One of Our Most Important Jobs as Parents Is to Teach Our Children How to Suffer
July 11, 2024
Like it or not, teaching our kids how to suffer is a key part of parenting
If teaching our children to suffer doesn’t seem like a crowd-pleasing, headline-grabbing parenting tip, I get it. Suffering is, well, suffering. The belief that suffering not only can be avoided but should be avoided is so powerful that the very idea of suffering as something that needs to be encouraged feels possibly abhorrent. For those who are socially conscious, suffering evokes a feeling of inequity. Suffering in the world is callously ignored. Needless suffering is too frequently tolerated in favor of efficiencies and profit. We are too willing to tolerate suffering in others.
The politic here is important: When we are pretending to live a life where we are reducing suffering, we are often instead outsourcing suffering (e.g. in the interest of helping our families be protected from COVID, we ordered groceries to be delivered. The risk of contagion is equal, just distributed to someone else). A desire to lower collective suffering, needless suffering, and unequal suffering is a meaningful goal. A desire to limit our own suffering and the suffering of our children is equally reasonable, providing there is an underlying awareness and consideration of who might suffer by virtue of our efforts.
Parents need to accept kids’ bad feelings without trying to immediately eliminate this suffering
However, our task as parents is to also teach kids to do without and mourn missed opportunities. Validate their suffering rather than quickly moving to fix or distract them from it with an “Oh, but you have this nice other thing,” or “I’ll do this to make it up to you.” Let them be sad if they weren’t invited to that birthday party or disappointed they couldn’t go sledding because the sled was busted. Parents need to accept the bad feelings of their children. Suffering isn’t a failure.
Take, for instance, a family that moved to a nice school district of well-off families. They’re in the bottom tier of families economically and knew their kids wouldn’t have everything their classmates had, but the schools perform well on state tests and they’re glad to be there. And then, Dad loses his job. Though he picks up part-time work to cover the mortgage, extras like summer camp and the annual eighth-grade field trip have to be cut. The eldest son is devastated. Now, Dad could drive an Uber every night for a month to pay for the trip. Mom and Dad could remind their son they had a great ski trip with the cousins last summer and promise that next year things will be in better shape. These could be fine options—it’s hard to miss out and watch kids suffer. Yet, at least part of the response should be making a place for their son’s sad feelings. Resist the drive to find a solution, to bright side, to urge gratitude—not because those things are bad but because suffering is inevitable and we all must learn to face it.
Parents should also provide leadership around enduring suffering and learning it will pass
Besides not trying to effortlessly eliminate this suffering, parents also need to provide leadership, warmth, comfort, and recognition to help children understand they can endure suffering. Patience is a kind of endurance of suffering, having to tolerate doing without for at least a time. The word patience has its origin in the Greek “to suffer.” It’s quite meaningful to also connect the word “patient” to a similar meaning: “One who suffers.” One can imagine that for physicians that label serves as a reminder: The people coming in for treatment, waiting in the waiting room are suffering. The primary task of a physician is to treat the illness or injury causing suffering. As a parent, a task is to feed our hungry children. By all means, pack snacks for the long car ride ahead. But understand that for our children, learning how to delay having their hunger satiated will (thankfully) emerge at some point or another.
More than just wanting their children to be able to endure the slights of the world, parents have the experience in the world and the perspective on most childhood tribulations to know that these too shall pass. Having to wait, to miss out, and yes, to watch other people be fulfilled in a way we crave only feels like it will swallow us whole. It won’t.
