Sharing Our Passions
By David Elkind, Ph.D.

One of the best ways of ensuring that our children play and develop lifelong habits of play, is to share our personal passions with them. Our passions are those activities that we love, and that we engage in whenever we have the freedom or opportunity to do so. Whether its golf, gardening, fishing or jogging, passions give us a creative outlet that we may not find in our jobs or professions. They allow us to realize our personal talents and abilities. Children are blessed when we have passions that we can share with them. While they may not always take these up, they still have the opportunity to see us engaged in something that we love, and that we do for no other reason than for the sheer pleasure of doing it.

I have a good friend and colleague who has a passion for baseball. He follows the teams religiously, goes to the ball park whenever he can manage it, and coaches Little League. He has conveyed this passion to his son who now has an equally strong love for the game. Father and son play catch in the yard, and go to baseball games together when they manage it. In sharing his passion with his son, my friend has also created an abiding common interest that will continue long after his son has left home.

It is important to say that sharing a passion is far different from paying for music or sports lessons, when you have little, or no, interest in these activities yourself.  Children may still learn under these circumstances, but it is a very different form of learning than when you are sharing your passion for the activity. If our children see that we really love something, they are much more likely to take it seriously than if we take them for lessons in a sport or on an instrument in which we ourselves have little or no real interest.