Pressure and your kids!

My goal is to share a blog post each day. Today I got to take orders from my daughter and her friends. Let me explain.

My daughter asked me to help her and her friends put together a DARE video for school. The topic is peer pressure. Now, I put together video content all the time but I’ve never had to do it while taking direction from my 11-year-old daughter and her friends. Honestly, the biggest challenge was just letting them make all the decisions. It is their project and I needed to make sure their voices came through—I was just running the camera and editing it all together.

It was harder than I thought—keeping my mouth shut! I don’t consider myself to be a creative bossy-pants, but I do have over 22 years of professional experience being creative. Before that, I just created things for fun. But this wasn’t about me or my creative vision. It was about the girls and what they wanted to do.

So I kept my mouth shut, let them pick all the music, write the script and make all the editing choices. And if something doesn’t work, they are going to have to deal with it… not today but next week when they will show their video to their entire class and wait to see the reaction. That will be the hardest part—for them and for me.

Their friends may laugh at all their inside jokes and obscure references… or they may not. Either way, the girls will get to experience first hand all the highs and lows of creating something and then releasing it into the world.

For them, it’s about sharing the video they’ve created—hoping people love it as much as they do. For me, it’s the same feeling. But it’s not the video that I’m sharing with the world, it’s my daughter. And I hope people love her as much as I do!

Good luck, Lili! No matter what happens… your Dad is proud.

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