On Letting Them Struggle
In a previous post I suggested a few ways parents can train up their children well by letting them struggle and even fail. One important goal of parenting is to prepare children for adulthood, and that means guiding them through hard times toward being more responsible and accountable.
I would encourage all of you to read The Coddling of the American Mind by by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, a book that discusses why a dangerous set of ideas being adopted on college campuses and beyond have developed a stronghold and are doing a lot of harm. The authors explore the origins of safes spaces, trigger warnings, words as violence, and the rash of campus protests and riots that gripped the nation a while back. One thing the authors do as they explore this phenomenon is to analyze trends in modern parenting that have paid forward these problems.
The authors analyze what they call the “Three Great Untruths”:
- The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
- The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
- The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Consider the first great untruth. When parents treat their children as fragile, they assume their children need protection from struggle, hardship, and opposition. The highest value becomes safety – at all costs. However, when you shield your children from anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or threatened in any way, you increase the likelihood of their becoming fragile, anxious, and hurt. Rather than being fragile, children are actually “antifragile.” They grow stronger the more struggle and difficulty that is thrown at them, like the human immune system growing stronger by being exposed to invading contagions or like a muscle growing stronger with the repeated strain of lifting weights.
The authors describe the antidote to the three great untruths:
seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).
God has called parents to love their children, but our love is to imitate God’s Fatherly love and care for us. Our Heavenly Father allows us to experience life’s challenges – pain, futility, confusion, and adversity – because He knows they are good for us. “‘For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.’ It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” (Heb 12:6-7).
God knows that we are “antifragile” – that is, the things that hurt us actually make us stronger. And He cares much more for our holiness – an eternally valuable likeness to Christ – than He does for our happiness – a passing emotional experience. So, in love, He seeks out challenges for us.
Likewise, it’s our job to lift our children up, paradoxically, by letting them fail and struggle and, sometimes, hurt (within limits of course). It’s that pain and struggle, when mixed with trust in God, that will develop into fortitude, purpose, wisdom, and “grit,” traits essential for navigating the world as adults. It hurts us when our children hurt, but when we try at all costs to minimize the pain they experience, we should ask: whose pain is this really about – theirs or mine?
So, here are a few more ways parents can help their children by letting them struggle through life’s challenges.
Let your children wrestle with their own relationship struggles. It’s not our job as parents to make all hurt feelings go away. Hurt feelings that result from getting crossways with friends or being mistreated by peers really do hurt. Parents who intervene again and again to try to make it go away can actually be doing more harm than good, though. Instead, parents can help their children walk through the hurt feelings, seek resolutions for themselves, and learn to ask forgiveness of those they’ve hurt. We can give them tools to communicate and resolve conflicts, and support them with wise counsel and comfort. But that’s something far different from doing it for them.
Let your children be pressure-free in their activities. Take the pressure off their extracurriculars. Face it, your child will most likely not be a concert violinist or a major league baseball player or a major recording star. These activities are places for your child to develop their interests, learn new skills, have fun, and make friends. Their character is honed as they commit themselves to these activities and follow through, working through challenges and hardships, and learning discipline. But parents who hover and criticize and constantly problem-solve can unknowingly undermine the benefit of these activities.
Let your children learn to talk to their teachers about their struggles in class. Parents who swoop in to deal with a classroom struggle have assumed two things: first, that their child’s version of events is accurate (it’s not that the child is lying but that he is locked into his own perspective), and second, that you, as a parent are better positioned to deal with the issue than the child. Instead, train your child to go to his teacher and ask for help or ask a question. And resist the urge to swoop in and make the problem go away. Help your child figure it out and seek help from the teacher.
There’s more that parents can do. We can give our children the chance to earn money so that they learn to manage it and be generous with it. We can encourage our children to take risks (the right kind of risks) and then live with the consequences. We can be honest with our children about their strengths and weaknesses. We can require that our children ask forgiveness of those whom they have wronged and also pay restitution when appropriate. And the list goes on.
In all these things, our goal is to train up young adults who are well-equipped and mature, ready to take responsibility and be accountable. It takes faith and wisdom, for sure, but that’s what parenting is all about.