A hard childhood

My kids don’t have it rough. They have a mother and a father who are emotionally self-aware. They are given emotional support through all their difficulties. It safe to say, my kids won’t have a rough go, if the trend continues.

Contrast that with kids I have worked with as an assistant. Homeless, orphaned, abused, neglected are all words that fit. These kids have an edge, a hardness that is shaped by the difficulties they have handled.

What do you do as a parent when your kids are marshmallows. Do you burn them? Do you wait for life to burn them? I think every parent has an image in their mind of what parenting should look like to them. You come to your circumstances with alien expectations, that is expectations that are born out of experience that have nothing to do with your kids as people or the circumstances you are raising them in. It’s funny how often that is the case in life. We approach our life’s challenges like a baseball player walking into a hockey arena. Wrong equipment, wrong rules, wrong teams, wrong locations.

Another aspect of this is that we use our alien expectations to look into the future. With a dose of pessimism, we perceive the war zone that our current situation will bring to us. We see the disconnect between our expectations and reality as a symptom of a greater problem. “Surely, if I were doing this right I could have avoided this hassle. If things continue everything I love will disappear,” we think. This is extreme, but it is meant to illustrate the spectrum of negative emotions. Emotions are the looking glass that we see the world through. If we are sad, all we will see is sadness. If we are hopefully, we will see hope.

I believe in offering conclusions. Expectations vs reality vs the future. My only conclusion is that hope will sustain me and despair will drain me. Despair is easier cos you’re giving up. Finally, my marshmallow children. The kids are still very young. Life provides plenty of wounds and effects to make a person more savvy to life. Perhaps my kids just get to be kids longer than others; that’s not so bad. The challenge for me is to not let them off the hook. I need to challenge them. I need to oppose them. I need to cause them discomfort. They won’t grow otherwise. These are more difficult traits. It’s much easier and more fun to be the buddy. I guess we’ll see whether life leaves them at the campfire or in a bag with the other marshmallows.