Role Models

My daughter, Pebbles, is four years old and still believes (*ahem...knows) that her daddy, me, is the STRONGEST MAN IN THE WORLD. Who am I to tell her otherwise. A couple days after she said this, I saw yet another fight among players in an NBA game while watching ESPN. What do these two events have in common? To me, the correlation is simple: to my four year old, I AM her role model, and I am trying my best to be the right example for her. It is important to me to continue to be that role model for her. Pro players, whether they are a good role model or not, should not be your child's role model. To me, this is just parents being lazy, like having the TV babysit your own children (which I know I do at times).

I shouldn't be so hard on professional athletes, they ARE just children. They are someone else's child. Why would I expect them to be able to set an example for my kids when they are only children themselves. I'm 30, and I still worry about being the right example for my kids as they grow, so why would I want them to loom up to someone else's child who doesn't have any stake in the successes or failures of my kids? I value education as a third-generation college grad and a 2nd-generation post-grad, but these kids come out of college with barely more credits than if they went to a community college and someone hands them a multimillion dollar bonus check.

I wish I could say that it is an age thing and that they will grow wiser with age, but Brett Favre dismissed that argument this past year. Who, in their right mind, send a picture of their old, greying, receding-hairlined, loose-skinned JOHNSON to a beautiful young woman and think that is all it takes? So, maybe i shouldn't pick on pro players, because their profession is to play, so I shouldn't expect too much out of a business that does not encourage it's employees to act with character and integrity.

I'm not even going to talk about musicians or actors, because that is too easy, so I'll mention politicians. [sigh] Now that I think about them, they upset me as well. Here is a group of delinquents who shoot a whole in my previously mentioned notions of education as a value and proves that it doesn't provide for better role models. Politicians, are notoriously just as bad. And why is this? What makes celebrities so out of touch with reality? And why would we want our children to look to them for examples? They typically come from two different backgrounds; one is in the business of producing revenue and entertainment, and the other is in the business of governing the land.

What bothers me most about politicians is that what I feel towards them doesn't come from watching tripe news or doing research, but from personal experience. I was fortunate enough to witness first-hand how a politician become blinded to the reality around them in an attempt to "stand for values" and win voter approval across several value sets. What comes of a person whose business is to be a people-pleaser but they don't realize it?

All this to come back to my original question: who is your child's role model? And why would you let someone else steal that level of influence in their life from you?

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JB