Preparing children for adversity

Family relationships within the home are the first school that every human being has to prepare him/her to face life in society.

It is a common attitude among parents to want to overprotect their children, to avoid any possible suffering and to make them feel that everything will be all right no matter what happens. What happens is that sooner or later, children grow up and must face the reality that their parents will not always be able to protect them in the face of adversity, and it is here where overprotection can be a hindering factor for the growth and development of the child.

During the development of this guide, we will be addressing this topic in greater depth, so that you can educate your children to face adversities and assume them within reality, as one more element that will be present in our lives.

Naturalizing adversities

The first point of great importance that we want to address in this topic is that of naturalizing adversities. We do not have to make everything look easy or create in our child's imagination that we can always achieve what we want. Life is about trying, with successes and failures. It is important that we learn to naturalize our mistakes and instead of trying to mask them, we should think about how to educate our children to get the most out of them.

Surely you have encountered or will encounter situations where you know that your child is making decisions that will lead to a bad outcome, unless you intervene and contribute your resources and experience. It is not a bad thing that when one of these situations does not represent a big problem for your child, you also allow him/her to experience the feeling of failure. Those who do not manage to naturalize failure in time, live in victimhood and justifications. Let your child understand that things can go well or go wrong, but the one who chooses what he/she will do with that result is him/her and no one else.

The value of experience

Continuing with the idea that we have addressed in the previous point, it is valid that we emphasize the importance of instilling the value of experience, especially negative experiences. A negative experience, adversity or failure, only means that our actions have not achieved the desired result. This does not imply that we do not have the capacity to achieve it if we shape our actions and strategies to try new things.

The value of experience lies in the fact that, thanks to our mistakes, we now have more resources to choose better ways to try what we have failed to achieve. In the professional field, one of the most important factors is experience. A person's experience is conditioned by the number of times he/she has tried something or has repeated a successful process. When the results are positive, the child should be encouraged to repeat the process several times in order to establish this experience as new knowledge learned.

In the case that the result is negative, start by naturalizing it, not giving it more importance than that of having to analyze now a new way to try it. Overcoming adversity is the value that we must transmit to our child. When the parent is in charge of blaming the child, he/she only succeeds in victimizing him/her and sowing in him/her the fear of making a mistake.

This fear of making mistakes will lead to conformism and lack of proactivity when the child is an adult and must face more complex scenarios. It works on the spirit of self-improvement and personal growth, preventing failure from being perceived as a reflection of our capabilities.