We were on a family road trip back to our town today and my eldest kid was sitting up front next to my husband who was driving, while I sat next to our youngest who was only 4 months old. Behind me were our 2 girls.
In the midst of chatting as one does during long road trips, my 10 year old son told us he was worried about entering high school in a few years time, because the school we planned to enroll him in had a bit of a reputation of being competitive and had certain admission requirements for the students entering it.
It was popular due to the high education standard and he was apprehensive of having to put in more work into his academia to keep up with the demands of the school curriculum.
So I thought it was a good time to try to teach him on one aspect of life that I’d had been guided by especially in the past decade of my life.
‘Do not always take the easy way out son’ my husband advised him.
And I chimed in this feedback that some things in life will be difficult, but some difficult things are worth doing.
I went on telling him that if I had wanted a much easier life, I wouldn’t have had children.
Or I would just have one child and be done.
Because having children is difficult, one of the most difficult things a person can do, and its a job we cannot quit, i explained.
If I had decided to only have him, he wouldn’t know his 3 younger siblings.
For perspective, we now have four children, and the journey to conceiving our youngest was harder, me having suffered two miscarriages leading up to him.
We also explained how we pushed through university and even though I did really badly in physics when I was first exposed to it in secondary school, I grew to love the subject and value the knowledge and how physics was relevant to basically everything runs in our worlds.
We were trying to teach him was that we are capable to handle and do difficult things. And so did he.
And most things that are difficult at the start, become less difficult as time progresses because we get better, we get exposure and experience, and we expand our limits and are able to adapt.
That he would eventually meet that ‘more advanced’ version of himself in the future if he keeps at it.
I continued on by telling him the example of his videogames which he plays on his tablet or on his computer, SuperMario, Castle crashers or Mindcraft, Ori and the Blindforest, among a few, that if he had only stayed on playing at the lower levels, those that he now has mastered, it would always be easy for him.
But it would be less fun, boring even, and that progressing to higher levels meant better adventures, more demanding but more rewardind and satisfying once you have cleared it.
That difficult things can also be fun, after a while, once he overcame the initial hurdles.
And also, you wouldn’t want to just have the capacity for more, but be content to do less due to fear, lack of confidence or plain laziness.
He listened quietly, and I felt that he understood what we meant. He did not gave us his usual retorts that he sometimes adds in.
I hoped that bit by bit, with more conversations like this we were making our children better, more adaptable, more open to challenges and growth,and be less afraid.
Because my goal was always for our children to grow up to be better than their parents, than me, and utilize their potential without being held back by fear.
This conversation was one of many that we have with our children, because change and growth take time, and we will have to be consistent and patient with them.
Finally a note of advise on the flipside, even to us as adults, we need to be careful and wary of which advise is taken to heart and allowed to influence us.
Because whatever decision we make, we are the ones who will have to live with it.