My Daughter’s Wonderful Interest in Star Wars

November 11, 2015

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You can probably find a couple hundred articles on the effects of encouraging your kids’ interests at an early age.  Let your kids find their own interests and encourage them and learn about their interests.  Sometimes this can be difficult since it may not align with your personal interests.  However, the payoff can be pretty awesome as I learned this past weekend.

Showing interest in your kid’s interest is pretty easy when it’s Star Wars.  My 11-year old daughter started watching some of the Star Wars cartoons over the past year and she’s excited about the new movie coming out in December.  So to prepare for the upcoming movie, she wanted to watch the first six.  When she approached me about the idea, it was a no-brainer “yes” and as soon as we could get our hands on the movies, we would watch.

We got the movies on Saturday night from her cousins and Sunday morning she was ready to watch.  I had done some previous research on how to watch them and the “Machete Order” was recommended.  The order is 4-5-2-3-6 leaving out number one since it carried little value to the entire story (not judging, just following the order).  That’s around 11 hours of viewing time and I think she wanted to do it all in one day.  I knew I couldn’t make that happen without falling asleep at some point, so we watched Episodes 4 and 5 and took a break until after dinner when we watched Episode 2.

This got us to our bedtimes and we were both pumped to watch Episode 3 after dinner on Monday night.  We settled back in and watched the fall of Anakin Skywalker towards the Dark Side.  We would have to wait another day, but the finale would be worth the wait.  Tuesday night after dinner, we finished up with Episode 6, the death of Darth Vader and the fall of the Empire.

I didn’t think my daughter would pick up on some of the stroy lines, but she was able to put it all together pretty easily.  Now we’re both looking forward to the new trilogy.  We both think Luke Skywalker is going to follow his father’s footsteps and be swayed to the Dark Side.  Only time will tell.

It was a lot of fun sharing Star Wars with my daughter.  Just having an excuse to watch them all in a binge fashion was fun, but having that shared interest was great.  The best part was Monday night after we watched Episode 3.  She came over, gave me a hug and said “thanks for watching these with me.”  It was a great reminder that my interest in her interests has a huge effect.  This will stick with me and be a catalyst to make sure I’m involved and interested in all aspects of her life.  Even the ones that may not be my favorite.

What’s one of your kid’s interests that you share?  What’s an interest that you’ve had problems showing interest in?  How can you be sure to show interest in all of their hobbies, interests and activities?  Leave a comment below.