The "Obligatory" American Idol Post...

It's that time again...all over the United States, people have caught "Idol Fever" again. Personally, I don't watch the show. (It's not because I have anything against it, it's just another show that I don't have time for, and I probably watch too much TV as it is.) For the first few years, I did watch the first few weeks of American Idol each season. I never followed it all the way through, but I loved to watch the auditions and just laugh at all the folks who thought they were really good singers...but weren't. It was kind of a guilty pleasure.

One particular audition stuck out to me about 4 years ago. There was a mother with her daughter who was auditioning. And let's just put it this way...she was awful (I think Simon even said it himself.) Now, it wasn't the song she sang or the tough love criticism that she received that stuck out to me. It was the mom who I couldn't stop thinking about. The mom continued to go on and on about how her daughter was such a great singer...how she was better than Beyonce and Whitney Houston, etc. Anyone with functioning ears would disagree with her, but she was insistent and indignant. Flat out...her daughter wasn't even in the same zip code, state, country as those two ladies.

I've always wondered why her mother (who obviously cares about her daughter) never told her the truth in the most loving way possible? Can you really be "anything" you want to be like the old parenting adage says? This young lady had no shot at being a singer or winning American Idol. Why did this young girl have to hear the "hard truth" from three "judges" who don't know her and/or care about her and love her?

Here's where I"m going with this, and it's your though-provoking idea for the day:

• Should we tell kids they can be "anything" they want to be or should we tell them that they can be exactly what God created them to be?

If the latter of those two is true, at what age/stage do you start to have to tell your kids some hard truths (i.e. - maybe you're not cut out to be a professional singer, but that doesn't mean God doesn't want to hear your praise to him through song, etc.)?

What I'm not saying is that kids shouldn't have dreams or that you shouldn't be the best encourager on the face of the earth for your kid. And sometimes, for some kids, a little "adversity" is exactly what they need to motivate them to greatness. How does that factor in?

I'm really not trying to be a buzzkill, but these are the kinds of things I wonder about.

Parents, help me out...what do you think?