“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

                                                  ~ Winston Churchill

Tactics:

Wendy Mogul, clinical psychologist and author of Blessings of a Skinned Knee reminds us that our children do not belong to us. That, “they are both a loan and a gift from God, and that the gift has strings attached. Our job is to raise our children to leave us.” As the title of her book implies, our children will only be prepared to do this if they are familiar with life’s pains, and it is only through this that they will learn to be strong and to cope. It is a natural inclination of parents to want to protect their children. Parenting today has taken this to an extreme, or worse, intervened to such an extent that we have eliminated the training ground for adulthood. Better that we leave the bumps in the road, leave the grade, leave the defeat, score the game and don’t call them every half hour. Allow your child to process the normal occurrences of life.

At the core of coping is the ability to have peace of mind; being able to accept who you are. But, extraordinary is what’s valued in the hothouse home. Most likely your child is more ordinary than “extraordinary” which is not to say that they aren’t unique and wonderful. They are. Enjoy what is unique about your child; enjoy them for who they are and they will find this enjoyment in themselves, and the peace of mind. When your child faces life’s disappointments, let them express their disappointment. Wendy Mogul posits that we are a generation who is reminded of our own pains through our children, and therefore we are uncomfortable with expressions of too much unhappiness in our children. Perhaps the best way to teach your child about how to cope is to model it. They say there are two aspects to coping: one based on action: solving the problem and one based on emotion: feeling better. Let them see you tackle the problem personally or with resources and let them see you deal with the feelings. Exercise is a great stress reducer, as is meditation, rest, reading and so on.