One thing that puzzles me about parenting is how much suffering is normalised in the name of building resilience.
There is very little evidence that chronic harshness builds healthy resilience. Most research points toward the opposite.
Developmental psychology consistently finds children build resilience through secure attachment, responsive caregiving, and gradually increasing challenges.
Research comparing gentle, authoritarian, and helicopter parenting consistently shows that chronic harshness does not build resilience. Rather they grow with chunks in their armour, with a lot of coping mechanisms and anxiety towards life.
From the physical to mental suffering, we humans have faced it all. We have stood after falling hard, fought very hard tangible and intangible battles, and won.
Yet the thing which we picked, from fascist and slave culture is to start them young. Start to trouble them young, start to discipline them young, start normalising living in pain young, normalise a life of suffering young.
The research in the area of child development has supported targeted building of resilience in controlled environments, not treating kids like drying mangos for pickles in the harsh sun.
One can study examples from all fields, from medicine to military, from sports to dance, from singing to astronomy, the training is intentional and controlled. There is support, physical and mental, throughout the process. Extra care is given to those who are finding difficulty in learning and proper help is provided when there is any injury.
Mental therapy is always provided to support trainees and even professionals whenever there is a mental block, more than physical limit to performing better.
Basically, one can observe that hard sports with intensive physical and mental training are treated with a controlled pace instead of rapid brainless hitting like a hammer on a nail.
We understand progressive training everywhere except parenting.
Imagine you start deadlifting 100 kg on your first day. You keep trying to lift till you lift it, we surely know the answer what would happen to you. You probably would end up in an emergency room.
All the gymbros know, even when you are a pro, you deadlift very carefully lest you injure yourself.
Now imagine we think about children, who I emphasize are not mini-adults. They are called children for a reason, and are asked to just hustle like they have to fight tomorrow, when probably they won’t be.
We are preparing our children for battles and a difficult future, which probably doesn’t exist or at least the training we are giving them is not in the right direction. We are passing on our battles to them, instead of giving them hope for a better and a different future.
Every generation prepares its children for the dangers it survived. But children don’t grow into our past. They grow into their future.
We accept very harsh environments for our children physically and emotionally, because older generations fed us that being comfortable is for the weak.
Our parents raised us with the knowledge they had. We have access to far more developmental research today.
Even without reading a single research paper, we can simply look at ourselves.
How resilient are we?
How much pressure can we actually tolerate?
How calm do we remain when life gives us no room to breathe?
We are struggling, we all know. Did our parents not train us well then?
No, it is because we were prepared for a battle that was in our parents’ head, but the present is very different from our past. In the same spirit, our kids’ future will be very different from ours.
Now, we have talked about what is not working, but what will work then?
Well, I am not sure. I’m also exploring as you are. But one thing I have established is seeing kids for who they are instead of what we think they should be is one way to start.
We have to understand that unnecessary, unsupported adversity is not good teaching. To make our kids resilient, a balanced approach which doesn’t involve any bit of harshness is very pertinent.
In retrospect we could even thank god for our misfortunes, but it is only reserved for our god. In the case of parents, it is only bitterness and a lot of therapy sessions for the grown up kids when they grew up in the harshness that made no sense to them.
It is important to work with a child’s body and brain in age-appropriate ways. It is important to understand how their thermostat, cognitive abilities, and musculoskeletal system work instead of just pushing them assuming they have a brain of a 40 year old unused.
Children are not unused adults.
They are children. They grow according to the environment and the stimuli around them.
Be kinder. Be more thoughtful while raising your tiny humans. We don’t raise resilient children by making life harder than it already is. We raise them by helping them discover that they are capable of meeting life’s challenges – one supported step at a time.
There is a reason everything about them is tiny except their feelings, which are as big as Jupiter.
As parents, perhaps the real question is this:
Are we raising children to become cacti…
…or to learn how to bloom like roses among thorns?
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