As you can tell by the title, I’ve “homaged” the heck out of my little artist twice before (here, and here).
As much as I love to share Boy Wonder’s artwork with heaping amounts of mom pride, sometimes I wonder if I’m pushing art too hard.
To quote myself from yesterday, “Boy Wonder has been in art class for five years and every Saturday morning it’s a damn struggle to get him there. I force it because he likes the class, even if he doesn’t like getting showered and dressed to go there. I also force art because he has raw talent that deserves development and yeah, the discipline art requires won’t kill him.”
While I believe in my reasons for forcing strongly encouraging private art lessons, the last thing I want to do is suck the joy right out of his artistic experience. When I mentioned he “liked” the class, I failed to explain that what he liked was the finished product – not the formalized instruction. I get it, 1 ½ hours of art instruction every Saturday morning wouldn’t be my idea of fun either.
At an age where he disagrees with me on everything just because he can, I’m at a loss in deciding if art lessons are a battle worth fighting for…[read more]
MOMMYFRIEND 
Also, he’ll get a taste for art and refuse to do anything with his life to make any actual money. I tried to make money with my art once. It didn’t work. So then I decided to fall back on my sure-fire back-up plan: be a best-selling novelist. Before long, I’ll have to go to plan C as a garbage collector. My parents should have just made me take business classes.