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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

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.

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