It’s always surprising to me that the only way I learn in life is to experience it.
People around me can talk their way silly about how awful it feels to have your partner betray your trust, how anxiety provoking it feels to have your child start high school for the first day, or how painful a bikini wax really is. But until you go through these experiences yourself you just really don’t get it at all.
Life is our biggest teacher
Tears can be our biggest motivator to change.
Heartbreak is often followed by joy.
I know this all intellectually, but each time I go through it emotionally it all seems to make more sense
Pretty much all of my happiest moments my in life have somehow been preceded by some form of pain or heartache.
Life has a way of wanting to teach us in the rawest forms. It’s as if at a certain point we only listen if life is really loud and essentially forces us to hear.
So the same applies to our children right?
I have encountered a couple of situations in the last couple of weeks with my kids that bring home two very important messages that I try to ensure I never forget:
1-Experience in life with kids is key. For them to learn properly they need to experience sadness, pain and heartaches along with the happiness, roses and lollipops.
If they don’t experience and live life, and we try to live it for them, they get stuck. They lose out. Massively.
2-When kids experience sadness or worry it has some good aspects. It is a motivator for change. If they never experience these things,they won’t change behavior and may get stuck doing the same unsuccessful thing over and over and over again which long term will create even more unhappiness for them in the long- term.
Without these things it’s all theoretical really.
A heart needs to feel. Their hearts need to feel.
I witnessed a Mom at the school the other day who’s son started at school in grade 1 mid year and cried when she left the schoolyard..and so she went right back and took him home telling the teacher “he was not ready and she would try again the next day if he felt ready”
("Oh Pleeze!!!!)
Both the teacher and I looked at the child with sadness..and fear.
Not because he was crying but that his Mother so quickly judged him incapable and basically robbed him of getting through a difficult experience himself. The message she sent her son that day was:
When the going gets tough; you are not capable of handling it and so I will save you.We will do what feels best short term and ignore the long term impact of this important action.
Both the teacher and I knew that the son might appreciate this saving now, but years from now-it will harm him, his self confidence and his need in life to learn from experience. His mother set the stage of running in quickly and saving her son and she is sure to repeat this pattern time and time again.
We have all been that Mother-and had the urge to go in and save out kids from a tough situation. That would be the easy thing to do.
The hard thing is often doing the right thing.
In times like the last few weeks I have been very grateful that I have prepared my kids when they were young for “real life” by ensuring that the had opportunities to miss me..and realize the were capable of overcoming that….fail…without falling apart…getting hurt and still playing despite the boo-boo, getting in a fight and having the courage to say sorry without me by their side and face their peers…having a bad cold at night and after a few snuggles and hot water bottle going back to their own beds and putting themselves asleep.
I am thankful that I gave my kids these opportunities to be capable in life early on. Thank goodness now as I see as soon as the double digits hit-or sometimes before then-they need these skills to survive at school and with peers.
It is easy to tell the difference in the schoolyard between the kids who have been fully protected and the kids who have had to fend for themselves a little bit. The difference is in their confidence and their ability to deal with the meanies and nastier kids at school. The more confident kids are able to get through it all; the less confident ones crumble and they fall apart; these situations traumatize them at the very core.
So on the diet of life, although not necessarily as tasty, what I prescribe for healthy living is small doses (and sometime unwanted larger portions) of difficulty, hardship and tough encounters.
Somehow carrying this load and getting a little more used to it-prepares us for the larger loads we will with certainly come across as we get older and hopefully wiser.
