Joyful Parenting

When our children are babies and they are learning to walk we watch from the sidelines. We cheer each attempt and commiserate each failure. Clapping and cheering when they take a wobbly, imperfect step and cooing “poor baby, it’s okay” when they fall.

What happens as they grow older and life becomes harder? When they are struggling to take steps out in the adult world. We are no longer cheerleaders. We become perfectionist instructors. “You should do it this way.”  or “Why didn’t you do this?” or “If you’d just do it the way I do it.”  We are trying to instruct them into perfect lives.

Why do we do this? Can you imagine when a baby is learning to walk if we stopped them and corrected them every time they fell?  If we repeatedly said, ‘”watch me, do it like this, let me show you how.” Or lectured them on how they needed to try harder.  Or if we tried to instruct them in their form or technique.  It sounds ridiculous.

But we do it to our young adults. We want them to be perfect.  We don’t want them to mess up, to embarrass us or themselves. We want them to be the perfect children that prove we are the perfect parents. We don’t allow the joy of exploration and learning. We want them to figure it out, get things done, be the brightest and best. Why can’t we allow them to have that child-like freedom even as they become young adults. Let them figure out life by trial and error, just like they learn to walk. Let them fall on their butts a few times, commiserate with them, then dust them off and send them out to try some more.  We see the joy in babies eyes as they try and finally learn to walk, I wonder if we’d see more joy in our older kids eyes if we would let them continue to figure the word out through trial and exploration with us acting as attentive cheerleaders.

We need to let our children struggle a little. A baby doesn’t learn to walk if he never falls and children don’t learn about life unless they are allowed to fail and pick themselves up and try again, and again, and again.  Failure is a part of learning, just like falling is part of learning to walk. We need to embrace failures, mistakes, even a little stupidity. That’s what growing up is about. We would never be embarrassed when our baby falls and skins his knee, but we’re so embarrassed when our older kids rebel or screw up or do things differently than we think they should.  They are kids, allow them to screw up, help them back up and let them keep trying. Eventually, they’ll figure it out. We all do. But wouldn’t it be great to have someone by your side while you’re figuring it out, cheering you on and helping you up when you fall.  That’s my goal with my kids who are adults now.  Life can be so hard. They so badly need someone to tell them, “you’re smart, I know you’ll figure it out”. “Or look at how well you handled that”,  or “you kinda screwed that up, but I’ll bet you learned a lot”. Or “I know you’ve got this, your gonna figure out how to handle it. I think you’re doing the right thing.” They still need a cheerleader.