Persistence

A motivational thing I was listening to pointed out that we have all already accomplished multiple things that took years of patient effort and failure: learning to walk, learning to speak, and learning to read.  We are born with persistence in us.  We have known success.

I will draw another point, though: in nature, parents nurture their children to adulthood, then let them go.  They may see them again, they may not.  It’s a rough and large world.

This is not a bad metaphor for parenting.  I think much of the helicopter parenting, the “attachment” parenting, is really intended to use the child as a long term crutch for the parent.  Many of us feel lonely, and anyone who has sent their kid off to college has felt an emptiness and loss.

But your JOB is to send them into the world prepared for set backs, prepared to bounce back from failure, prepared to endure without complaint emotional, physical and even intellectual pain, in the forms of hard work.

If you watch this video, in real time this little cub gets better at climbing.  It figures out how not to slip.  This is a lesson it will retain in its bones forever.  The mother in any event could not likely rescue the cub, certainly not easily, but a cub which cannot figure these things out might at some point get both of them killed, as would happen if both fell off of a mountain.

Your children are in your custody only a short time.  Your job is to prepare them.  Whatever comfort you find in the world, find it elsewhere.  Enjoy them, rejoice with them, see them as often as you can, but do not make it their job to comfort you.  Offer them free skies and an open road.