially to complete a personal goal. I finished a very slow marathon in August 2008, when my daughter was three. I must say that our Canadian hero Terry Fox was an inspiration to me. If he could run a marathon a day on a prosthetic leg, then I could run a single marathon with type one diabetes.
I don’t want to be a helicopter parent who coddles her child and enrolls her in multiple classes so that she can become a language master, a violin virtuoso, and a mathematician by the time she is five. I want my daughter to play. In fact, the other day I asked her what her favorite activity was, with an eye to adding some encouragement and inspiration, maybe a class or two. “Playing,” was her reply.
However, I am encouraging my daughter to watch the Olympics and we are going to a Paralympic event. While I don’t think that all athletes are great personal role models, their dedication is to be commended. While watching skiing and skating may not inspire my daughter to a life of athletic prowess, I hope that it inspires her to a life of being dedicated to her goals, athletic or otherwise.