Encouraging Our Kids

Getting Your Children to Step Out of Their Comfort Zone

article by Cindy Gist Foust

Season’s Greetings BayouLife community, because that’s what it feels like outside…Christmas. If April showers bring May flowers, what do April avalanches bring? Good grief! The entire BayouLife community will look like the tulip fields in Holland! I am so ready for this weather to make up its mind what it wants to do.

We have had tornado weather the last two weekends; it’s freezing outside; and the groundhog has gone into the Witness Protection Program because he clearly had misguided information this year. Honestly, I think it even has my mental state all out of sorts because I have been having the craziest dreams. Is there a correlation? Anybody a meteorologist out there that can correlate the weather with crazy dreams? Maybe I just discovered something, like a modern-day Christopher Columbus, because I had a dream I was asked to the Neville High School prom, and I wore gray pants with a fuchsia top. Oh, and I rolled my hair. I also forgot to get a pedicure, so I was freaking out in my dream. You would think I would be more disturbed that I got invited to a high school prom at 51-years-old rather than be worried my toes weren’t polished, but hey, I don’t interpret my dreams, I just have them. I just bet it’s this weather.

So, I decided to change things up this month and I’m writing my column from my dining room table rather than my office or my big comfy chair. Just hoping for a little inspiration this month, from perhaps a different vantage point, but all I can see is the wind blowing like there’s a monsoon coming. I’ll be dreaming crazy again tonight…what you want to bet it’s about Keith Urban asking me to open up for his next concert or Prince Harry asking me to be the Matron of Honor at his wedding? Dang weather.

Instead of being worried about being “tor-na-doed” to Kansas with Dorothy and Toto, it’s the time of year when we SHOULD be looking forward to school finishing up and all the fun activities that go along with that. Graduations, end-of-year field trips, talent shows…you know, great times.

Speaking of fun times, I overheard a conversation a few weeks ago, while waiting to get my toes polished (see, I would have been totally ready for the prom) between a mom and her young daughter. I have a daughter, maybe just a little bit older than this one, so it caught my attention when the little girl started telling her mom that tryouts for the school talent show were coming up and she sure wished she was talented at something, because she would like to try out. The mom, who was distracted by her phone (imagine that) seemed about as interested in her daughter’s insecurities as she would have been in having a colonoscopy.

I kept sitting there waiting on the mom to shake out of her “phone coma” and tell her daughter that she was indeed talented enough to be in the talent show and they would figure something out for her to do. In my mind I’m thinking, how talented do you have to be to be in an elementary school talent show?

When I was in junior high (what we called it back in the day), I showed OUT for my talent shows. My 7th grade year, my friend Liz Jones and I, wore sundresses and used an umbrella to dance and lip sync to Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head by B.J. Thomas. It was an artistic masterpiece. I think we wore matching Yo-Yo shoes (look them up on the Internet if you are out of the Yo-Yo loop) and our hair in pigtails. The next two years, well, the next two years I performed as an 8th grader, with an encore performance in my 9th grade year (back when junior high went to 9th grade, and I think it still should, but that’s not what this column is about) with two of my friends (I’ll keep their identity anonymous for the sake of their current reputations) to the tune Gitarzan by Ray Stephens. I’ll give you one guess who was “Jane,” and who might have worn a Wilma Rubble outfit with a bone in her hair? To quote the lyrics of that great Grammy-winning song, Jane’s “claim to fame” was her ability to sing “Baby, baby, Whaooooo Baby!” and even though I was lip syncing, I gave an award-winning performance that left the audience, especially my parents…well, speechless. Yes, Gitarzan managed to attach itself to the Woodlawn Junior High school talent show folk lore and I all I can say is PRAISE THE LORD we didn’t have video cameras back then, because I would have to live in Provo, Utah under an alias.

Now, where was I? Oh, at the nail saloon with my nose in someone else’s business. Listen friends, not every child can be Mariah Carey or Cindy Foust (famous lip sync and dance queen) when they are 10 years old. In fact, it takes a lot of guts for some children to get the nerve to get on that stage, in front of all their friends. I’ve sat through my share of elementary school talent shows, and even imparted some of my lip syncing, dancing moves to my son when he dressed up as Napoleon Dynamite and danced, in his moon boots, in the 5th grade.
I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t matter how “on-key” a child sings, or how good of a dancer or skip roper or hula hooper they are, the fact is, they are brave souls for just wanting to get on the stage at all. Don’t discourage your child from singing just because they don’t take formal voice lessons. Don’t discourage your child from wanting to do magic tricks just because they aren’t David Copperfield. Don’t discourage your child from being Jane in Gitarzan just because they aren’t Cindy Foust. Get on the Internet and find some Po-Go stick routine or synchronized yo-yo (not to be confused with the acclaimed Yo-yo shoes) skit they can do. And then be the loud and proud parent in the audience when they take the stage and act like they are starring in a Broadway play.

I don’t know how things turned out for the little girl at the nail salon. I wish I had staged an intervention (her mother wouldn’t have known any different) and helped her reprise the role of Gitarzan’s Jane, but instead, I sat in my chair and silently pleaded for her mom to reassure her that she was indeed talented, and they would work on her skit, maybe even include some of her friends. It’s true elementary school is some of the best years of our children’s lives and should be full of great memories and fun times. Don’t miss an opportunity to encourage your child to step out of their comfort zone and do something that isn’t in their wheelhouse.

And maybe it’s not the talent show they are interested in participating in, perhaps it’s karate or baseball or dancing or magic tricks. Whatever the interest level, encourage it, applaud it, support it. You never know what hidden talent may come to the surface. Or, like in my case, when you have a talent that’s so brilliant and so bright that your parents encourage you to keep it hidden for the rest of your life. Now that, my friends, is good parenting.