Trust & Fear

Parents usually try to protect their kids, of course. I do that too. But recently I have realized that too much protection isn’t good. How many times I told my kids, “don’t do that since you might get hurt”, “don’t do this since it’s dangerous” or “wait, wait, be carefully, I’ll do that better for you”. Suddenly I am realizing this is well-intentioned, but doesn’t help my kids the way I expected initially.

What’s the result? Kids develop fears, fears to do something wrong, fears to get hurt. Is this what I wanted? Definitely not. Remember back, what have been your major lessons and remember what led to them. Why do you remember some lessons very well? Exactly, since they are the result of a big failure or pain. Yeah, when we fail we generally learn more and more lasting.

Who am I to take my kids the chance to learn from their own failures? Who am I to avoid that my kids learn from experience? But yes, it is so easy to prohibit or warn and to raise your index finger in case your child tries anyways and fails. It’s so easy, but it’s so selfish and wrong too. Of course it is much more effort to show trust into your kids, to let them make their own experiences, to learn out of their own failures. This requires much more trust and strength.

I believe the parent task is not to prevent failures of their kids. Let them fail, let them get hurt (of course only to a certain degree). The task is rather to make sure your kids learn something from it, to make your kids understand that failing is normal and belongs to the process to develop, that failure is no issue as long as you learn from it, as long as you don’t do mistakes twice. And sometimes you need to get hurt to understand things, that’s part of the game. This task is much more demanding than just warning, this task requires trust, willpower, understanding, but this way your kids will benefit most.

Trust your kids and don’t show your fear. This helps your kids to grow to adults with trust and no fears. They will reward it. Raising kids is challenging, isn’t it?

One thought on “Trust & Fear”

Comments are closed.