Bleak

Way ambisyon. There are those of us who do not understand what things we want to achieve. There are young persons who seem to have no direction except to play and enjoy the moment. There seems to be an absence of goals amongst our midst.

According to mindtools.com, Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality. The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You will also quickly spot the distractions that can, so easily, lead you astray.

But there are those who do not even set their directions for the day making a lot of resources be wasted.

Research has uncovered many key aspects of goal setting theory and its link to success (Kleingeld, et al, 2011). Setting goals is linked with self-confidence, motivation, and autonomy (Locke & Lathan, 2006). A 2015 study by psychologist Gail Matthews showed when people wrote down their goals, they were 33% more successful in achieving them than those who formulated outcomes in their heads.

Training the mind to set goals could be considered as a crucial part parents must employ in their children. This is beneficial for them to become responsible persons which will lead them to become independent. There are those parents who even decide for their children even the food they eat and the clothes they wear. This could be relative to their financial capacities but there are those who micromanage to the point that the kids will become dependent to them.

Taylor (2019) mentions that decision making is crucial because the decisions children make dictate the path that their lives take. Teaching children to make their own decisions has several benefits. When they make a good decision, they can gain the greatest amount of satisfaction and fulfillment because they chose it. When they make bad decisions, they may suffer for it, but they can learn from the experience and make better decisions in the future.

But it is a sad reality that there are parents who make their children as the fulfillment of their deficits. They want to make their unrealized dreams through the young allowing them to become extensions of themselves not as individuals. In such cases, something will not go right and one or more basic needs will be unmet. When a basic need is unmet, there is a loss, such as a loss of security, safety, freedom, trust or love. Losses like these tend to create emotional voids (Frenz, 2018).

There are also those who were not trained to create goals for themselves, so obviously, they do not see the relevance of allowing their kids to do so.

Effective parents use goals that are based around a set of core values. To establish these values, they must first decide what values are most important. Then they communicate these values clearly to the children. They also must constantly ensure that their actions and the actions of the family are in line with their core values. If they value education, activities relevant to this are always practiced at home (i.e. homework checking, buying books for the kids, etc.).

Yet, adults are more immersed with their unmet needs rather than looking into the well-being of their young. This could be attributed to their personal struggles too leaving the children to be influenced by outside forces rather than the things within the range of their values.

Troll (2016) states: If your needs were not met when you were a child, you may have trouble accepting and meeting your children’s needs because it wasn’t modeled for you.  You may be resentful of your children’s requests, or you may go overboard trying to satisfy every whim in an effort not pass on to them your childhood feelings of deprivation.

There is a need to make the future full of driven people towards the common good. We need to instill positive drives to our children for them to be enlightened. We could not dare to let them be imprisoned with our past by allowing them to play around in the present.

This could make their future become bleak.