Yesterday I wrote about raising strawberries. Not the ones at the supermarket, but the ones we have apparently been growing at home. Children so shielded from life’s knocks that they struggle when things do not go their way.
Then I shared the post with my own children, and what came back was a long family chat that went late into the night. At 4.48 this morning I was reading it all over again, with a rather full heart. Not quite what I expected from a post about toughening kids up.
The first surprise was who disagreed. It was not the children. It was their mother. She said, kindly, that she does not fully agree with some of my ideas, though she understands where I am coming from. Agree to disagree, she said, and I could not argue with that.
She also described our two styles better than I ever could. Her instinct is to spare them the heartache, because she knows how it feels. Mine is to let them find out for themselves. She compared it to asking someone to walk on fire. You know it will hurt, they know it will hurt, but are they willing to walk on it to learn what the pain is like?
Then one of the children said something that changed how I read my own post. He feels fortunate that his parents have been ready to take some of life’s blows for him, more often than he would like to admit. But he also agreed that you never really learn until you go through things yourself. And when it all gets too much, he knows he has two reliable people to cheer him up and help him move forward.
That is not a strawberry that bruises at the first press. It sounds more like resilience with a safety net underneath. He faces real things, learns from them, and knows who to call when it gets heavy. I had written as if it was my way against their mother’s. That chat showed me the two have been working together all along.
I have not changed my mind about the main point. Children still need to meet disappointment while the stakes are small, and we cannot shield them from everything. But I should be careful about assuming the way I learnt resilience is the only way to learn it. My generation was good at keeping quiet and getting on with things. I am no longer sure that was always strength. Sometimes it was just not wanting to trouble anyone. Young people today find it easier to say they are struggling and ask for help, and that may be a strength too.
I will probably always worry about whether we are preparing them for the world. But we can spend so much time on what our children might lack that we miss what they already have. They can think for themselves, see another point of view, and talk it through kindly even when they see things differently.
So a little discomfort now and then never hurt anyone. But we could also give them a bit more credit. Judging by a conversation that had me smiling at 4.48 in the morning, the strawberries may be doing just fine after all.