Hadassa Ben-Ari Found Something Every Parent Dreams Of
Author Hadassa Ben-Ari discovered her teenage sons had secretly written personal goal lists on their walls and her emotional post about it is resonating with parents everywhere.
Hadassa Ben-Ari, the beloved Israeli author and creator known for her deeply resonant writing, thought she was just doing a favor for one of her kids when she walked into her sons' room, a floor of the house she laughingly admits she almost never visits.
What she found stopped her in her tracks.
One son had taped a handwritten goals list to the ceiling above his bed. "Targets. Date. 10-second handstand. Play any song I want on guitar. Pull-ups with 30 kilos." The other had his own list on the wall: "My goals. To master piano and kamancheh. At least 5 pull-ups. Learn to draw beautifully... Good luck."
"Every parent wants to see what I saw in my sons' room," Ben-Ari wrote in a post that quickly struck a chord with thousands of followers. "It lit up my heart. Oh, how it lit up my heart."
She wasn't without her trademark humor. The lists were attached to the wall and ceiling with scotch tape. "I wanted to hang them both," she wrote, referencing her long-standing house rule against sticky tape on the walls. "People think I write books and don't know that I'm basically a maintenance worker. A building superintendent. Whatever."
But what moved her most was where the inspiration came from and it wasn't her. Ben-Ari is candid about the limits of parental lecturing. "They wrote themselves life goals, and not because I talk to them about living a life with meaning. Because when I talk to them, they say, 'Mom, enough with the speeches.'"
The spark, it turned out, came from a young neighbor who sat with her sons and told them simply: "This is your time to live a big life. Write down your goals. Become the people you dream of being." They took it with both hands.
It is a truth every parent knows and few admit so openly: sometimes the message lands better when it comes through the back door, carried by someone who isn't you.
Ben-Ari connected it to a moment earlier that week, when a child who doesn't like reading showed up at her door having heard that her new book "War of Heroes 2" had come out - and told his mother they had to get it. "I gave him the book and thought, how wonderful for him. How wonderful for him, and how wonderful for my children, that at the back door there are people lighting them up about life."
"We parents will keep talking sense into them," she concluded with a smile. "But they'll learn to live lives full of magic and dreams and ambition from the heroes of real life."