【Description】
When a child wants to work at a part-time job during summer vacation or on the weekends, what is their motivation? Are there risks to this? Is it appropriate? Should parents support their child’s initiative? Drawing from his extensive experience counseling young people, Grandmaster JinBodhi provides thoughtful advice to parents.
【You will learn】
- The negative consequences of overprotecting your children
- The benefits of letting children enter society
【Content】
Your children need to learn to survive independently. This is the skill your child should learn.
(Should My Child Experience Working?)
It is your child, so I shouldn’t say too much. I think a part-time job is quite common. When teenagers grow up, say after 18 years old, they often think about leaving home to look at the outside world. I think it is a reasonable and mature idea.
As a parent, your job is to raise them into adulthood. After that, your children need to learn to survive independently. This is the skill your child should learn. As parents, you have more life experience, so you can give them advice and protect them; or you can keep them under your wing forever, like raising pigs in a pen. When you keep an animal in a cage, it is safe. You can’t raise kids like this; yes, they will be safe, but they will never get the ability to survive in the outside world.
Do you realize this? When you release animals born and raised in zoos, such as tigers, leopards and wolves, into the wild, they die in less than 6 months. They either starve to death or get eaten. Do you know why? In zoos, these animals are fed on schedule. In the morning, at 8am, it is breakfast time; a piece of meat is thrown in. The animal just eats the meat. Every day is the same. A piece of meat each day; that’s it. When smaller animals enter their cage, they don’t even have the intention to hunt.
So, if an adult wants to leave home and look at the outside world, I think it is a healthy sign. Will they face dangers? Of course. If you put a tiger into a wild forest, the tiger will face danger. When a buffalo gets mad, it could kill a tiger or lion with its horn. A buffalo can stab the heart of a tiger or lion using it is horn, killing them. Dangers always exist in the outside world; it’s the reality everyone has to face.
As parents, you are much older than your children; you can’t accompany them through their whole life. Your children have their own destinies to fulfill. They have to explore their own path.