Ever thought of how to find the talents and skills of kids!?
Kids are like satellites – they are always on a mission to discover new things and update their brain but how to find talents and skills of kids is a different story. At the same time, they know what they want to be when they grow up right from the beginning! When they start going to school, their interests may shift. At this time, it is the parents’ job to encourage them to realize their skills and nurture them.
Kids like to taste, feel, see, and touch almost everything. It’s kind of funny and scary at the same time because you can expect anything from them. But this is how they eventually evolve and learn new life talents and skills. They discover that fire hurts when they touch it for the first time even if you tell them not to.
By experiencing that pain for themselves, they create the necessary defense mechanisms and learn how to deal with such situations smartly.
A parent’s job is to raise their kid, make them aware of what hurts and what doesn’t, what’s good and what’s not, what’s right and what’s wrong, etc… It’s exhausting, but the effort is worth it as you see a tiny version of yourself grow and evolve into a responsible adult in front of your eyes. To ensure they grow up to be those adults, you need to observe what your kid want in life.
As a little kid in Berlin, I was very interested in electronics. I remember we had a faulty TV and I thought I could fix it. So I found a hammer, took the TV apart in the storage room, and was bent on fixing it. As an energetic and enthusiastic kid, screwdrivers were an alien concept to me. Pretty soon, my parents found me smashing the back of the TV.
But before they punished me, they made sure I was fine first.
Now imagine if your parents had taken a bit more time to observe everything you do and realized that you are interested in electronics. Rather than punishing you, they could have sent you to classes that taught the subject or gave you guidance and the resources you need to learn more about the talents and skills that drives you. They could’ve easily identified my passion way before I started school and done something to encourage it while I was still so young!
A few month after writing this article and on December 14, 2020 I decided to take a break and watch The Final Table (A Netflix Series) and the following that is relative to the article I wrote, captured my attention;
Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz:
Born in Spain Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz one of the greatest living Chefs in the world, his restaurant is ranked in the top 10 restaurants in the world for 12 years. That same person in The Final Table show on Netflix says…
Quoting Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz: “When I was very young with many bad grades, my parents were led to make a decision for me, because they noticed I had no direction in life. They enrolled me in the best cooking school in San Sebastian and something magical happened there.”
Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz continues “Mugaritz is a project that is two decades old. We explore much more than food there. An experience in Mugartiz is basically somewhere between 20 and 25 tasting each narrated by a story. Basically, it’s a journey.”
Maybe the parents of Chef Andoni Aduriz did not figure his talents and skills when he was a child but they definitely knew academic school is not for him, so they made a decision and apparently that decision matched the talent that Chef Antoni Aduriz had and it grew in him from being a kid to one of the world’s greatest living Chefs.
Chef Amninder Sandhu:
Amninder Sandhu is a National Award winning Chef, well-known for setting up the first gas-free kitchen in the country says:
Quoting Chef Amninder Sandhu: “It was so dramatic when I discovered my true calling, that I wanted to become a Chef when I was 17, I started studying science and my dad where like you are going to become a Doctor. Every night I would cry myself to sleep because this is not what I want to do. My dad he took me for the medical entrance exam but I went in and I didn’t write anything in that exam, he was so upset. I’ve been professionally cooking for 14 years now and I still feel the pressure to justify my career.”
Conclusion About discovering talents and skills of kids
Being a parent is an extremely hard job, but we still need to make sure our kids are raised right. There might not be a wrong or right way to do things, but by observing our kids in action and helping them focus on talents and skills they are interested in cultivating, we can turn them into geniuses.
Talents and skills of kids can be seen and touched. So next time, just take the time to observe what your kids are interested in and help them harness that skill. It’s like planting a seed – you put the seed in the ground, you water it, let the sun in, and see it grow into a beautiful plant.
That is how you should nurture the skills your kids have. They will surely grow up to be responsible, successful and respectable adults, and most importantly they will grow to do what they love best.
