“What do you want most for your child in life?” I have asked this question to
multiple parents during my 40+ years of experience in education. In that time, nearly all the
parents I have asked that question to have replied that they just wanted their children to be
happy.
This raises the question; how can we help prepare our children for a life where they are
happy? I believe that a large part of ensuring our children live happy lives comes from us
equipping them to deal with adversity and challenge.
“Life is difficult.” Those are the three words written in the book The Road Less Traveled,
by American Psychiatrist Dr. Scott Peck. I find those three words vitally important. They reveal
an important reality of life: everyone’s life is filled with difficulties. Dr. Peck states that once we
truly understand and accept that life is difficult, we can begin practicing how to work through
it. When we, and our children, choose to work through life’s difficulties, we become more
competent and more successful. Dr. Peck drew this idea from a prince born in the
Lumbini Province of Nepal: Buddha.
The first of the Buddha’s 4 Noble truths is Duḥkha. It refers to the idea that existence
can be unsatisfactory, or even painful at times. This isn’t to say that life is only suffering and we
should pray for early death, only that there is a mixture of pain and pleasure inherent to
existence. Nobody can completely avoid challenges or hardships in their life. As parents, we
can’t completely shield our children from this reality either. But, if we can teach our children to
accept their struggles and overcome them instead of being paralyzed, their lives will be filled
with more happiness as a result.
I have another three-word sentence for you and your child to consider: life isn’t fair.
There will be times with a referee will make a bad call or your children’s teacher will not pick
them to answer a question they know how to answer correctly. There will even be times when
other children we say and do hurtful things to them. None of those things are fair. But in order
to succeed in life, you still have to work hard to persevere and overcome challenges like those.
The most important character-building skill to teach your child is that, “It’s not what
happens to you that matters, it is how you choose to respond to what happens to you that
matters.” Or put another way, “Things will happen to us that are outside of our control, but our
response is what matters most!” When you teach your children that they must learn how to
work hard to improve despite unfairness, they will benefit from it. It is good for them to learn
early, when they still have room to make mistakes and grow, how they best handle pressure.
Something that can help your child visualize why learning how to persevere through
pressure is to tell them about how diamonds are created. It takes 1 to 3 billion years or
pressure and heat on a piece of coal to create a diamond. Diamonds are not only beautiful, but
they are one of the hardest natural substances on earth. Compare that to a piece of glass that is
cut to look like a diamond. Glass can be made in as little as 10 minutes and can look both shiny
and lovely too, but, because it wasn’t created by pressure and time in can easily be scratched
and shattered under even a little pressure.
Much like glass, if we take shortcuts and try to avoid facing our challenges, the end
result won’t make us as resilient or as happy. When all is said and done, it is better to be an
authentic diamond than to be glass cut to look like one.
