Finding Resilience
I remember that when my children were young, all players on their sports’ teams received participation trophies. They looked like the ones that were given for excellence in the sport, and the children didn’t differentiate participation from excellence. Their generation of now 20-somethings collected trophies for showing up at many things and now, in their 20s agree that showing up should not be awarded. Parents need to let children understand the need for effort if they want to be rewarded. The pandemic forced students to be responsible for their effort and took shielding children from feeling uncomfortable but still continuing away from parents. Failure is a part of learning and resilience is necessary if anyone hopes to succeed since life doesn’t just hand us a trophy.
It’s my generation of parents with children in their 20s who became the “fixers.” I know I was guilty of stepping in to make sure my children didn’t fail at certain times, but still don’t understand why I felt that I needed to do that. My children are smart, logical, ambitious, and self-aware. They would have been fine needing to figure out what to do if I hadn’t stepped in. They might have even advocated and asked for help, but I didn’t let that happen. So many parents have stepped in for their children but to our children’s detriment. We are responsible for our children sometimes thinking that they should be rewarded without putting in the time and effort needed for the reward.
School age students have found resilience during the pandemic and will be so much better for it despite it feeling hard now and having been particularly hard when they moved to remote learning. If we consider the work of researcher Carol Dweck, we can have a growth or fixed mindset about any tasks that we are undertaking. A fixed mindset views everything as I can or I can’t, while a growth mindset determines that effort can change how well I do something. I have the capacity for change if I am resilient and accept that work is not always easy and I might even “fail,” but that is just part of learning. Building resilience to be able to persevere and become what we are capable of is so much more rewarding than merely participating.
Our Children had growing pains, and still might, as they gained resilience and perseverance during the pandemic, but they will be better for it if we, their parents, don’t step in again as the “fixers.” Instead, we can help them continue to grow in their resilience by telling our stories of growth through failure, not catastrophizing bumps in their lives, allowing them to fail with knowing that they have support, discussing how they can push though discomfort, and not demanding that there should be trophies for participation. We are responsible for helping our children appreciate their effort driving successes and developing their learned independence. We don’t want them living in our basements as adults, so we need to give them the space to try, fail, succeed, find grit, resilience, and acceptance of who they truly are.