Once I was sitting in a restaurant that specializes primarily in breakfast and baked goods. It’s a large restaurant with very few customers around supper time so the conversation this evening was a muted chatter. I was settled into a booth beside a round table of a close-knit family.

The family contained two elementary school boys, one older than the other, a mother, a father, and a grandfather. The boys drove most of the conversation, they swapped information about standardized tests at school and the games they played at recess. The younger boy, like most children, the boy started talking about all the things that he wanted to be when he grew up. A policeman. A veterinarian. A teacher. A doctor. He wanted to be all of those things, not just one. His parents laughed and humored the naive idea until the small boy spoke again. “I really want to be a policeman,” he said. Instantaneously the comments from his mother and father flew. “You don’t want to be a policeman,” they insisted. Neither of them provided a reason, they simply told him that a policeman was not what he wanted to be.

It’s what every small child is told at some point, "you can’t do that;" "You shouldn’t do that;" "You don’t want to do that."

Children shrug it off the first, second, maybe even third time, but eventually those words lace their way into a child’s brain. It fills a child with doubt and forces the child to grow up. Adults shut down the dreams of the young, the dreams that don’t match their own image of what adulthood should be. The brutal shutdowns do not come from a place of cruelty, I truly believe that.

They come from a place of genuine concern. No parent wants to watch their child dedicate themselves to something that they will inevitably fail at like many before them. No child wants to hear that their dreams are futile.

Which side wins? Should parents support their children’s dream even if they will lead to failure? Should children understand and heed the well-meaning advice of their parents about accepting a realistic life goal?

I am still a child, I am surely biased, but I don’t think children should ever just accept that their dreams are unreachable. Students spend a good portion of their lives being told to reach for the stars, but as they grow up they’re told to lower their stars so that they are within arm’s reach. Some have done just that. Students have shoved aside their childhood dreams and claim that their life dreams are the practical ones instilled in their minds by vastly uncreative adults. I haven’t done that, and here’s why: I don’t believe that I will fail. There is certainly the possibility that I will crash and burn and never reach the world I am striving for. There is also the possibility that I will succeed and wind up endlessly happy. The things I strive for are the same things a lot of people strive for. There’s too much competition. Why would I, of all people, make it? Here is my simple answer: someone has to. Why couldn’t it be me?

The world needs a million different types of people with a million different talents and careers. Someone has to flip burgers at fast food restaurants, someone has to teach elementary schoolers, someone has to be a best selling novelist, someone has to be an actor, someone has to be an olympic athlete. Everyone has to be someone, so why not try for what you really want? Why not use your drive and your talents to reach for stars that are a million miles away? I want to look up one day and realize that those far off stars are dangling directly above my head.

And to that little boy in the restaurant, I hope you do what you want to. I sincerely wish for you to take the intelligence in your young voice and do something with it. Speak words people will hear, perform actions people will be touched by. I hope that you can go back to that restaurant someday with your aging parents and equally successful and happy brother and tell them you are doing what you want to do. I hope you can tell them that you're happy.