Learning the Hard Way

In high school, the summer before my junior year, I had a three month relationship that my parents knew was going to crash and burn before it even started.  It had all the wonderful things teenage melodramas need:  A boyfriend who was still in love with my best friend, a friend who was still in love with my boyfriend, the boyfriend who had the emotional maturity of a gnat, teenage hormones, and no worldly experience for any of the teenagers involved to say:  "This is going to end very, very badly with many, many tears and lots of landline phone calls."

At some point while I was crying my broken heart out on my dad's lap, I had an inkling that he had a premonition that this relationship was going to last about as long as the latest boy band.  I asked him why he let me do it, knowing it was going to have such a tragic ending.  My dad looked me in the eye and said, "I struggled with it, but in the end, I knew you had to make your own mistakes.  I can't live your life for you. It's the hardest part of being a parent...knowing your kids are going to fail and letting them do it anyway."

When my dad explained his reasoning to me, I was shell-shocked.  I heard the lesson but thought his timing was rather lousy, given everything *I* was already dealing at the time.  Major break-up, here! Hello?!?  So, I filed it away under "things parents say to their kids when they think they are being helpful" and went about my life.

Now that Richard and I are raising two middle schoolers, I finally understand what my dad was trying to teach me:  It isn't easy to let our kids knowingly make mistakes.  However, if they are mistakes the kids can afford to make, with no serious consequences except to themselves, I am learning to bite my tongue.  It's hard. I hate it.  I don't always know when to let them fail and when to offer help, so sometimes I jump in too soon or not soon enough.

I am learning that kids need to be able to safely fail at things so they can learn how to handle the disappointments in life. It makes the successes they will experience that much more triumphant.   We can't save our kids from every curveball thrown at them, but we can equip them emotionally and mentally.  We can be there to cheer them on when life is going well as well as comfort them when it is not going quite their way.

As parents, we can teach them to learn from mistakes, rather then letting mistakes define who they are as a person.   It's a continuous process, but if we want children who are not afraid to explore the world, it is one well worth the effort.

Social (Media) Awareness

I like Social Media. A Lot. In fact, I read books about how to use it more and how it is impacting our society. I'm equally fascinated/startled by the privacies we are willing to give up in order to immerse people into our lives at the expense of letting advertisers mine thier way through our digital homes. That being said, I share much of my life through status updates and pictures on facebook. I chose facebook because Instagram freaks me out with their lack of privacy controls. I like twitter, but it isn't my thing. I don't feel home there. I also have this blog which I am horrible at updating. Like many people before me who found something a little too enticing for their own good, there was a point where I felt facebook had more control over me than I did over it, so I walked away from it for awhile, reassessed my priorities, then returned wiser for the experience. If you know how much time I'm spending on social media and it bothers you, the problem is yours, not mine. I love sharing my life and the support that is freely given and offered. I have been able to interact with my family and friends in a way that would not have been possible years ago. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to see pictures of events that would otherwise have been missed. I am not going to apologize for choosing to live an interactive life. It brings me an incredible amount of blessings and joy to share the adventures of family life. It is my fondest hope you join me for the journey.