How to avoid our children from suffering.

If you are a mom or dad, at some point you have surely asked yourself this question: how can I prevent my children from suffering?

A friend asked me this same question a couple of weeks ago. Her son is going to high school this year, and she is very worried, since all his friends are going to go to a different school and he has to go to another one. She asked me, 'Cristina, how can I make sure my son doesn't suffer?'

My response, of course with love, was "you can't and you shouldn't."

Suffering is part of life and is inherent to the emotions and feelings that we experience on many occasions. Currently, we are in a generation in which we want to prevent our children from suffering at all costs, and many times we give in to them so we don't see them cry, get angry, frustrated, etc. But the truth is that we are not helping them if we do not allow them to face that discomfort.
 

It's okay for your child to go to another school; That will make him grow, it will open him up to meet other people, other realities and other types of people different from the ones he is used to. It will take him out of his comfort zone and make him much more decisive in the future. Therefore, we cannot continue with this thought of avoiding suffering for our sons and daughters. Suffering is not bad; It is what drives us to leave where we are to achieve things. If we are not allowed to expose ourselves to that suffering, we will never leave that comfort zone and, therefore, we will not learn.

Lately we hear a lot the term "the snowflake generation", when searching for it on the internet it appears that they are the generations born after the year 2000 and it refers to fragile young people, in need of constant protection and with unrealistic expectations about work and life. The truth is that at school we very often see this behavior in both boys and girls and in their families. When something happens to a student, the family takes it as something very negative and gives it a lot of importance as if their son or daughter was untouchable physically or verbally.

It is not easy to see our children suffer or cry, but instead of seeing it as something negative, let's see it as a learning experience. We can even apply this  to ourselves, when I am suffering from something, I am learning something. I don't have to feel like suffering is here to hurt me, drag me down, or hold me back; If not the opposite. This feeling of frustration or suffering is here to make us jump, change and grow. Emotional intelligence speaks a lot about this and resilience consists precisely of that, it is the process of adapting to adversity, to a trauma, tragedy, threat, or sources of tension and moving forward.

Our job as mothers, fathers or educators is to be there to support them and accompany them when they need it. We must not remove the stones from their path, but rather extend our hand to them in case they need it to cross over.
 

What about you? What do you think?

A hug,

Cris