Teaching your children to follow their passion sounds promising, but when you reflect on the word passion, you realize it's a misnomer. We don’t actually want our children to follow their passions.

What Is Passion?

Passion is the state of experiencing a strong or uncontrollable emotion according to the dictionary. Babies follow their strong, uncontrollable emotions. Mature people do not.

They follow their reason.

You won't find meaningful pursuits by following your passion. On the contrary, such a goal requires that you keep your passion in check.

When we use a word like passion in the wrong context, and then we elevate the term to a societal maxim, we are altering our understanding of reality and creating problems where none existed before.

Throughout history we have been warned about the danger of letting our passions rule us, but somehow, in today’s enlightened age, we do a 180 and turn the following of our passion into an ideal.

Passions are unbridled desires, and if we let them run free, we're in for a lifetime of disappointment. A fast way for our children to end up miserable is to train them to follow their passions.

Feelings are neither dependable nor trustworthy, and they do not always have our best interests in mind. 

The Wiser Choice

What looks out for our best interest is when our reason guides our will. Wise people keep their passions under control; babies don't.

When you eat way to much chocolate cake, do you feel good?

When you marry the wrong person, are you happy?

When you lose your temper with your children, are you pleased with yourself?

Yet, we espouse this idea that we should follow our passions even in the face of how poorly they serve us.

Do not follow your passion, and do not pass this dangerous idea onto your children.

Learning to bridle their passions will be a lifelong pursuit and one that should begin early, but pursue it, they must.

Competent child-rearing and a sound education include training the mind towards disciplined behavior and sound decision-making. Without clear thinking, we can make regretful choices, and we can misguide others.

We aren't taught that the Wise keep their passions in check, but we should be. It's something we used to know because we understood what constituted the good life.

But not any more. We're raised and educated to do what makes us feel good, regardless of the consequences our feeling good might have on ourselves and other people.

When Selfishness is Mistaken for Courage

A writer I used to admire left her dapper and devoted husband, whom she still loved and had a happy marriage with, for another woman. Yes, another woman.

When you look at this person's life, it's one of selfish choices with a trail of people she's left behind whose lives have been derailed. But hey, she's happy. What else matters? 

The strange thing is that people admire her for having courage to make the choices she made.

No one seems to notice how incredibly selfish her behavior is because sacrifice for others is a thing of the past. She's doing what makes her happy, and that's what matters. 

How can we build a stable society if satisfying our own needs is our primary goal? We can’t. Healthy societies are based on a moral responsibility to one another. The degree to which we lack moral responsibility, is the degree to which our society suffers.

The follow your passion maxim is hedonistic, and it doesn't support what we know about the acquisition of happiness. Happiness is rooted in virtue as Aristotle taught in Ancient Greece and wise psychologists like Jonathon Haidt still teach today.

From everything we know about happiness and from everything we know about misery, following your passions has never been a good idea.

Teach your children to restrain their passions by not indulging their every wish, by not accepting bad behavior from them, and by having them learn to develop skills that require discipline. 

And educate them well.

Raise them to be good people, guide them to discover what motivates them, help them become skilled at something, but teach them to bridle their desires. 

They'll be much happier people if you do. 

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Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education. She has two successfully homeschooled children in college.