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<\/a>For the most part, these\u00a0are rhetorical\u00a0questions because I think any middle- or upper-class parent today (and often many with more modest means) experiences jealousy toward their kids’ experiences at some time or another. I know I do.<\/p>\nJust this week I felt a twang of jealousy as I took my twelve-year-old to her first day of Chinese language immersion. I love learning new languages. As a kid, whenever I would hear the nasal\u00a0tones of spoken French, the rasping gutturals of German, or sonorous up-and-downs of Mandarin, I wished I could speak\u00a0another tongue. At the park when new kids came along, my best\u00a0friend and I would pretend in vain to be anything other than the Midwestern born-and-bred girls\u00a0that we were \u00a0by garbling nonsense to one another. But what we hoped would sound like gibberish to them ended up also being gibberish between the two of us.<\/p>\n
If only I’d been able to take Chinese language immersion back then… except that in actuality I only lasted through a few months of French in sixth grade. I wasn’t ready for language learning at that age. Not only that, but I did<\/em> study\u00a0Spanish from high school through college. While I’m not so adept at speaking it any more, my comprehension of Spanish largely remains. I also studied Russian for several years after college, including six weeks of language study in Moscow. I became fairly proficient in it\u00a0before letting it lapse (there aren’t many Russian speakers in our corner of Chicagoland). And most recently, I had taught myself basic Italian using Duolingo and Rosetta Stone.<\/p>\n What do\u00a0I have to be jealous of?<\/em><\/p>\n Those thoughts went through my mind as I drove away from dropping my daughter\u00a0off at class. As quickly as it arose, my jealousy disappeared. But had I not been acting on my desire to learn another language all along and had I not\u00a0gained those great experiences\u00a0for myself, the jealousy would have lingered. In fact, as I stopped to consider\u00a0why I was even the slightest bit jealous, I realized that I need to keep at my language learning. Because that jealousy was telling me that I’m not done with my passion for\u00a0learning foreign languages. I need to add “learn a fifth language” to my bucket list. Or at least “become more fluent in a foreign language.”<\/p>\n The next time you find yourself feeling jealous of your child, listen to what that reaction is trying to tell you. It’s probably speaking to you of a bucket list desire that you have left unfulfilled. Follow that cue until you’ve isolated what it is that you should add to your bucket list.<\/p>\n Because once you do not only will your jealousy disappear, you’ll also be able to enjoy watching your child’s adventure unfold in a way that best suits them. You’ll find that when you put your own<\/em> bucket list dreams\u00a0in motion, you’ll free your child from having to live them out for you while you look on with jealous interest.<\/p>\n