The Struggle is Real -- and Good

As fathers, we all want what’s best for our kids. There are times where we don’t know what that is but even when we make a mistake, the mistakes are made with the good intention of doing what’s best for them.

The problem in an ultra-luxurious and materialistic society like ours is it’s easy to lose sight of what really is “best.” Or perhaps to put it a different way, there’s an assumption that it’s best for our kids to have it better than we did.

But you know what they say about assumptions…

Zooming out and taking a historical perspective, common sense says something is off. If things are so much better now than say 100 years ago, why are the younger generations so much less prepared to take their place in society?

If you argue the established adults who are hiring, teaching, or otherwise interacting with the young have always said this, that only proves the point. If in the last 100 years fathers have wanted to give their kids more than they had, why are they turning out worse than before? Why is the bar always getting lowered?

I think part of this is because we’re ignoring an important factor in the process of growing up: struggle. Having to make your own way, fail, and/or sweat it out uncomfortably isn’t a negative thing. Or, if the act itself is, the results aren’t.

So many of us went through these experiences and learned to stand on our own two feet, or maybe learned we couldn’t, much to our benefit. Yet, we then turned around and cleared the path so our kids wouldn’t have to experience that.

Like I said at the beginning, I think our intentions were good, but that doesn’t save them from being short-sighted and ultimately detrimental to our kids.

Struggling is a good thing. I know because I did it -- and hated it at the time. Pushing the lawn mower in the heat as a kid, having daily chores and responsibilities, working three jobs while paying my way through college. These were hard things. Others have had much harder things to struggle through: poverty, famine, war.

But rarely do you learn and build character without encountering hard things.

Do we know this and still go out of our way to limit or eliminate the struggle from our kids’ lives? Seems like it.

Maybe it comes down to how, “having it better than we did” always seems to mean something particularly materialistic or luxurious. At least that’s the context in which I’ve always heard that phrase said. I didn’t have X (a possession, comfort, or otherwise luxurious thing) so I wanted my kids to have that.  

This may again be those good intentions mentioned earlier, but if we’ve ceded “having it better” to simply meaning having more stuff and/or having things easy what good does this do our kids?

Kids can be happy in many situations and if we teach them their happiness is tied to things and a comfortable life is of primary importance, well, we’ve found ourselves a long way from the thoughts of Solomon, Aristotle, Augustine and most other great thinkers. 

Struggling is good. Learning from failure is a good way to learn. Our media saturated lives with their highlight reels and skewed view of reality suggest everything is fast, easy, and life is just a series of successes and wins. But we know that’s not the case.

We don’t do our kids a favor by removing all struggle or eliminating all responsibility. Knowing what we know, that life isn’t easy and doing hard things is good, we do them a disservice by not helping them learn that at home.

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day;
teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I’ll go get my tackle box.