There are times when parents enabling their children turns bad. We see parents bailing kids out of jail after they nearly killed someone or stole to support a drug habit. We see parents enabling children by drug-running for them, making excuses for them, or continually acting as advocate to buy time when the child should have had assignments in at school. Many times and many situations do not benefit when parents enable their kids’ destructive ambitions or habits.
Then there is another kind of enabling; the kind that actually supports and encourages good habits, good situations, good goals, and good dreams. This is the kind of enabling I have found myself in this summer. Calls have been slow coming in for work over at my “day job” since June, so time has been available.
In July, for the very first time in my life, I pulled a loaded horse trailer to and from a schooling show one weekend so that my daughter could get her horse into their very first show. The benefits were unreal! The horse was entered into 5 classes, with the first two severely bringing back memories of the track. I write about that adventure on my blog here.
In August, just in the first two weeks, I have assisted my son in getting started with posting videos to Youtube featuring game walk-throughs, glitch videos, and game reviews. While we still have to spruce up his channel and get him started with his promotional campaigns, you can find his youtube channel here. He hopes to begin earning advertising revenue through these game videos.
Over the past year or so, my daughter has also been using my recording setup to create and record her own renditions of various songs on her harp, and post those to her youtube channel. Both these youtube channels are now featured on my own Songdove Books Presents. My daughter’s music is available for sale with links to those locations in the video description below each video.
This month of August also saw her decide to turn me into her booking agent as she steps out to become a busker, or musician-for-hire in the local area. Her website is: http://ashgrove.fa-ct.com/ and her fan page on FB is here. She successfully auditioned to busk at the local Farmer’s Market last weekend and will be playing there again this coming weekend.
Needless to say, the summer’s been full of enabling. But it isn’t stopping at just horses, videos and harps.
My daughter is a budding writer as well, and I’ve been encouraging her since high school to continue with a fictional novel she’s writing. She’s also asked me to help her with a teen equine devotional that she’s in the middle of putting together, and just recently, she and I found ourselves thinking how cool it would be to republish an 1893 translation of a book written during the time of Rome. This ancient book is a small treatise on buying, training, riding, and looking after your horse! This last project of hers is more mine than hers, so it’s coming together faster. But I’m still relying on her 9 years of riding and training to help me flesh out a series of notes to bring the content into modern times.
As a result, Songdove Books could find itself as the imprint on these other books as well!
All that remains is steady regular income for myself! Soundtech events at my church this past week have helped. A local realtor asking me to act as his untrained assistant has helped a bit although he didn’t call me all last week. Tech support calls have come in a little more this month than in July, so that was nice, with one web client finally serious about a complete website overhaul. I almost have that ready for his review. So I’m praying for steady income to resume before Fall hits so that I don’t face the same financial problems I had last Fall.
But it feels good helping two grown kids start to turn past-times into income-generators! It takes work setting up your kids to be shot straight from your parental bow. You work at ensuring a solid foundation for their faith. You work at ensuring a healthy education so they have a good foundation for jobs and such. You work at ensuring their biological health with the food you buy and the hygiene and healthy house-care habits you install into them. Then at some point, it’s time for them to move forward. The grad caps come and go and it’s time for jobs and careers. My kids chose not to attend college or university after high school. My daughter is studying to get her Equine Canada Certification so she can teach riding lessons and operate her own riding barn one day. My son is still figuring out what he wants to do in life, and has suffered a head injury since April, forcing him out of work. My daughter’s harp and my son’s gaming both have potential to bring in a little here and there, and I saw opportunities to finally get those avenues launched!
So pay their channels and pages a visit. I still have to get my son’s FB page up and running, see if I can talk him into launching a vlog, and get that youtube channel updated. But my daughter’s things that way are ready to go. So the enabling this summer isn’t over yet. Everything takes time, effort, dedication, creativity, and then stick-to-it-iveness. But we’re at the starting line! Be sure to follow them to see how things go!