Grow Through Difficulties

As parents, we have a great desire to protect our children from pain and disappointments of all types. Just as we vigilantly guard preschoolers from running into the street, so we wish we could spare our school-age children the indignity of being teased or the embarrassment of not understanding something, or to save our teenager the anguish of a broken heart or a college rejection letter.  We wish our children would never know the grief that comes from losing someone beloved or the pain and fear that comes with serious illness or danger.  We wish them only happiness. Just as we wish ourselves to be free from pain, distress and illness, whether physical or mental.

The desire to be free from danger and to be comfortable and happy is very central to our human experience and imbued with all sorts of emotional and psychological factors.  One of the things we have in common with all other people is that we each want to be happy.  But, there is suffering in the world and everyone of us will know its pain.

This is a disturbing thought and it is difficult to accept. We tend to fear suffering and seem to have countless strategies for avoiding and denying it. These strategies often seem protective, but unfortunately they may also distance us from the experience of life. When we put up barriers to pain, we inevitably create barriers that extend to joy.  When we deny difficult things, we close off a part of ourselves and we create walls between ourselves and others.  Sometimes we may even be forced to construct a fictitious isolated world for ourselves if we move away from reality.  These things lead to anger, frustration and fear as we try to gain control of things we cannot control.  This is not to say we should embrace painful and difficult things, but that we should see them for what they are, an inevitable aspect of being alive, and move through these events without fear, recognizing that they often bring opportunities for growth and development.  If you can help your children acknowledge and move through the hopefully small pains they encounter, you can help them develop courage, self-confidence and a repertoire of healthy responses to challenges.

The desire to protect children from painful and difficult experiences can be very well meaning but also unwise.  At the same time, I think we can sometimes protect our children, leading them away from circumstances that don’t directly affect them and gauging their maturity to understand struggles in the wider world.  The choice is more a loving art than a science or formula.

The problem with well-intentioned concealing of information

A lot of families deny difficult situations.   In “dysfunctional” families, substance abuse, serious conflicts, physical abuse, eating disorders and the like may be overtly denied, kept secret, or shrouded with excuses.  There are many causes for this.   Sometimes it is shame or fear or embarrassment that keep secrets within family walls; other times it is an unconscious sense that something doesn’t really exist if it is not recognized.   There is also a sense that children can be spared pain if the source of pain is not acknowledged or discussed.  This strategy extends to the good intentions of many well functioning families.   It is denial when parents try to conceal that a grandparent is gravely ill, a job is lost, or a close friend is angry.   The pain is denied, at least in front of children, in an effort to protect them from it.  Unfortunately, this approach usually backfires.   Children almost always sense when there is a problem and they know something about what is happening to one degree or another.   They feel pain and worry about the situation as they understand it.  They are also disturbed by the implicit lies.  Since the truth is not acknowledged, children are not comforted.  We cannot comfort a child’s concerns about something that we pretend does not exist.  Another consequence of this strategy is that children learn not to trust their own feelings and intuitions.

So when parents adopt these kinds of strategies, they inadvertently teach children to deny and fear painful things. They teach their children not to trust what they apprehend and they are unable to ease or clarify their children’s worries.  They also deny children the opportunity to express compassion or sympathy to others.  Concealing or denying difficulties that are clearly present is counter to one of the other Guiding Principles of parenting with wisdom, “Interact Respectfully.”

While it is not a good idea to deny difficulties and challenges when they are clearly happening, it is not necessary or helpful to share all the specific details with a child, particularly a young one.   The best guide is to offer a simple description of a situation and let your child ask questions.

Ways to handle suffering is a central theme of most religions.  Each offers ways to find strength and peace of mind by lovingly opening in faith or by seeing the ebb and flow of life events with equanimity rather than contracting in denial. Interestingly, modern science is also examining effective ways to move through difficulty and to promote meaningful positive experiences.  The combined wisdom of the great religions and recent findings from science all indicate that while difficulties are inevitable, how these affect us is in part up to us.

This guiding principle encourages you to accept that challenges and pain visit each of us on our life path, and to move through these with honesty and openness, using them as opportunities for personal growth, and to help your children to do the same.

There are three specific things you may want to nurture:  acceptance, compassion and resilience. Acceptance is courageously facing distressing events, opening to them, rather than being afraid of them or letting them become prisons. Compassion is born of empathy.  It involves sensing how another person feels or experiences something and responding by acting in a helpful, meaningful way. Resilience is the ability to face emotional or other challenges with energy, determination and flexibility, rather than retracting from adversity and being diminished by it. Resilience enables personal growth and supports qualities of strength, determination and grit.

Acceptance

Acceptance means acknowledging reality.  It doesn’t mean liking reality.  You may or may not. There is an openness to acceptance, just as there is a contraction to denial.  You can actually feel this in your body.  Denial brings a sensation of tightness, aching, shallow breathing, holding in and anger.  Acceptance brings deeper breathing or even sighing, softer muscles, less resistance.  Both may feel sad, but only acceptance is truthful.  You can’t move through something that you don’t even acknowledge.  Feelings that are ignored become trapped inside; and, as we know, they do not magically disappear.  Feelings that are acknowledged become conscious, where you can tend to them.  So acceptance offers the path to healing or resolving; denial does not.

You can see this in your child’s relatively small burdens.  Imagine a child who doesn’t disclose a problem she is having with a friend, or conceals that she broken something she shouldn’t have been using, or hides a poor grade.  The child hides too — sometimes literally hiding behind a chair or under the bed or secreted away in her room.  Or she may act cross or stressed.  If you go to her with kindness and invite her to reveal the problem, you can see her unfold as she does.  Even if the consequences will be serious, there is a relief that comes from saying the truth.

As a parent, you can guide your child to open to the truth in several ways.  One is by not concealing or hiding truths from her.  This is both role modeling and creating an honest environment in your home.  Another is to create a safe space where your child feels she can speak truthfully, knowing that she will be loved even if her behavior is not loved.

Sometimes what prevents acknowledging things is a fear of what it will be like to experience the situation.  The problem is, we then unwittingly compound and prolong the difficulty, dealing with the stress of denial, as well as not working through the difficulty.

These are some behaviors that reveal non-acceptance

• Trying again and again to change something that is not going to change.
• Feeling angry or indignant with someone or something and staying withthose feelings rather than resolving them.
• Making excuses for some event or some person’s behavior.
• Concealing some event or behavior.
• Hiding, physically or psychologically

Compassion

Compassion refers to our deep urge to respond caringly to another’s emotions without any expectation of reciprocity or acknowledgement.  It is born of empathy, which is the ability to recognize and experience the same feelings that someone else is experiencing.  Empathy is classified as a secondary emotion.  It is universal and emerges during toddlerhood, but unlike primary emotions like happiness or anger, it relies in part on cognitive development and social experiences.  It grows throughout childhood as children learn to understand the minds of others.  Empathy is an emotion, whereas compassion is a proactive response, a deep desire to do things that improve another’s condition.  Compassion is also rooted in a sense of connection to others and it focuses on what is the same in all of us rather than on what is different.  It is the pinnacle of prosocial behavior, which are acts intended to benefit another person or persons.  Traditionally, religions have spoken of compassion, while science has talked of altruism, but the boundary has blurred in recent decades as scientists have begun to explore both the neuroscience and the experience of compassion, giving rise to what is sometimes called “compassion science” and other times called the study of altruism.  Summarizing a rapidly growing body or research, altruistic behavior is associated with mental, social and physical flexibility; with better ability to regulate attention and emotion; with feelings of calmness and connection as opposed to the more stressful fight and flight reaction; with greater openness; and with enhanced brain regions associated with positivity.  These come about from a number of measurable factors including reduction of stress inducing cortisol and of higher vagal tone, which is a measure of cardiac rhythm.

Acting with compassion offers two remarkable benefits: on the one hand it is a truly helpful expression of kindness to another; intriguingly, it is also connected to the well-being of the one offering compassion.

Compassionate acts need not be elaborate.  Many times it is not possible to take away pain, whether physical or mental, but to have the pain acknowledged eases the discomfort.  To acknowledge the person in pain, including them in activities or simply being with them, is even more comforting.  In fact, very simple acts of compassion are often quite profound:  taking someone’s hand and looking directly into their eyes or asking what is happening.  A compassionate act is one in which we are fully present in the moment and are attending to someone else.   Crucially, compassion does not mean becoming overwhelmed with empathy for another nor does it mean taking on another’s suffering.  And it doesn’t mean somehow “fixing” things.

So acknowledging difficulties opens the door to compassion in multiple ways.   It offers opportunities for you to offer compassion to your child.  It allows your child to truthfully experience challenges or sadness, building empathy and self compassion, the tender care of one’s own feelings.  It creates possibilities for your child to offer comfort or compassion to you or to others.  Guiding your child to develop compassion strengthens his or her sense of connection to all others, enhances understanding of emotions and also promotes your child’s well being.

Some Ways To Nurture Compassion or Altruism

Children are altruistic by nature, though they are also naturally self oriented.  Altruism is intrinsically motivated.  In fact, research is showing that rewarding compassionate or altruistic acts may actually diminish them rather than enhance them!  So, if your child acts with compassion, it is fine to say thank you or that was really kind, or even you made so-and-so feel better.  But, if you offer a tangible reward such as a new toy or a treat or a privilege, your child will probably feel less altruistic in the future.   (The reason for this is something called the “over-justification effect,” in which rewards cause our orientation to change from internal to external motivation.)

As a parent you can promote prosocial behavior and nurture empathy and altruism or compassion in a number of ways, including:

• Modeling, that is acting with compassion/altruism yourself
• Pointing out a peer’s distress
• Handling your child’s distress sensitively rather than ignoring it or punishing it
• Talking with your child about the effect of his or her actions on others—both positive and negative examples

“True compassion doesn’t come from wanting to help those who are less fortunate than us, but from recognizing our kinship with all others.”
~ Pema Chodron ~

RESILIENCE

Resilience is the ability to recover from setbacks or challenges and to respond to them effectively.   There is something of a continuum to the way people respond to difficulties.  At the one end, people faced with difficult situations or adverse circumstances respond by collapsing, feeling crushed and helpless and sinking into depression.  At the other end, people respond by facing the challenge, finding strength and energy and moving forward.  People who lack resilience are likely to stay in a bad mood for protracted periods, they have difficulty functioning or finding solutions to problems and they may linger in grief and sorrow.  In contrast, those with resilience can feel sadness without becoming lost in it and tend to take challenges as learning experiences.

It is well known that personal growth and creativity are often born of adversity.  While resilience is related to temperament and has some genetic roots, it is increasingly clear that people can alter their patterns of responding and that resilience can be enhanced.   You can support this as a parent.  In acknowledging challenges and managing them, children experience success.  This bolsters their self confidence and inclines them to see themselves as resilient.  Resilience is not only strength, but also flexibility.  It is this that gives rise to creativity and innovation.  It also opens us to notice or try out new opportunities when old ones disappoint.

Helping your child to grow in resilience also helps prevent them from developing unhealthy patterns of thought, such as believing they are a looser, have bad luck or will never do things right.  These kinds of thought habits turn difficulties into catastrophes.   Rather than this dysfunctional thinking, children who are resilient see themselves as thriving, strong and capable.  And open to the personal growth that comes from moving through difficulties skillfully.  As a result, responding with resilience nurtures qualities of strength, determination and grit.  Grit is one of the character traits that is vital to success.

“I have never failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”
~ Thomas Edison ~