Do you want to raise mentally strong children? Why must you let your children struggle sometimes?
According to psychotherapist Amy Morin, parents must push past their instincts to coddle their children and fix their problems for them. Children must learn to experience pain, make mistakes, cope with discomfort, and work through their emotions.
Here are four things you can do to raise strong children.
Let Children Experience Hardship
As a parent, it may be tempting to protect your child from hardship and discomfort. However, Morin says that experiencing hardship is a crucial part of growing up: Children need to learn that they will struggle at times, and overcoming problems helps them build the confidence they’ll need to face challenges later in life. Here’s how to raise mentally strong children.
Mentally Strong Parents Aren’t Overprotective
It’s natural to want to shield your child from hardship. However, Morin says that not letting children experience pain—both physical and emotional—sends the message that they’re too weak and fragile to deal with such pain. This often leads to adults who spend their whole lives trying to avoid ever feeling bad and resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms like drugs to do so.
Therefore, mentally strong parents allow their kids to experience adversity, then provide the guidance and support they need to cope with it. This way, their children build confidence in their ability to handle pain and hardship, rather than becoming afraid of it.
For example, an overprotective parent might forbid their child from trying out for the school soccer team because they’re afraid that their kid will get hurt. The child then internalizes the message that they can’t handle danger and grow up to be a timid adult who’s afraid to take risks.
Conversely, a mentally strong parent would encourage their child to try out for the team—and, if they do get hurt, help them to endure the pain and recover from the injury. That child would then internalize the opposite message: that they’re strong and resilient, so they can afford to take risks because they’ll be able to handle whatever happens.
Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Protect Their Children From Mistakes
On the topic of perfectionism, another of Morin’s tips is to not fix your child’s mistakes for them.
Morin says that messing up—and facing the consequences—is one of the most effective ways for children to learn. Therefore, it’s crucial that you don’t jump in to fix every little mistake your child makes.
For example, if your child forgets their homework at school, don’t drive them back out to get it. Letting your child experience the embarrassment of admitting they didn’t do their homework, and the shame of getting a zero on that assignment, will go a long way toward making sure they’re more responsible in the future.
Furthermore, Morin says the single most important lesson children learn from making mistakes is how to recover from such mistakes. In other words, by allowing your child to make mistakes and learn from them, you’ll help them to develop resilience, independence, and problem-solving skills.
Conversely, children who grow up shielded from consequences tend to develop into anxious, uncertain adults. Because they never learned how to deal with mistakes, they become terrified of doing anything wrong once that protection is gone. As a result, they often become perfectionistic and unwilling to take risks.
Finally, Morin adds that even though you aren’t protecting your child from their mistakes, you can still offer them much-needed support during this learning process. One way to do this is by telling them about times that you made mistakes and learned from them; this will help instill the idea that nobody’s perfect, mistakes are a part of life, and the truly important thing is how to turn those mistakes into personal growth.
Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Enable Victimhood
Children who don’t yet have the skills to cope with hardship and discomfort often play the victim; they exaggerate their failures, overstate their pain, and insist that they can never succeed because the whole world is against them. Morin says that you shouldn’t indulge that kind of self-pity because then your child might never grow out of their victim mentality—psychologists refer to this mindset as learned helplessness.
Therefore, the author recommends encouraging your kid to learn and grow from their struggles. For instance, you might help them figure out why things went badly and how they can avoid that problem in the future. You can also guide them toward positive, productive action to improve their situation. Then, instead of learning that they’re a helpless victim of an unfair world, your child will learn that they can always improve and try again.
Mentally Strong Parents Don’t “Fix” Their Children’s Emotions
Another temptation Morin warns against is the urge to cheer up your child whenever they feel sad or hurt. This is important because, much like children need to learn how to cope with physical pain and risk, they also need to develop the skills to handle their painful feelings. Therefore, it’s important to let them experience and learn to cope with a wide variety of emotions, from frustration and embarrassment to boredom to grief.
So, instead of trying to make your child feel better right away, the author suggests offering validation and support when they’re struggling. Let your child know that it’s OK to feel what they’re feeling, and that you’re there to help them through it—but not to fix the problem or to somehow make the pain go away.
