Pastors

Adversity Training

Yep—we are a culture that is terrified of adversity finding our kids.

Leadership Journal September 7, 2007

In a recent issue of Parenting magazine, one mom recounted that it was hard for her to watch her child cast in a school pageant as the “cheese”—as in, the “cheese” that stands alone.

The child is three.

Yep—we are a culture that is terrified of adversity finding our kids. Strike that; we’re terrified of even brief unpleasantness getting near our kids. I’m not sure it’s even much different for the Christian culture. For instance, how many of us have been around parents on a Sunday morning who would never consider telling their three-year-old, “Do NOT interrupt—I’m talking to the grown-ups,” for fear of bruising a delicate child’s psyche?

Fear of any adversity touching our kids may be most pronounced as our children head back to school, and some of these issues are once again thrown into relief: What if my child has a teacher he doesn’t like? What if he doesn’t make the team, or she isn’t invited to the popular girl’s party? What if he has to play the “cheese”?

“What if she … fails?” And most especially: “How do I fix it?”

Dr. Robert Shaw is a practicing child psychiatrist in Berkeley, California. In his 2003 book, The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children, he says that we parents are simply terrified that our children might experience irritation, frustration, anger, disappointment, sadness, or any other negative emotion. In fact, many of us parents will do anything to have an always “happy” little one.

I call it “The cult of the always contented child.”

Lest anyone think I don’t fall into that very trap myself—wrong! I have four kids; a boy and girls aged 13, 11, 8 and 6. Believe me, that “cult” is pretty enticing. It’s great to have my six-year-old call me, “the greatest mom in the world” because I gave her something she wanted. The question is, though, can I handle it when she pronounces me the “meanest” mom in the world when I don’t? And will I teach her that not getting what she wants doesn’t equal me being “mean”?

If I can’t, I’d better find another day job.

A few weeks ago I was in the post office and a mother with a two-year-old or so boy came in. He spied a stuffed “post office” bear toy for sale, hanging on a peg on the wall, and instructed his mother—in very clear terms—to give it to him. She reached for the white bear, only to be told by the little boy “No, not that one.” He wanted the brown one instead. She dutifully put the one back and picked out the other for him. No “please” or “thank you” from the little guy, nor did mom ask for any. He clutched the bear, and only as I was leaving, did I hear her say to her little one, “You can’t have that, you know—the bear sleeps here.”

“Good luck” I thought. And wait a few years until he says, “No, not THAT car—I want the silver one!”

Yep, our culture seeks to protect children from every conceivable disappointment or frustration. Even the frustration of hearing the word “no” and having a little will crossed.

But, given that the calling of the Christian life is precisely to submit our wills to God Himself, especially when that’s hard, we do our children no favors when we devote ourselves to something we can’t achieve anyway—the “ideal” of the always contented child.

Moreover, we’re not building resilient kids. We’re building kids that Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford, one of the world’s leading researchers on motivation and self-esteem, calls both “entitled and fragile.” In other words, what happens when the little boy who apparently felt so entitled to the bears in the post office faces the “nos” of life? What about when he faces a real storm of life?

Such storms most surely do come to God’s children, according to Scripture. “For to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in Him but to suffer for His sake.” (Philippians 1:24) And “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials.” (James 1:2)

Well forget real suffering—our kids can’t even deal with a little delayed gratification!

But if our children are never allowed to fail, or experience disappointment or frustration—if every time they get a really boring or overbearing teacher we get them moved to another class—what happens when God allows real hardship into their lives?

There’s a great book called Children at Promise—as opposed to another called Children at Risk—in which the authors researched successful people who were also respected because they gave to their communities. They were givers, not takers.

The authors found is that in every case there was significant adversity the person pointed to as being part of their success, AND that adversity was interpreted to them by some adult, sometimes not a parent. There was someone in their lives who helped them see that they could grow from whatever the adversity was, whether a broken family or a dream which got derailed so they had to find another.

None of us go looking for adversity for our children. And you know what? Sometimes it’s prudent to change a teacher, and I, for one, would fight on behalf of my kids to make things right when it comes to some real injustice. (Though I might not succeed.) But hey, adversity will come in some form to our children, and often we just can’t, or shouldn’t, fix it for our kids.

What a blessing that unlike the world, we Christians don’t have to fear adversity for our children when it inevitably does come to them, whether it’s being cut from the team or a friend that’s ignoring them—or even a profound tragedy like losing a parent.

Don’t get me wrong. We dare not treat the grief lightly. It will happen in a variety of ways—large and small—and will present itself to our children in countless ways. But what a gift that we know that “For all things work together for the good of those who love God, and are called according to His purpose,” says Romans 8:28. That’s doesn’t mean, by the way, that He will makes things good in a worldly sense, though often God does. But it describes the fuller sense that God promises to break into our hearts through adversity and make us more like his Son and, therefore, more fit for heaven. And more able to look forward to Heaven because that means leaving the brokenness of this world behind for good. What a gift.

But that can be a little hard to communicate to a seventh-grader whose best friend has suddenly stopped talking to her, or an eighth-grader who didn’t make the school baseball team, or a freshman who makes it to the third cuts for pom pons—then completely forgets the routine in the middle of tryouts and doesn’t make the squad after all. (Okay, that last one was me.)

So, what do we do to begin training our kids now to handle and grow from adversity, even if we don’t always put into those terms? To look ahead at the takeaways I’ll share for the successful Christian home, one of the ways to build resilient kids is to let them know that they are, well, resilient. Dr. Dweck suggests asking our kids, “What challenge did you face today? How did you handle it? What’s a mistake that you made—and learned from? What’s something that disappointed you in the last month—and what’s some good that came from it?

In a self-esteem soaked culture in which we are devoted to the idea of the always contented child—these are not questions we typically ask our kids.

But, if we consistently engage in such conversations, we build a “bank deposit” for our children—one that serves as a history they can recognize and draw from when the going gets rough. It’s a reminder that God is good and situations might not be as bad as first imagined. “Oh right, I remember a while ago when Suszie stopped talking to me. That was really hard. But then it turned out her parents were getting divorced and she was really sad and I was able to reach out to her—it wasn’t what I thought at all! So then … Maybe I need to talk to Jill about what she’s going through.”

When my husband chose to leave our family a few years ago, it rightly brought my children and me a wrenching pain. I would never have chosen that for my kids. But scripture stared at me: “All things work together for the good of those who love God.” Notice that God doesn’t say the “good” is easy or pleasant. The “good” can be incredibly hard, and it might really involve an injustice for which legal or other remedies might be sought. But it doesn’t change the fact that God intends all things to work together for the good of His children.

And so I let my children see me grieve, I encouraged them to do the same. I talked about the grief being real, and being made by God into something that could soften and strengthen all of us, all at the same time. It wasn’t something to be gutted through or ignored—God was and is there with us in it, wanting us to see it as the brokenness that it is! And yet amazingly, He has a purpose for it; one that is for His glory and our good, even if I can’t always see what that is right now.

I wonder—had my parents always protected me from adversity, had they been committed to the “cult of the always contented child,” had they been afraid to say “no,” would I have had the resiliency to have handled what God allowed for me? I’m not sure.

I know that I hope I’m raising resilient kids.

Adversity comes in many forms, but it comes into every life. What a gift we parents give our children when, instead of always trying to protect our kids from it—when we can’t anyway—we help them to walk with Christ in the midst of adversity that will surely come to them. Ultimately, that ability rests in this: Trusting in who God is—not in our circumstances. We parents have to really believe that if we are going to pass on that truth to our kids. Here’s what I mean:

When I lived in Washington, a young Christian woman in a sister church of mine, Mindy, a mother of young children, lay dying. A dear friend of mine who was close to her visited her. She recounted it being a sunny day, and she wanted to essentially tell her friend how sorry she was for the very loss of life she was experiencing. Mindy asked my friend to look outside and see all the healthy people walking around in the sunshine. Here’s what she said to my friend: “Do you understand that if those ‘healthy’ people walking around out there don’t know Christ they are dying. In contrast I’m in this dark room ‘dying’ but I know Christ—so I’m the one who is alive. Praise God!”

That is gratefulness to which I can only aspire. But if I’m aspiring to it—I’m hoping my children get a glimpse of that aspiration! Be warned: In allowing our children to appropriately experience adversity, we completely go against the “parenting culture,” and we give them a gift indeed.

I’ve found there are at least five steps to enabling our children to find fruit in adversity. They rest on the understanding that the teaching of scripture is that rightly interpreted, adversity is a gift from God which draws us closer to himself.

Practically speaking…

  1. Say “no” to our children when it’s called for. The experts suggest we parents hide our “nos.” I think more parents should use “no” as a complete sentence. What a gift we give our kids when we teach them that the world will not, should not, conform to their will. What a gift we give them when we give them practice in having their passions denied—and thriving anyway!
  2. Ask our children, particularly our older ones, “What’s a difficult situation you are facing right now? How can you grow from it? How can God use that difficult friend, teacher, (parent or sibling!) to draw you closer to Himself?”
  3. Ask “How has a difficult situation surprised you in the last month (or six months) by working out? How did it work out in ways you never would have guessed?”
  4. “What’s a mistake you learned from this week?” (It’s okay to fail—the key is growing and learning from it!)
  5. Let our children see us walking with God in the adversity that comes into our lives as their parents! That doesn’t mean sharing with them every detail or difficulty of our lives. It does mean openly walking with and trusting Christ even when, especially when, it means saying to or showing our kids, “I don’t know what God has for me in this. It’s sad (or hard or difficult). But I’m trusting in Him, not in my circumstances.”

I’m not suggesting the five steps are a magic formula to anything. I do suggest they might be a tool for helping our children to stand up against a culture that strangely, wrongly, and shortsightedly denies the reality of adversity in our kids’ lives—and leaves our children fragile, not resilient. And most sadly leaves them less prepared to walk with God and glorify Him in the richness, and yes even joy, that adversity might bring to them.

Betsy Hart is a mother of four, a popular syndicated columnist, and author of It Takes aParent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting is Hurting ourKids—and What to do About It(PutnamBooks, 2005). She also hosts a weekly syndicated radio show by the same name—click here and you can listen to podcasts of her recent shows: www.betsysblog.com

Copyright © 2007 Promiseland.

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