Does experience count?

Good parents all over the world want to help their children to succeed and to help them get what they themselves lacked as a child. I am sure you have thought about what you did not have as a child or the things your parents could not give you. Now that you are a parent you do not want your kids to go through the same experiences that you had to go through.

Who can blame you for wanting this? After all, your job is to support your children and that includes “saving” them from the bad experiences you went through growing up, so they don’t have to! The lack of clothes, the lack of attention, the lack of food, the lack of toys, the lack of a TV, and the list goes on. Each parent brings their own unique experiences to light here.

However, in our working to create the better environment for our children do we sometimes lose sight of the benefits that are provided by our experiences? Even though your experiences growing up where not ideal, they may have been your driving force to get you where you are now. You may appreciate what you have now even more as a result of what you lacked as child. Whatever your experience may be, take a look back and really examine where you are today and what role those experiences growing up play into who you are. Every experience, no matter how painful, has a lesson hidden in it.

What I have found is our parental instinct is to protect our children from anything that can hurt them, has the potential to hurt them or that can disappoint them. However, where do you draw the line from what you must do to protect your children and what we choose to do, from your point of view, to protect them.

When is it advantageous to allow your kid to experience defeat, experience loss, experience not being able to have something? If the situation is not life threatening then should we stand back and allow our children to learn through experience? Do we not learn more from our experiences then from someone telling us? Do we not have to learn how to extract lessons from our experiences so we do not repeat them?

Henry Ford said, “Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger… for the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grief’s we endure help us in our marching onward.”

Everyone continuously experiences events throughout the day. If these are all protected experiences for your children then they never get the benefits of experiences that don’t go the way they want or the so called “negative” experiences and the lessons on how to deal with the results that don’t come as easily. How does this prepare them for life? How does this teach them to benefit from experiences?

As Robert Packwood said, “Judgment comes from experience, and great judgment comes from bad experience.”

So the theme of this week is that as a parent you can be too protective and as a result deprive your children of one of the required tools to be successful in life! With that said here is our quote of the week.

“Where parents do too much for their children, the children will not do much for themselves.” ~ Elbert Hubbard

So have a wonderful week of knowing that you are letting your children experience, learn and be motivated as a result!

With Love, Peace and Power,

Ron Dilbert
Single Parent Power, Inc. – “Helping Reconnect Families”
Operation Renewal, LLC – “Helping Military Families Stay Connected”
www.SingleParentPower.com
www.blogtalkradio.com/Single-Parent-Power
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rdilbert@SingleParentPower.com
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“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” – Albert Einstein