Over the weekend I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Charles Fay, the President of the Love & Logic Institute. He was in Oklahoma City to speak at a Family Wellness Conference hosted by Wymer Brownlee, the wealth strategies company a friend of mine works for, and she invited to come. I’ll be sharing as a bonus podcast episdoe later this fall of my conversaion with him. But something he addressed in our time together and his seminar that has also been on my mind is parents’ tendency today to rescue kids from all adversity.
We don’t want our kids to suffer the consequences of mistakes, and we especially don’t want to see them fail. But as Dr. Fay said and we must remember: Failure is not final, it’s informative. In other words, we learn from our mistakes and grow through adversity.
Cognitively, we KNOW this. We can probably all look back at bad decisions, poor planning or flat-out failure to see how each served as a tutor or even pivotal life lessons.
One of those lessons for me came the second semester of my college sophomore year after not making my sorority’s grade requirement that led to losing my officer position. What was especially hard in this is my position as Panhellenic Vice President would be rolling into Panhellenic President the next year. But because of poor study habits and carelessness I let this opportunity slip through my hands. I can guarantee you though from that experience I have never again not taken seriously my responsibilities.
But somewhere our experiences get lost when it comes to our kids.
We turn into helicopter and lawnmower parents instead, seeking to rescue them from anything adverse. This is not loving them. In fact, we are harming them.
Consider with me the cost of a mistake at two different ages.
Scenario 1: Your kid is in middle school and forgets his homework. You bring it to him along with a lecture about remembering next time. But he suffered no consequences.
Scenario 2: Your kid is now employed and forgets to do everything his boss asked of him by a certain deadline. He gets fired.
The cost just went way up. In middle school, our child may have received a late grade, but even if it cost him a drop in a letter grade on his report card let’s be honest- the middle school transcript will not ever be seen by any college. So wouldn’t it have been so much better to help him learn from his mistakes when the costs were low? Even if we had to repetitively let our kid suffer until the lesson really sunk in!
Today, even college professors and corportate employers report of parents calling or coming in on behalf of their young adult kids. We are crippling them to the point that they actually get to adulthood unable to deal with hard things. It’s for this reason I’m pushing my boys to talk to their teachers and coaches when there is an issue. They need to know how to advocate for themselves. But the beauty of doing it now while they’re still at home is my husband and I can coach them along in it from the side.
- Is it hard to watch them pay for their mistakes or have to initiate difficult conversations? Absolutely.
- Is it hard to enforece consequences when we know it will effect us too? Of course.
- Is it loving to let them breeze on through without accountability for their actions/inactions? No way.
I know it’s not easy to feel like the “mean parent” (though that is far from what we are doing), but still we need God’s grace to see what’s true. Grace to help us love them enough to let them experience consequences, to let them be mad at us, and to trust God’s goodness to them and us in it.
For a related post check out What’s Driving Our Lawnmower Parenting?
