All Aboard the Struggle Bus!

We need to have a conversation about Struggle.

As parents and caregivers, we will watch our kids struggle from the start. Pregnancy, childbirth, and the newborn months are filled with little blips of struggle. Then toddlerhood hits and this is often a time when the need to struggle for new skill acquisition hits a new high. There are so many ways our toddlers are learning to physically move about the world on their own. Toddlers will likely assert their independence and need for autonomy in more pronounced ways. 

Suddenly it can feel like everything becomes a struggle. Every raincoat zipper, new step to climb, or door to open becomes a battle of will. All you can really do is stand back, resign to the timeline of toddlerhood, and slow down to make space as your kids struggle through to their new mastery. You stay close, you observe, you honor your trust in them by allowing them to struggle. You carefully time any offers of help and in the least intrusive ways like silently holding out a hand or maybe you find gentle words like, “I’m here if you’d like some help.” Your toddler, though, is committed to the struggle itself. Jumping in with ill-timed unsolicited help is the last thing a struggling toddler wants. 

Photo: Annie Friday

Adults often want to eliminate, facilitate, sanitize, or skip over moments of struggle for the kids in our lives.

As our toddlers shift into kid years and on into tween and teen years, they will continue to find moments of struggle. Just like in those early years, we feel compelled to jump in and … we also realize any offers of unsolicited guidance may damage our shared trust. 

Whether it’s a raincoat zipper, a major friend shift, or the loss of a loved one, watching our young people struggle is never easy. As caregivers, we recognize that our children do often come out of the other side of moments of struggle with new skills, knowledge, and strength. Though to be clear, I am in no way saying you must struggle in order to learn. I am saying that struggle is an inevitable part of life. How we approach it and how we allow our young people to navigate it on their own is important. 

Adults often want to eliminate, facilitate, sanitize, or skip over moments of struggle for the kids in our lives. Struggle is messy. Struggle is icky. Struggle is an inevitable part of authentic life. Adults who want to free their children of struggle are well-intentioned. They likely had adults in their life try to clean up moments of struggle before they even began too. There’s been a message delivered for at least a few generations now that kids need to be contained partially because they can’t be trusted to navigate tough times on their own. The thought seems to be that left to their own devices, young people will choose pathways to evil, selfishness, and greed. This often comes from a lack of knowledge in child development. As the human brain develops, young people develop a social view of the world including empathy, kindness, and generosity. First they need to see themselves and then they can see how they themselves fit into a bigger picture. From those earliest days of wanting to hoard all the toys and scream, “MINE!”, at the top of their lungs, adults step in and clean up the messy interactions, assuring the other adults around them that their kid is not a troublesome kid to watch out for. Afterall, those reputations stick and can have major impacts on early childhood. (More expulsions happen in early childhood than any other age.) We need to let our young people struggle through these hard-to-watch social interactions with close support from adults to ensure emotional and physical safety. There’s so much to gain through these early struggles.

Just like kids, adults struggle too! Sometimes, as hard as it is, we have to observe our friends, coworkers, siblings, parents, or other adults struggle through various life challenges. We can’t eliminate struggle from the lives of our loved ones. However, there are many roles to play through a time of struggle. You can offer support for their tough times; you can offer reminders of who they are outside of the struggle; you can provide moments of comic relief, dance breaks, rage outlets; you can direct them to further resources or expert care.  As parents and caregivers, we must do the same. We need to get comfortable in uncomfortable spaces and realize that eliminating struggle doesn’t make us “better” caregivers. 

Our relationship with “our” kids is unique. Whether they are children in our care professionally or in our family, kids can feel like a responsibility to grown-ups charged with their care in a way that adult friends or other relationships probably don’t. Those friendships and relationships don’t “belong” to us in the same societal way kids do. Commonly used expressions like “molding young people” and “brain development architect” highlight society’s view of the adult being the one to shape what kids turn into. From the start though, our kids are in the driver seat of their own lives. 

Our work as parents and caregivers is a role of facilitation. We’re here to provide for a child’s needs, monitor for hazards, offer assistance as needed and requested. Part of this role is to be discerning and allow our kids to navigate their way through life. That means we have to let our kids find their way through struggle too. Our attachment to their development often impairs our ability to find our way through the discomfort of it all. Stepping out of mainstream parenting models and letting kids live in moments of struggle is pretty radical after all!

If you’re having a hard time figuring out your role or just getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, I’m here if you need help. I hate to see young people or families in moments of struggle, but I also love to help you through them. My upcoming in-person workshop on November 18 is meant to take you from Surviving to Thriving and help you find moments of regulation together to help you through the hard times. Email HelloAnnieFriday@gmail.com for more information. 

Found via tenor.com

*It’s tough times out there right now. All of my coaching and consulting is meant to be accessible. If there is a barrier to working with me, let’s work it out together.