How to Prevent Your Child from Being a Children's Villan

Today, during my Sunday School lesson at church, my teacher asked us a question. He asked us to think about the best advice we've ever had from our parents was.

Naturally, at that moment, my mind went blank and I couldn't think of any advice.

Fortunately for me, the moment of blankness didn't last long, and I remembered some advice. And I can quite honestly say I know the best piece of advice my parents have given me so far in my life, and it is this.

Don't be them.

This has been reiterated to me in several different forms, from "do as I say, not as I do," to "you're supposed to be better than me," to "be yourself."

These usually come up when my mother and I are arguing (usually over something stupid) and I get mad at her logic, and point out that she has made the same mistakes I do. I point out that she's actually made some worse choices than I have.

My mother and I are very similar. We look alike, our tempers are similar, and to a certain extent we share the same tastes. This is both a good and bad thing.

My father and I are very similar. I share many physical features with him, and we share the same sense of humor and several personality traits and ways of thinking. We share a lot of the same tastes. This is also both a good and bad thing.

However, despite being a mold from taking random traits of my parents and smashing them together, I am not them. I am my own person. I am myself.

I listen to music both my father and mother abhor. I have talents they don't have. Going through school was a different experience for me than for either of them. I'm not my parents.

I don't want to make the same mistakes they did. That's why they went through life first. So they could mess up, and then they could tell me about it so I could make different mistakes and learn from them.

Parents, despite how much you want your children to be like you... they're not you.
This is a common mistake parents make, if Hollywood is to be believed. Parents don't understand their children. They shove on them their hopes, their dreams, making them do everything they didn't get the chance to do.

My mom never got to do choir during her school years. I've been in choir since the fourth grade, and she's mentioned at times how she regrets that she never got those same chances I did. However, her lack of ability to do that didn't force me into choir. All she did was teach my how to sing. What I did with that was my own business. I started choir because I wanted to, and I stayed because I fell in love with it.
When, after I graduated, I decided I didn't really want to do choir anymore, and I wouldn't take it in college, my mother was fully supportive of my idea. She too, during the choir experiences I went through, was probably burnt out. But she would have supported me no matter what. She wasn't going to make me continue choir so she could live vicariously through me, thereby not setting me up to be a Hollywood villan who's goal is to destroy all the choir teachers because my mother forced me to be in choir. Maybe she deprived me of getting the chance to be a corny villan, but I'm glad my mother has never forced me to do something I didn't want to do, especially because she didn't get to do it.

It's the same with my father. As I've mentioned, we share several tastes, especially in music. However, as I've gotten older, I've ventured out from his genres he likes to listen to, and found lots of several different kinds of music I like to listen to. And I listen to them with great gusto and lack of apology. When he hears me listening to it, he gives me funny looks and teases me, but since he does that to everyone, it's not like he's forcing me to listen to his music. As he would put it,
"I recognize that you're taste in music is sometimes different from mine. I also recognize that your taste is bad."

So, dear parents, you want to provide your children with such wonderful backstories that they have to reason to become villans for children's book and shows, let them be themselves.

Children, as much fun as being a villan might be, I'm sure you can find better motivation than that. Be yourself. You don't have to be just like your parents. Being different is a good thing. You can learn somethings your parents never even knew.