I remember talking to a friend of mine who used to run a daycare Centre in America. One day she had to stand in for one of the staff that usually looked after the preschoolers. My friend said that amongst other things she did on that day to engage the children, she decided to ask them what they would want to be in future. As expected, there were very interesting responses coming from kids who hadn’t even gone through primary school talk less of finishing high school. But one response stood out the most.

One of the four year old boys said he wanted to be a drug dealer. Yup! drug dealer!! I was as thrown off balance as I’m sure you are reading this. Guess what his reason for this choice of vocation was? The richest and coolest person in his family was his uncle who happened to be a drug dealer. So he figured that to be cool and rich one had to deal drugs. We really can’t blame the kid– What does he really know about selling drugs except that it makes you “ rich and cool”.

Obviously that story got me thinking about a lot of things like how kids tend to look up to older people and how we never know who’s looking at us as their role model; How selling and using drugs had become casual dealings and somehow perceived to be “cool”. Really how did we get to the point where as I hear drugs have become so accessible and a social culture?

I am not about to give some “stay-away-from-drugs-kids-its-bad” lecture. I’m sure we all know that. What I really would want us to think about is why we make the choices we do even when we know the consequences could be very dire and the effect our choices could have on some young kids life. Coming to think of it – do our choices truly reflect our values? Have we even developed our own set of values that would guide us when we have to make tough choices? No one is perfect. I would never say I am but one thing I’ll say is that defining our values and deliberately choosing to live by them will save us a lot of stress. Yes there would be slip offs but stand by them regardless – you never know who’s looking up to you as a role model.