weatherwax's Profile

I think some people are taking this a little too personally when it comes to finances and career paths.

You give a kid cardboard boxes, newspaper clippings, basic art materials like crayons and posterpaints and blue tack. Well, you got everything a kid needs to make their imaginative world with those items. We never had money. I never went to lessons. Still, I was given the tools to make it all possible. I turned my room into an art studio by sticking all my drawings on the walls and my brother turned his room into an ocean by cutting out pictures of marine creatures and sticking them on his walls! Give your kids the tools and they'll make it possible.

As for career paths, let's face it, it's unlikely your child will be the first cowboy spacemouse but isn't to say you should reject the idea. Instead, take your child's ambitions seriously. My parents did. When I wanted to be an artist they did everything they could to encourage me. They'd tell all their friends I wanted to be an artist, would show my drawings to others. They really made me feel confident, even when I had a massive ambition change at six and wanted to be an actress. They did the same to my brother who wanted to be a spy, then a marine biologist, then a physics professor and then, finally, a musician.

Had my mother decorated my room pink with purple and took all my Van Gogh books away and replaced them with barbie dolls, I'd have been absloutely heart broken. It should never be about what you think your child should be. They're little people and if you reject their dreams, you're rejecting them and it hurts when you're too young to understand. I have a friend whose parents wanted her to be a violinist. They invested a lot of time and money into their dream of her being a violinist. She was very unhappy and so at last threw caution to the wind and ran off to follow her own dreams of directing. You can't make a kid something they're not.

Oh and I became an artist. I'm working on the actress part.