Hate Me Now, Thank Me Later: How to raise your kid with love and limits

Who Is ...

Michael Jordan

Twelve publishing companies rejected her manuscript before she went on to capture the world’s imagination with her stories about a wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead.

Who Is ...

J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series

You get the picture.

Watching our children struggle with what we perceive to be difficult (and perception is the key here) can be trying. Knowing when to step in and when to hold back is one of the hardest balancing acts of parenting. But today the pendulum is swinging too often into code red. Instead of allowing mistakes and failure to be some of our kids’ best teaching tools, parents today treat emotional pain and mistakes like a hot stove. We have it all wrong. Our job is not to prevent our kids from failing; it is to teach them that failure is part of the process of success.

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

—Albert Einstein

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

—Nelson Mandela

Failure is how kids learn perseverance. Knowing that you can bounce back from failure and disappointment teaches inner resiliency and builds true self–esteem. Real self-esteem comes from mastery—social, physical, and emotional—coupled with unconditional love.

But we’ve lost the crux of self-esteem—the word self! Instead of allowing our children to stumble their way through, we persist in micromanaging everything so that our children never feel any modicum of hurt. This is not self-esteem, this is insanity!

Let’s look back at the swing set debacle. It could have been a great opportunity for the kids to learn to compromise and to handle a little disappointment. How?