I enter this topic of quitters and their quittingness with
trepidation. Because I totally know that there are those parents who will
never ever in a million years let their kid drop a thing they started.
And those parents are also totally the ones with kids who have soccer
scholarships and musician kids currently at Juliard and soon to be part of an
awesome philharmonic or something. And I am really jealous of those parents
and their rockstar tenacity. But I, personally, am a quitter. And I
personally am raising a big heap of quitters who I fully intend will rule the
universe.
To clarify. I don't actually quit everything, I just
generally quit things that suck. I can absolutely stick with things that
are great, good, half-decent or perhaps that will have a good long-term
outcome like college or whatever. But things that really suck and are
optional, I have no qualms about ending when the time is right. And I
have no problem teaching my kids to do the same. In fact, I like teaching
kids how to distinguish life-enhancing activities from life-detracting ones.
Once upon a time there was a child who started playing the
violin, after years of begging, as soon as she turned four. It was hard
to play and hard to practice and I had no idea how to help. There were
fits, ignoring the violin, a possibly intentional string breakage... and
meanwhile I was schlepping one small butt in a car seat to unaffordable
lessons. But I really wanted her to love musical instruments, so violin
turned into cello, then flute, then piano, then voice, oh and trumpet and
clarinet along the way somewhere. It was six years of tortuous
musical-instrument musical-chairs. And one day the music stopped and she
said, “Mom, I suck at musical instruments" and I cried because thank goodness I
didn't have to be the one to say it. We broke up with musical
instruments. Quitters.
In contrast, a different child is very musically gifted.
He started with the piano and did wonderfully. Until he cut his
fingertip off in preschool one day using safety scissors - which is a topic
altogether for another day. He liked piano, but now it hurt to play.
He kept it up a while then tried guitar which, if you have ever touched a
guitar string or had a part of an appendage cut off, you will know that it
would hurt even more. He kept at it a few years but it never got better.
Now he is a drummer and may be a drummer forever. But he has quit
plenty of things too, never fear.
Like karate. He tested twice in the karate dojo both times
in a heap of tears because, what with his musical ears it was massively loud
and painful to be in that cacophonous and chaotic space. So he quit.
Could he have advanced to national ranking level with amazing board
chopping prowess? Maybe - but the price just wasn't worth the suffering. Incidentally his younger brother has stuck with the exact same karate practice for almost half of his life. Go figure.
This
is what we do every day, isn't it? We weigh the costs and the benefits of
things and then decide whether the equation makes sense. I have noticed
that for parents, perhaps too often part of the equation against stopping any activity seems to be "I
don't want to raise a quitter". But I think that you should raise a
quitter, it's OK. Or said a little bit differently, it's great to raise someone who knows when to
quit. And, of course, when not to quit. Because there is wisdom in quitting
just as there is wisdom in tenacity and neither is quite the right answer all
of the time.