LEARNING TO LET KIDS STRUGGLE
Ihave been thinking a lot about parenting. My daughter just turned 18. Since the start of this year, I have officially become an empty nester. I miss her every day. She sends me silly cat videos on Instagram. They make me laugh, connect us, let me know she’s still alive.
I wish the world to be a better place for her instead of this messy and dysfunctional one where governments and regular people dismiss the warnings and wisdom of science, where many forget the vulnerable or the consequences of actions and simply do what they like, where politicians think of the next election rather than the next generation.
I want her life to be one that is filled with kindness, beauty, hope and love – not this pain and disillusionment. I want to protect her. Fiercely. I am at the ready to fight for her and stand with her.
But it is so important that I let her spread her wings, and make mistakes, experience her own successes, and the world just as it is. This is hard. Life is hard. Parenting is hard. I found it hard last week when she got a tattoo.
A quirky, harmless image, but too big for my liking. It sent me spiralling into sadness. Sadness that I wasn’t there to guide her. Sadness that she might not have thought this through, that she might regret her choices down the track. A week on and I wonder what made me so sad.
This week I have been reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle.
I dearly wish I had read this book before I spiralled.
A friend gave it to me to read a long time ago and I have resisted reading it till now, somehow afraid of what might happen if I read it.
It has a lot of wisdom in it (I might even need to read it twice). I can see that my child is not a child anymore. With this inked marking she is saying ‘this is my life, my body, my design choice, I know who I am in this moment’. She isn’t trying to fit into the conservative safe spaces I have contorted myself to fit into. She is being true to herself. And this is a gift.
Doyle talks about the different memos each generation of parents have received upon leaving the hospital with their baby.
She describes how our ‘grandmothers’ got a memo to just get on with their lives and let their babies grow; how our ‘mothers’ got a memo to relax, trust the kids to be ok to play outside all day with all their friends till dark.
But ‘our’ memo has been one of ‘protect your children from every harm’, ‘keep them inside or only where you can supervise’.
As Doyle says, our memo is a ‘terrible memo’. Our children become strong through struggle.
They become compassionate through struggle. They learn who they are and who they are not through struggle.
Our job is not to protect them from struggle – it is impossible anyway. Our job is to be there when they need to be wrapped in support. Our job is to listen without interrupting, to listen with empathy and love.
Dr Ali Black is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of the Sunshine Coast ablack1@usc.edu.au