Boy in the Bubble

For a while now I have been disturbed by the growing trend of everyone having to succeed. A couple of years ago I found out that my son's elementary school gave every student an award. The school calls it instilling success in every student, I call it false satisfaction. I call it false satisfaction because we are not giving our kids any reason to strive for something better. When you join any of the Armed Forces Academy's the first thing they tell you is that you will fail. They tell you that it's not about failing, it's about what you do after you failed that will tell the teachers who you are. Remember that the kids that are accepted by the Academy's are over achievers and a lot of these kids have never failed before.

Yesterday I was catching up on my podcasts when I came upon this one by Al Mohler (http://www.albertmohler.com/radio_show.php?cdate=2008-02-21). In it he talks about how we as parents expect our kids to get no less than an "A" in school and that we don't stop there, we expect the teachers to give our kids an "A".

Parents believe in our society that if we protect our kids from failing that we are doing them a favor. I believe that we need to allow our kids to fail. We have to train them to take failure and to respond to it in a manner that develops a strong character. We as parents must desire to train our kids. Parents in our society look at the time that this takes and take the easy way out....we put our kids in an academic and social bubble. We as parents have to be wise in the situations we allow our kids to engage in, don't get me wrong, but at the same time we need to not protect our kids from failure.

Parents listen to Al Mohlers radio show, train your children, don't protect them from failure, allow them to fail and then train them how to learn from it, but most of all be their parent. Do not desire to have you child grow up in a bubble. I would also encourage you to read "The Duties of Parents For Their Children" by one of my favorite preachers Richard Baxter. Now I will tell you that if you subscribe to this idea your child might, like mine, run into bullies, but we have turned this into a great opportunity for our son to learn about forgiveness and how to be Christ-like in his response. My wife and I engage our kids and are always talking to them about what is going on at school and in their lives. With this we encourage when encouragement is needed and teach them when teaching is needed. It takes time, but it is well worth it.