Weimar

Dear friends of piano music,

It may sound amazing, but my son would like to spend his next vacation in Weimar. Not that I have anything against it - on the contrary, I love Weimar, it is the city of Goethe, Schiller and Liszt, and so far I have never really had time to visit the places where they worked. But why does a seven year old boy want to spend his vacation there? Well, he is very interested in Goethe's house, has studied it on the Internet down to the smallest detail and now wants to see the original, live, in color and analog. I find it fundamentally fascinating when children develop an interest in something that seems rather absurd. For example, a boy close to me had a bird that he taught to speak with great persistence. When my sister was five years old, she really wanted a violin, and after another five years she had my parents ready to actually get one. There are children who spend their afternoons in dumpsters looking for returnable bottles. And mind you, not because they urgently need the money, but out of a sense of order. That is certainly frightening, but here too, as with all other unusual interests, the question really arises: Why are they doing this? This is the point that concerns me. Kästner sums up a central educational problem: there is no point in bringing up the children, after all they imitate everything. But there are certainly not a few, especially among older children, who do the exact opposite of what the parents themselves exemplify or what they want from them. What have we done ourselves to meet our parents' expectations? It probably takes a while to think about it, but I'm sure it is quite a bit. And it certainly doesn't concern any small things, rather very decisive things such as career choice, choice of partner, building a house, grandchildren, etc ........ It's usually rather subtle, the parents don't force us to become dentists to live in the neighboring town to build a big house or have plenty of grandchildren. But they want it because they think that it will ultimately make us happy too. And how stressful it is when you do not meet the expectations of your parents and you can feel their underlying disappointment, because you are not a dentist but an unsuccessful pianist, because you don't have three children but a badly trained dog ....... It it's so hard to find out in life what you really want, what you do best, what makes you happy. And parents don't make this difficult task any easier. Of course, you have to show them possibilities, children cannot know everything by themselves. Still, I'm worried - so he wants to go to Weimar. Well there are worse things. As long as he doesn't want to become a dentist .......

Kerstin