One thing I failed to reckon with prior to becoming a parent is the strength of my desire to protect my children from pain. In many ways this is a good desire, but like all desires, it needs to be tempered. By which I don’t mean that we beat or starve our children, but that we allow our children to have difficult and painful experiences while they are young so that we can walk with our children in wisdom through these early storms, knowing that one day they will experience greater turmoil and suffering.
As school gets started, parents (like myself) may be tempted to address problems at school by blaming others – other kids, teachers, and administrators – for circumstances which we should be teaching our kids to navigate. Now that doesn’t mean that parents aren’t monitoring and prepared to intervene in the right way, but my Spidey sense tells me that more parents want behaviors and attitudes to change in everyone BUT their own children than the other way around. If we are going to raise tough kids who become resilient adults, then our kids are going to have to go through tough times. Here are four things you may not want for your kids to experience, but you should.
A Bad Teacher
The phrase “bad teacher” covers pretty broad territory, but at some point your kids are probably going to experience a teacher that either 1) doesn’t connect with them on an individual level, or 2) is a poor classroom manager, or 3) simply isn’t good at teaching. While we have largely experienced good teachers, we have also experienced bad teachers. Kids need to learn that having a bad teacher is not an excuse for a failure to learn or behave. There is an older educational adage that goes something like, “A student who doesn’t want to learn won’t learn from the best of teachers, while a student who wants to learn will learn from the worst of teachers.” Our hope is that our children will largely encounter good teachers, but it won’t kill them to have a bad teacher every once in a while.
A Bully
I say that our kids should encounter a bully, not “be bullied”, and there really is a difference. Bullying probably needs its own separate post at some point, because that phrase is being used to cover a lot of ground. But let’s say there is a genuine bully in the sense of using words and actions to intimidate others into doing what he/she wants. Your future men and women are going to encounter such people and they might as well have some experience with it. Being a glasses-wearing kid of diminutive stature with a bent towards reading, I was a natural target for bullies. But I learned not to be bullied, and bullies learned to find other targets. This is probably one of the hardest experiences for parents to walk through with their kids, but you want to have the opportunity to walk through it with them. And maybe the approach is something like this. “Hey buddy, it sounds like ______ is giving you a rough time at school. Let’s figure out how we’re going to not be bullied.”
Struggle and Failure
As your students get older, they will have to work harder to get the part in the school play or make the team or win the debate. Participation trophies are for littles, because the world is a competitive place for a reason. Excellence needs to be honed by competition and comparison, words that many in the modern world hate, until they need a really good surgeon or plumber. It does seem like some kids are naturally gifted across many disciplines and rise to the top, but generally speaking, someone will be better than your student at something. This means that your tyke – the apple of your eye who is unsurpassed in excellence by anyone, according to those skewed glasses you are wearing – will get beat at something. They will fail. This is a good lesson to walk through with your kids. They won’t always win, and always winning won’t result in them improving. Likewise, struggle is not something we enjoy our kids enduring, but it is necessary for their development. My students have each had their own difficult subjects to comprehend, but it is our job as parents to push them to try.
Conclusion
As parents, we should take the unpleasant experiences our children have as opportunities to prepare them for a future filled with adversity and opposition. In the honesty of my hearts, I can tell you that my inclination is to hurt when my kids hurt and to remove the source of that hurt. This is where, as parents, we must want the best for our kids and discipline ourselves. If you try to remove every obstacle in your child’s path, you may find yourself getting a phone call from a sobbing adult because the washing machine is broken, or a coworker is being mean, or someone else got the promotion.
Nathan Writes 