Why I Don’t Tell My Kids They Can Be Anything They Want To Be.

Parents who say their kids can be anything they want to be are trying to instill in their kids a right desire to think about the possibilities for the future. However, the values of our culture have subtly infiltrated the church and the homes of those who attend our churches. We have come to believe that the Christian life is about the pursuit of happiness more than the conformity to Christ.

As Americans, freedom is our highest good and greatest goal — freedom to choose, freedom to live, and freedom to be whatever we want to be. We pass this ideal on to our kids by saying they are free to do or be anything they can dream of. Romans tells us the opposite is true: we are slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness. Yet in our desire to live life on our own terms, we have come to value freedom as the greatest of all virtues. What we fail to realize is that freedom is the byproduct of constraint. Raw, unabashed freedom always produces license. Os Guinness says it this way in his book A Free People’s Suicide:

Americans today are heedlessly pursuing a vision of freedom that is short-lived and suicidal. Once again, freedom without virtue, leadership without character, business without trust, law without customs, education without meaning and medicine, science and technology without human considerations can end only in disaster. When exported abroad, the same rampant American freedom often undermines the traditional ways of life in other countries through its licentiousness, permissiveness and passion to transgress.

Why shouldn’t we tell our kids they can be whatever they want to be?

1. It presupposes man as the center of all things.

As Christians, the Bible tells us the story of God and his love for us. It starts with God, not man. “In the beginning, God created…” The Bible is all about God and what he has done for us in Christ. God is the Author, and Jesus is the Hero. The tendency we have is to read the story of the Bible with ourselves in mind — to use the Bible as a tool to find our purpose in life. This is dangerous because when we presuppose that our primary purpose is personal fulfillment and personal success, we become disillusioned when our dreams go unfulfilled. The first question of the Westminster Catechism asks: What is the chief end of man? Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

Our purpose is to give God the glory, and we, as a result, get the joy. The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism asks: What is our only comfort in life and death? Answer: That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. We are not the captains of our souls or the masters of our fate. We belong to God.

2. It teaches them that what you like matters more than who you are becoming.

The Bible teaches us that God is very interested in who we are becoming. Are we and our desires being formed into the image of Christ? Being conformed to Christ in his suffering is far weightier than our petty preferences — questions built around what we enjoy or how much money we can make. While those may factor into what you choose to do, we need to ask better questions:

1. What do I enjoy doing?

2. How has God uniquely gifted me to do something that will bring God glory and those around me joy?

3. What do my friends, family, and leaders see in me that I don’t see in myself?

4. In the ways God has uniquely gifted me, how can I point people to Jesus?

3. It sets kids up to see failure as fatal.

I have seen it over and over again: kids believe their parents. They think they can do whatever they want. Sometimes it works out, but oftentimes it doesn’t — and when it doesn’t, kids are devastated and disillusioned. To carry a dream your whole life, watch it fall apart, and then question everyone who promised that success was yours for the taking is a painful place to land. Often, our success is a process, and if kids think it is a birthright, they won’t do the hard work, and they won’t trust God in the hard seasons. The failures won’t have the intended effect.

If you’ve been in a bookstore lately (go now while they still exist), you know the self-help section is massive — because we all want to be a better version of ourselves. To a point, that’s okay. Parents who tell their kids they can be whatever they want to be are doing so for kind reasons. They want their child to have good self-esteem and a strong sense of self. The problem is that when we are so self-aware but not God-conscious, we tend to gloss over things God doesn’t gloss over. Telling our kids they can be whatever they want will set them up for disappointment or make them self-absorbed. Telling them to pursue the gifts God has given them and explore the dreams God has placed in their hearts is a far better way to say the same thing.

So what’s the difference? It’s subtle, yet important. By asking How has God made you? What dreams has God placed in your heart? — God is primary, and we are secondary. Our kids are growing up in a world where this is never explained or enforced. They need to see that their lives are more than the fulfillment of a wish-dream, but are shaped by God’s unique and particular design of them.

In sum, parents, be far more concerned with how God has designed your child. Think more about how we can help our kids become more God-conscious and less self-absorbed.