My mother-in-law introduced me to a great Yiddish term, “Nachas fun der kinder,” which means gratification or pleasure from the children. It’s that moment of overwhelming pride when your 18-year-old makes an unsolicited call to her grandmother to say hello, when your college senior graduates summa cum laude, or, in my case, when your struggling musician son signs with a record label and releases a CD!

Daniel always had music in his soul. He struggled in school as a kid, but had no trouble memorizing the entire musical score to The Wizard of Oz. He decided in fourth grade that he was going to play the trumpet. Finally, he had found a subject he was good at.

After four years of marching band in high school, Daniel realized that music was more than a hobby, it was in his core being. He majored in music in college, with a concentration in sound engineering. He hated school and couldn’t wait to graduate. He complained bitterly about school work. His trumpet playing gave way to an electric guitar. He spent hours teaching himself to play. I never once heard him complain about having to practice the guitar or rehearse with the band.

Last week, 16 years after his first piano lesson opened up the world of music, Daniel hosted a CD release party with his band, One Short Fall. Dan says his music is “Popular Punk,” which translates into melodic hard rock and roll with an occasional foul word sprinkled in. Bad language aside, I’m very proud.

We don’t get to choose the roads our children take. Our mistake as parents is that we sometimes think we can. I had a student who asked me to mediate a meeting between him and his parents. His folks wanted him to major in business. He wanted to be a graphic artist. And he wasn’t doing very well in the business courses that his parents had chosen for him. I suggested to the parents that perhaps their son was doing poorly because he was pursuing their dreams instead of his own. His dad thought he knew what was best, thought it was only smart to go where the jobs were. But that wasn’t where his son wanted to be.

When Dan was in high school and floundering around for a purpose, I could have easily dissuaded him from majoring in music. It’s not exactly an easy career choice. After all, what mom wants her son to grow up to be a punk rock musician? From my perspective, however, this was Daniel’s path to a college degree. He never would have stuck it out and graduated from college if he had been forced to study business, or science, or one of the other majors that a mom would have preferred.

Unless Dan is extremely lucky, he will never be rich. He’ll always be scrounging for money at the end of every month and holding down a day job to support himself. But Dan really is one of the lucky ones.

Dan’s one of the people who gets up every day with a purpose, secure in the knowledge that he is doing what he was born to do. He also has passion — the passion for his music — in his life, something so many of us are lacking.

I don’t think this passion and purpose are something we can create, but perhaps it is something we can nurture. Our job as parents is to give our children the opportunities to explore their strengths, then to let them decide whether it’s a strength they personally want to pursue. I say this from experience.

My oldest child, Annie, could have been a great musician. I was determined that she would realize these ambitions of mine. So I made her stick with that clarinet all the way through high school. It was only in conversations long after high school was done that I came to understand she had been sitting there without a reed in her clarinet for the longest time — her own little protest against her mother’s dictum.

Just for this week, as I drive to work every day, I listen to the music of One Short Fall with a happy heart and revel in this little bit of “nachas fun der kinder.”

Dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs