When I was in Elementary School I used to walk to school by myself everyday. There were no anti-bullying campaigns and I got bullied a lot. There were Physical Education tests like the 1-Mile Run, 1 minute Max Sit Ups, and Max Pull Ups tests. As an overweight kid I struggled with all of these things and was usually dead last in the run and hung from the pull up bar embarrassed as I couldn’t do a single pull up back then. What made it worse is that the females in my classes often could outperform me on all these tests. Today I don’t see this as an issue but this was the 90’s and culturally unacceptable growing up in the deep south.
As a kid I experienced an environment of risk, failure, and embarrassment on a regular basis. Fortunately I developed some internal strategies to deal with these uncomfortable situations but there were no tools being taught at the time. You just had to deal with it and figure it out. As time has gone on I’ve realized how difficult it would be for me, if I had kids, to let them walk to school on their own. To let them deal with bullies or suffer daily embarrassment would be difficult but I recognize that dealing with those things made me a more resilient human being. How do we advocate for social environments where people thrive without shielding them from challenges that are normal parts of life?
One of the things that would’ve been helpful to me would have been being able to talk to an adult about what’s happening, brainstorm some strategies, experiment, and review the results. In hindsight, I wouldn’t want anyone to remove the difficulty but rather facilitate a way for me to honestly work through the difficulty. I look at the challenges of childhood and life the way I looked at learning Calculus: You have to struggle and fumble through problems but with time and practice, you get it.
As me and my wife have more conversations around having children, I find that I don’t want to be a parent who is constantly shielding my child from difficulty. At the same time I cringe at my own child having to deal with some of the challenges I dealt with growing up. The same challenges that have made me a strong man. Certainly, part of the answer is to encourage experimentation and failure and help young people (and adults honestly) develop the right perspective on loss, failure, embarrassment, and struggle, in all natural parts of life. It’s difficult to watch vulnerable people go through a hard situation but we wouldn’t want to rob someone of the mental strength that comes from facing adversity. Maybe that’s part of the difficulty of being a parent and an adult, we have to know and face the reality that harsh things will happen to our kids and we do them no good to try to protect them all the time. To do so, may just be us protecting ourselves.
What do you think?
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Travis Daigle 
Very wise words. Shielding kids from harsh realities too much does them no benefits. I know someone who never had to deal with being a total grown up until their mid 40’s. They are an only child and were put on a pedestal by their parents. After a bad marriage and failed relationships, along with 3 kids, their father took care of her and was retiring so he could help more with the kids and she could go back to school for another degree. Unfortunately, he passed away due to a surgical complication right before retirement. This left his daughter very vulnerable. She went through a whole lot for a while including a devastating hurricane. Me, my son, and my dad were the only family members around to help her. She’s doing better as far as I know 4 years later, but a lot of what she and her children went through could have been avoided if they let her grow up. Not that she wasn’t intelligent, she just was never forced to have to support herself the way most people are by the time they’re mid 20’s. He thought he was protecting her, but it ended up causing more harm than good.