Dear Parents,
I’ve never had any children, I’ve never been responsible for taking care of or supporting another human being and I have no idea what it is like to feel that overwhelmingly love for a child. I am not a parent and I have no idea what it is like to be one. However, I’ve spent my entire life so far dependent on parents.
Looking back on my own childhood and my interactions with my parents, I think that I have suffered from not having the ability to express or explore my own individuality or personal self. I think there needs to be recognition that just because someone is a child, doesn't mean they are not also individual human beings with thoughts, beliefs and desires different that those you may have raised them to be. I think parents overestimate the influence they need to have in a child’s life. I think parents in the simplest form are to do nothing but give children the building blocks necessary for life and that it is up to the child to decide what they want to build with those blocks.
I dont think that everything I have learned or been taught is wrong, but I am examining them and I am starting to deem some things not in line with who I am or what I want. Looking back on how I was raised, I would like for their to be more independence and understanding that even if a child is a child, they are still a person and there will be a day when they will no longer see themselves as a child. I understand the need to prepare them for life, but I think more focus should be put on preparing them for themselves. The journey of finding, accepting and embracing oneself. Treat kids as individuals who can go beyond being a child, because no matter what, sooner or later there comes a time when we aren't your little babies anymore. I felt in my own childhood that I was constantly seen as someone who needed to be taught to follow certain rules that were deemed crucial for my life. However, as I am growing up, my innate beliefs and the person I see myself becoming are making me question everything i have been taught.
To my parents,
As I am preparing to go off into the world, I am struggling to figure out who I am separate from you. May be in the future I will look back and now that everything you taught me was right and true, or I'll have kids and understand the struggle of guiding another human being. And maybe I'm wrong about all of this, but as of right now, I think that a child needs to understand that they don't have to be extensions of who their parents are, nor do they need to be whoever their parents spent 18 years trying to make them into. Children are innocent and empty of life experience but they are also (and in my opinion more importantly) individuals who should learn about and embrace themselves above all else. I accept, understand and appreciate all that you have taught me, but I will not let it overpower my own thoughts or who I am. I am going off to college and for the first time in my life I feel very detached and astray, but liberated and divergent at the same time. I think that I am becoming myself, and while I have collected your teachings and may utilized some of them, it is only now that I realize i will can so at my own discretion. I refuse to live in your world anymore. My world is my own. I will always be your child, with your blood, your physical features and hold your guidance and teachings in the back of my head. However, I from now on I will be my own self.
