Just like an airplane, our children will fly high and far if they have these twin engines on their wings: Challenges and Failures.
Challenges expand our vision of life. Failures teach us limits and boundaries.
Daily challenges like organizing our time and finishing our tasks help sharpen our focus. However, many children seem to have difficulty completing these basic tasks. There seems to be a big gap between our ideal vision of our children and their realistic capacity to carry out life's most basic tasks. One of the reasons is the lack of opportunities to fail and fail with empathic support.
Failures are normal and it reflects the expansion of skills and abilities. Without failures or the tolerance of failures, our children will be stunted at the stage of self-engrossed, narcissistic, and self-centered existence without any reality checks. Some parents are so protective and we do not allow any slight failures to happen to them. On the other extreme, we neglect and allow them to be in situations that are too much for them to bear. They become desperate and debilitated in their future pursuit of new interests. Adaptive and responsive parents will allow natural consequences to play out if they do not keep their time commitment or complete their tasks. This allows the children to face the natural and logical consequences. After the event, we reflect and engage in conversation with them. This allows them to learn from it with our full support and understanding.
With this kind of adaptive and responsive parenting, They can face bigger challenges and be more ready to self-talk themselves out of future failures when we are not around.
Bigger challenges like changing schools, family separation, and friendship goodbyes that cause social withdrawal and emotional pain will be handled appropriately with support and positive self-talk. Without parents or significant others being there when they face daily challenges, our children will not be able to expand their small circle of comfort to a bigger circle of strength-based living. On the other hand, when they are so used to small failures, with the support of a wise adult, our children can face their natural consequences.
An example: When their good friends move away, they were upset, or become quite negative, or even lose interest in daily activities. We do not say, "don't worry, you still can make new friends." Instead, we allow them to face the natural consequences of feeling loss, sadness, angry, guilty, or even regret. While they're learning about their grief process, we can listen, empathize and share their load. Our children or teenagers will learn about life's failure of not being able to control or predict their life events. They grow wiser in learning about natural emotions, accepting limitations, finding ways to feel better or move forward. Thus, these failures of not being able to control, not being able to get what they want at the time they want, will help them to learn delay of gratification and be compassionate toward themselves.
As they develop maturity, our children become more confident and competent to face another round of life challenges. Thus, failures propel them to move along, better understand their own limits and boundaries, become wiser and adjust their expectations, and be able to use their experiences appropriately.
Reflections:
a. How do I as parents create space for my children to face challenges of life and not become extreme in overprotection or neglect?
b. What can I say or do this week to create that affirming space for my children to face failures?
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