My oldest son plays on the football team at a fork in the road. Some players will try to qualify for the team further. Some of them will stay in space a pure recreation they currently occupy. The dilemma: I let my child, who is mentally and physically is destined to stay at a lower level in football, try? Or do I protect her from heartache of loss and failure?
It’s a cliche, but there is a reason it is so. As Elizabeth Stone said, “made the decision to have children is important. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. “
Once you have a child, once you have the heart that toured outside of your body, you want to do is to protect it, to keep it safe, to keep from a broken heart. Regardless of that instinct, however, parents should also teach their children to grow up to be people who are able to deal with their own problems, which means you have to let them have the problem. You have to let them lose. I find that, as a parent, one of the most difficult things to do is to let your child fail.
These lessons start early. Initially, pretend we lose foot race against toddler and let them believe that we cannot block basketball shot made by one-third of our high. Yes, we have all the boxes that are deliberately miscounted on snakes and ladders so we went to slide and children we climb up the stairs and we have been holding their breath as he pulled the card Candy land with the hope that it will not be sent all the way back to the Plumpy.
Immediately, we started mixing loss. Sometimes we outrace them. Sometimes we cannot reshuffle the deck to put the card Plumpy’s back at the bottom of the pile. (Occasionally, we still do – and not just for the noble, self esteem building good reasons. I have a Candy Land deck reshuffled it several times to avoid accidentally raging that I see brewing if my child lost and also sometimes just because, oh my God, let the end of the game already!) But at the moment my children enter primary school, for the most part, I stop letting them win.
