Today I am launching this blog. It’s an exciting endeavor—and I hope I can provide some help for parents in understanding and doing the difficult parts of parenting. To begin, I am going to start with one of the most difficult subjects of all: loss. This post is the first in a five-part series about loss and resilience in childhood.
Everywhere you look, someone is either writing or podcasting about how you should be raising your children: You should be more gentle; you should be less gentle. Your children need to develop an understanding of feelings; your children are overprotected and unprepared. Whether you are reading Sarah Ockwell-Smith or Johthan Haidt, you will find that you are doing it all wrong.
What’s a parent to do?
If you ask me, it’s not one or the other. Sometimes children need limits and sometimes they need help understanding their own feelings and the feelings of others. And when it comes to loss, they definitely need help. So do parents.
How do we prepare our children for loss? How much do we allow them to suffer and what do we do with our own feelings when we are sad that our children are sad?
We don’t want to overprotect children so they are unprepared for what life is really like, but nor do we want to overexpose them to disappointment and difficulty.
So, again, what’s a parent to do? Let’s talk about it.
Children—all children—experience losses and disappointments in their lives and contrary to popular belief, we do not need to protect them from these losses or from the feelings that result from them.
But we do need to prepare them and help them when these losses happen.
We need to prepare our children for both the little losses and the big losses so that as they mature, they will be able to handle what comes their way.
We don’t like to think about it, but children suffer losses all the time. And they need to be able to manage when these losses occur.
A friend doesn’t show up at school because she’s sick. Another friend moves away over the summer. A beloved stuffed animal is left behind on a trip. A promised adventure to the amusement park is canceled due to rain.
These are small losses, but losses just the same.
So, do we go out and buy a new stuffed animal right away? Do we call the teacher and tell her how sad our child is that her friend is out sick? Do we try to introduce our sad child to other kids as soon as we find out her friend is moving? Do we substitute a trip to an indoor trampoline park instead of the amusement park?
You might be tempted to do one of these things.
But how about holding off? Our job as parents is not to protect our children from experiencing every sad feeling. What we need to do is to help children with their sad feelings and with their losses, whether big or small. And we need to start early.
For even the youngest of our children we need to convey that yes, it is sad to lose a stuffed animal or to miss a friend or to lose a much hoped-for day at the amusement park—but we also need to convey that these losses can be survived.
Little losses are the best place to begin because they lay the groundwork for dealing with bigger losses that will certainly come along at some point.
We should try to avoid giving our children the impression that life is always good, because it isn’t. And we want our children to be able to feel what they feel when life isn’t good, and to be able to talk about it (if they want), and eventually, to be able to move on.
The problem is that often these small losses are not spoken about.
For the obvious ones like the loss of the stuffed animal, rather than acknowledge the sadness of the loss, parents are often tempted to make the sadness go away by replacing the lost toy. But why not let your child feel sad for a while?
Part of the problem is that it can be hard for parents to tolerate a child’s sad feelings. It is painful for us.
But try to take a moment. This is our job; we just have to try to allow the sadness and to show that we can survive it ourselves.
If we can tolerate our child’s sadness, this will help them to tolerate their own sadness.
And a missed friend or a missed day of fun?
Let’s let them be sad. Let’s try not to “make it all better” right away. Let’s talk about how sad and hard these things are. Let’s share times when we suffered in the same way. And let’s tolerate our children’s sadness and disappointment, and let them know that these things will happen from time to time in their lives.
And what about less obvious losses? The ones that we might not notice but which children are suffering with? They are what Pauline Boss calls “ambiguous losses” and I will talk about them in Part 2 of this series.
