There are a lot of myths about what you need to do in order to be successful in life. As parents, we often buy into the commonly accepted wisdom:
* a high school dropout has no chance in life: keep your children in school, whatever you do.
* in order to be competitive in the job market, you probably also need a college education.
* people who marry before they have a high school diploma are likely to derail their lives and become complete and utter failures. Keep your children from marrying young, even if they are in love.
* teenaged mothers are bad citizens.
We want our children to be successful, so we nag them to stay in school, get good grades and avoid an early romantic commitment. But every once in a while we notice that these rules don’t apply to everybody. Take Loretta Lynn, for example.
The childhood home of Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn was born in 1932 and grew up in a small mining town. She grew up very, very fast. By the time she was thirteen, she was married, and in less than a year, she was a mother. According to popular belief, that should have been the end of her. A life of poverty and drudgery was supposed to ensue.
But you know what? That’s not exactly what happened. When Loretta was twenty-four years old, her husband bought her a guitar. She didn’t have music lessons. She didn’t have voice training. Nobody taught her composition. She taught herself to play the guitar. She sang, she composed the music and wrote the lyrics to her own songs. And… she cut her first record the next year!
In 1967, Loretta Lynn charted her first sixteen number one hits. And success after success followed. Her marriage was rocky, but it provided a lot of material for her songs. If she had not been precocious in life, she could not have been so successful as a songwriter. And despite the ups and downs, her marriage was of long duration. She remained married to Doolittle “Doo” Lynn from 1945 until his death from diabetes in 1996. A lot of other people who waited until they were more mature to marry were not able to stick it out in a relationship this long.
Loretta Lynn had four children before she turned nineteen, and then she later had twins. One of her most controversial songs was about birth control.
When success stories like Loretta Lynn’s are mentioned, many people will tell you: she’s unusually talented and very lucky, but an ordinary person had better stick to the straight and narrow path, to avoid failure in life. This is not necessarily true. One doesn’t have to be a musical superstar in order to have a successful life after quitting high school. Read this pub by one of our star pubbers to see another example where allowing a child to follow a different path eventually resulted in a successful life.
Each of us has to make our own choices in life. In the end, it is very hard to tell what path is right for another person, and parents need to learn when to push and when to let go.
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© 2011 Aya Katz
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