<p>Some great advice. Where were you guys when my boys were toddlers?</p>
<p>I’ve also come to the conclusion that one of life’s important lessons is to learn that feeling distraught is a relevant, unavoidable and perhaps even necessary part of our lives. Ideally we learn that everyone will have negative experiences in life and that you can recover, and in many cases benefit, from the resulting pain and suffering. Discomfort is often a prerequisite for the changes we need to make to our lives.</p>
<p>This observation is fairly easy to make from an objective, dispassionate viewpoint. It’s a whole other situation when the person experiencing the emotionally painfull lesson is your treasured child. Letting my sons stumble and fall as they grow has been one of my greatest parental challenges. Too often I stepped in, ‘saved my boy’, and postponed the valuable lesson they needed to learn. </p>
<p>It took awhile for me to learn that trying to protect my boys from feeling acute distraught was a futile undertaking. Regardless of what I did, they were going to have some major setbacks, failures and unmet expectations in their spiritual, social and academic lives. I also learned that the definition of “major” is subjective and is totally controlled by the person undergoing the crisis. Eventually, I decided it would be more productive to let them learn how to deal with their pain than to avoid it. I also determined that most well-intended, sage fatherly advice is utterly wasted on sons. At least in the short-term.</p>
<p>Be assured, my own parental lesson in this area is ongoing and not one that I handled deftly. Part of my daily prayer is a request for the wisdom to know when to interject myself into my sons’ lives and when to let them handle their lives alone. So far my prayer has not been answered as quickly as I would have liked. The speed at which my parental wisdom grows often rivals that of the glaciers. Maybe global warming will speed things up.</p>