My Dreams Were Crushed in 1994: What It Taught Me About How We Talk to Kids
The drawing was of our kitchen table, and the cat was on a chair beside it. I was eight years old, and I had spent three afternoons on it, using every color in the metallic marker set my grandmother had given me for my birthday. In 1994, that set was the whole world.
When the art teacher, Mr. Ellsworth, walked around the room during our “draw a place that matters” assignment, I watched his face. He picked up my drawing, held it toward the window light, and studied it for a long time. I remember thinking, This is it.
Then he set it down. “It’s a little busy. What were you thinking here?”
I tried to explain the glitter on the cat’s tail. “Right. Next time, maybe simplify. Pay attention to what’s important.”
He didn’t hold it up to the class. He didn’t give me a bad grade. He just said “simplify” and moved on to the next desk.
And somehow, that was the end of drawing for me. I didn’t pick up a marker for about twenty years. Not on purpose—I just stopped considering it a thing I did. At eight, my dream wasn’t a career plan. It was simpler: I was someone who drew. And after that afternoon, I wasn’t.
I’m telling this story because last week my daughter came home from school with a folded paper in her backpack. She pulled it out at the kitchen table like it was evidence of a crime. It was a story she had written—four pages in her careful handwriting, with a drawing in the margin of a talking dog. At the bottom of the last page, the teacher had circled “Developing” on the “Word Choice” row.
“Developing,” my daughter said. “What does that even mean? I worked on that for a week.”
I looked at that paper and felt my stomach turn. Not because the teacher was being cruel—”Developing” is a normal, even friendly, rubric word. It means “you’re getting there.” But I also know that a kid doesn’t read “Developing” that way. She reads it as “you are not enough.”
Here’s what I’ve learned as a parent and as someone who used to teach: it’s not the loud, dramatic moments that crush kids. A teacher yelling, a big F, a parent screaming about homework—those are bad, but they can be fought. It’s the quieter moments. The comment that doesn’t quite land. The rubric word. The adult who looks at what you made and says, “Okay, but what were you thinking?”
Because a child’s dream isn’t a career plan. It’s identity. When you tell me the drawing is “busy,” what I hear is “the way I see the world is wrong.” When you circle “Developing,” a child hears “I, as a person, am not developed.” And they don’t fight that. They just quietly agree.
So what did I do, sitting at the table with my daughter? I didn’t tell her the teacher was wrong. I didn’t say “developing just means developing” in a chipper voice. I didn’t praise the story to compensate, because kids can smell damage control.
I took a breath and said, “Tell me about the dog.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you made him talk. Most people would just have a normal dog. Why does he talk?”
And then she told me. The dog talks because the boy lives alone with his grandmother, who is losing her hearing, and the dog is the only one who actually listens to him. So the dog learned to talk back.
We talked about that story for twenty minutes. At the end, I said, “That’s a smart choice, making the dog talk. Word choice? You chose all the right words. Developing? I think that row belongs more in the ‘Done Doing Its Job’ category.” She laughed.
I don’t know if that fixed anything. She still has to go to class and see that rubric, and the teacher is good enough that she’ll probably explain how rubrics are supposed to be read. My daughter will hear it.
What matters is that the rubric wasn’t the last word. Whether a dream survives isn’t decided at school. It’s decided at the kitchen table, in the car, on the walk home. It’s decided by whether someone takes the time to ask “what were you thinking?” in a way that means “I actually want to know.”
And I try to be specific about that. When a child shows me something they made, I ask a question instead of giving a verdict. Not “That’s beautiful” or “That’s good”—those are judgments too, and kids can sense their shadow side. Instead: “What made you choose this part?” “How did you decide to do it this way?” “Tell me about the cat’s tail.”
And when a child tells me someone said something discouraging—a teacher said it was “busy,” a coach said they were “too slow,” a friend said their drawing looked weird—I don’t rush to reassure. I try to sit with the feeling first. “Ouch. That would sting.” Then: “Do you want to know what I see?” If they say yes, I tell them. Specifically. Without any pep-talk packaging.
There was a moment in 1994, a few weeks after the drawing, when my grandmother asked why I had stopped drawing. I told her I didn’t feel like it anymore. She didn’t push.
I think if anyone had pushed—gently, or even just a little—my life would have looked different. Not necessarily professional-artist different. But I might have kept drawing for the rest of my childhood, and that counts for something. There’s a version of me who spent his whole life looking at things closely and putting them on paper, and I wonder what that would feel like as a grown-up.
My daughter is nine. She’s into soccer, Minecraft, and telling jokes she thinks are funnier than they are. I don’t know if she’ll keep writing stories. Development happens in all directions.
What I do know is this: when she was upset about that rubric, something in my body woke up. That old classroom, that cat on a kitchen chair, Mr. Ellsworth’s quiet voice. It wasn’t crushing me anymore. It felt more like an instruction.
So that’s what I’m working on. Not making sure educators never say anything careless—impossible. Not protecting her from criticism—inevitable. What I can do is make sure she has a table and a chair and someone across from her who genuinely wants to hear about the talking dog.
That part is getting better. The rest is still in development.
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