Learning from others part two

Every parent knows that children need to learn some things for themselves. A parent would be foolish to pick a baby up every time it falls. If the parent did this, the poor child would never learn to walk. The parent must let the child learn for himself. All the lectures in the world about the importance of money will do nothing for a child unless he is forced to make his own money.

Unfortunately some parents don’t realize that life is also to be learned. Everyone needs advise. Why should we travel a road someone else has traveled? Now if this is an exiting road, say learning to walk, there might be a difference, but letting teen try harmful drugs when the parent knows people who have gone down that road and discovered it to be harmful and dangerous, would be foolish. Abstinence from drugs is either avoiding harm or the avoidance of unnecessary time spent “experimenting” with that dark and slippery road called drugs. Learning to walk is a good thing. The baby will have to do this anyways. There is a difference in-between letting someone try something harmful and letting someone learn a necessary part of life that will end up being for their own good. Might the baby get slightly hurt when he falls? Possibly, but not nearly as much as he would if he tried going through life without knowing how to walk. The same is not true for trying drugs. The harm is not worth the outcome because no outcome from that scenario is good.

There must be a balance in-between letting a child learn life and letting him live life. To say that someone should learn everything by learning from others would be foolish. In many instances the person would never end up learning anything. But to say, question authority, would be foolish, too. Yes we should question the information given to us, but we shouldn’t try to always come up with that information on our own. However we should be open to other’s ideas, not in a believe anything that comes along sort of way, but in a discerning of the advice given us. We must always find a medium. Neither extreme is good.