Growing Pains

 

Our kids are growing up in a world that is difficult to grow up in. It’s not just a mirage that people my age can look back on childhood as a more innocent time, because indeed it was. For better or worse, we didn’t have smart phones or YouTube or social media, with the attendant information overload and assaults to body image and emotional wellbeing. 

On the other hand, I’m lucky that my kids can live in relative ease. They standard of living is more comfortable than mine at the same age, growing up in an immigrant household that was pretty well off but lived below our means because it’s what my parents were used to and because it’s what enabled the foundations upon which my life is based, most importantly education. 

Parenting norms have, not coincidentally, also shifted dramatically. It wasn’t too long ago that kids were secondary in the family orbit, with very little catered to their limitations and interests, and most of their existence consisting of putting the labor to keep the family alive. Nowadays, those of us in upper middle class households very much center our family life around kids’ needs and activities. We are chauffeur and valet and bodyguard and cook and maid and assistant. 

I’ve written before that one of my great joys in life is making breakfast for my kids on vacation. It is a small act of love in the form of servanthood, which is to say I take delight and express affection by serving my kids, in this case literally serving them a meal. And while some of my more mundane parenting responsibilities don’t evoke as much joy, I do recognize the importance and preciousness of things like riding bikes with Asher to his boxing lessons or moving Aaron into his freshman dorm or reading Jada’s college entrance essays. I may be tired when I do these things, I do them willingly and joyfully. 

But I also do them because my kids need me to. They depend on me for their safety. They don’t know how to do things so I have to show them or in some case do things for them (more on this in a sec). They are still growing up in this world and have much to learn in order to navigate it. And it is a sober responsibility I bear to help them prepare. 

But there is a balance between helping and enabling. It is unfortunate to the point of neglect when we are unavailable to our kids or refuse to assist them as they stumble through their transitions from pre-teen to teen to young adult to independent person. 

But growing up involves struggle, for to not struggle is not to really learn. And struggle involves pain. As I often say to Amy, “sometimes it has to sting a little.” The sting of not properly preparing, falling on your face, and learning the hard way that you should’ve prepared. The sting of working hard towards something and still failing, and learning the difficult life lesson that very little is given to you and that sometimes you do everything right and still lose. The sting of doing the wrong thing and suffering the appropriate consequences for it. 

Imagine the opposite of these scenarios. If we stumble into an easy life even though we didn’t work towards it or actively did the wrong things, we age in time but don’t gain in life perspective. And it would not be loving of me as a parent to allow my kids to go down that path. Better to go through the necessary lessons, even and especially if they hurt a little. 

I hope I am not coming across as a masochist. That life stings sometimes is not meant to glorify the pain as good in and of itself. Usually it hurts to watch someone you love get hurt. But if you know it is a necessary pain for a greater good, then you don’t shield them from the sting, just like you would never withhold a vaccine from a kid simply because getting a shot hurts and they don’t like feeling that pain. 

We all seek comfort, including parents for themselves and for their kids. And yet we must have wisdom to know when comfort is in fact the absolute worst thing for ourselves and our kids, and accept the struggle that life gives us sometimes on our journey to adulthood and fulfillment.