Please allow the childish dreams

There was one thing that I didn’t like in the expectations of parents in China when I was growing up: They wanted young children to be mature.

A Japanese journalist interviewed Chinese primary school pupils in lower years at the time and asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. She was amazed: most pupils wanted to become a scientist, a professor, or a scholar. “Chinese kids think big!” she wrote.

I remember writing down my wishes for the future at a kindergarten in Japan. Various festivals offered such opportunities, one of them being the “Tanbata festival” in July. In my kindergarten, every pupil got a piece of paper to write our wishes on, and we then tied the paper to a tree or a plant.

Our wishes were something like: “I want to work in a bakery shop and make lots cakes.” “I want to run a candy shop.” “I want to become a teacher in the kindergarten.” And my favourite: “I want to eat a lot of cherries when I grow up.” Yes indeed. You don’t get to eat lots of cherries as a kid because they are quite expensive!

I like to hear children’s wishes. They are so sweet. They don’t worry about how realistic they may be. They don’t worry about what others may think of them. They don’t look at how financially viable they are. They are, in short, natural, and their wishes come straight from their heart. It’s the kind of naturalness that belong to their age that they are bound to lose as they grow up.

To those parents who want their children to sound mature and think big at an early age: please allow childish dreams. Please allow children to be children. They are only young once.