Kids Need Role Models. Be Theirs, Or They’ll Look for One Elsewhere

You don’t want to risk your kid picking the school drug dealer as their role model, do you?

Gracia Kleijnen
4 min readOct 22, 2021

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Stacked shipping containers in turquoise, light blue, and dark blue. Right a red one, dark blue, and light blue. The image is taken from the ground up. In the middle is a Blob wearing a purple shirt and smoking a joint. It’s wearing sunglasses to look cool.
Photo by OSG Containers on Unsplash; illustration by the author

Growing up, I was a shy kid. The sketching pad and paintbrush were my best friends. I found love mostly in art and self-expression. I had human friends too. These relationships didn’t get a chance to deepen due to moving around a lot. I also didn’t attach much value to them. I knew they’d crumble and disappear the second the moving boxes reappeared, sometimes within the year.

One parent figure was always out working. Apart from spending time at the office, they went away on business trips, spoke at conferences, and whatnot. It sounded like a big deal, like fun, being paid to travel to and spend time in faraway countries.

I often asked if I could join them. Or how they did it. The answer was always the same. “If you go to school well and work very hard, you can do this too, later.” In other words: Go figure it out for yourself.

It taught me absolutely nothing.

The cool kids

After entering the main gate, you’d see the entrance straight ahead, the canteen towards the right, and a shelter to the left. One that protects the bikes from rain.

In the Netherlands, it’s common for teachers to bike to class if they live close by. The shelter next to the main entrance was meant for their bikes — in theory.

It was also where the cool kids hung out. They filled their lungs with cigarette smoke while skipping class and listened to loud gangster rap. Not that there’s anything wrong with gangster rap. They defied the rules and often got away with it. To me, these kids were a symbol of rebellion, and I was drawn to it.

I didn’t have any real-life role models around. The people from my class weren’t that interesting. Too bland, too boring. The cool kids? The opposite. Maybe they could fill the spot.

They were not the role models I should’ve picked for several reasons:

  • Many of these kids smoked. We were literal kids of ages twelve to fourteen. Smoking was profoundly cheaper at the time, but it’s not exactly a healthy…

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Gracia Kleijnen

Sheets maker. Comic illustrator. Words on relationships, mental health, productivity & self-development in 35+ pubs. 📕Book author: https://bit.ly/Gracia-Book