I love that so many parents I interact with have so much compassion for the social, emotional and mental health challenges of their kids. We have so much more information about ways we can support our kids in these areas (hint: participating in the SHIFT community is one of those ways!) and many of you are leaning into them! What I also see is parents showing empathy instead of compassion. Empathy means we put ourselves in our kids’ shoes which can be dangerous in a way because our energies become blended with theirs. We can end up giving them a pass on building skills they need to become healthy, whole adults. Compassion, on the other hand, is boundaried. It has guardrails/fences that allow us to guide our kids in helpful ways while we hold space for the tricky things they are navigating.
Adults…We do kids no favors by removing difficult life things from our kids paths. The trajectory of that is NOT great in adulthood. Instead, what they need is for us to help them NAVIGATE the challenges so when we aren’t around, aka they are adulting, they have a skill set that will support their well-being.
In the first modules of each of my online courses (one for parents and the other for educators/adults) I share an activity that can help guide your everyday decisions regarding when and how to support kids. Anchoring our decisions to our values and the skills/traits we hope to help our kids develop before they leave our care is one of the most important practices we can develop as individuals and as adults who care for kids.
The bottom line is that we need to avoid rescuing our kids from discomfort (chores, school work/attendance, relationships, accountability in general, etc.) and instead model and teach them how to navigate it with as much skill, grace and compassion possible. Consider what parts of you get in the way of allowing and encouraging your kids to be challenged? Are you trying to avoid your own discomfort of seeing them struggle? This is often the case and we can use the steps for healthy emotion processing and other resources like therapy, coaching, skilled friends, community resources and so much more to manage our own discomfort.