No rule settles when to push a child through something hard and when to comfort them. There is a question we can ask each time: what is this adversity likely to grow in this child? Suffering that grows a child toward their ambitions, their fulfillment, and their most congruent self is worth encouraging. Suffering for its own sake rarely is, and our own history often answers for us before we ask.
What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Stronger
The old-school paradigm says that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. There is real truth in it. Perseverance through adversity is perhaps the clearest direction toward growth we have. Skill, confidence, and resilience mostly arrive by doing something hard and coming out the other side of it.
And sometimes what doesn’t kill us leaves a residue of reactivity instead. At the far end, that residue is full-blown trauma, which makes no one stronger. At lower levels it shows up as an emotional reactivity that lingers, or as emotional resources spent enduring something when they would have been better spent in a different direction.
Two Generational Caricatures
The question shows up in practical decisions every week. Our child is sick: do they go to school or stay home? They hurt their finger: do they still play in the game? It also shows up in how we answer when they tell us something was hard.
Two generational clichés mark the ends of the pole. A kid falls off their bike.
The cliché baby boomer: Rub some dirt on it. Get on your bike and get going.
The cliché millennial: Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. You never have to ride a bike again if you don’t want to. Let me buy you a present to make you feel better, and get you some cake.
One end says we should persevere through adversity. The other says we should be nurtured within it. Either one becomes a problem when it is our answer to everything. Committed to perseverance, we stop noticing when our child needs rest, protection, or care. Committed to removing distress, we stop making room for the experience of doing something difficult.
When Adversity Is Only Inefficiency
At its lowest level, adversity is an inefficiency: struggling for the sake of struggling, with no noticeable growth on the other side. If I had to sit for five hours while somebody poured mustard on my head, that would be a lot of adversity. It is hard to say what persevering through it would grow in me.
When we cannot name what a difficulty is building, the difficulty may only be costing.
When Persevering Enables the Problem
Other times we can make the counterargument that persevering is a way of enabling, of being codependent with a dysfunctional system. Enduring the adversity of being undercompensated at work, or of being mistreated by a boss whose own lack of growth is impeding our access to wellness, can look like resilience. What it grows is the system’s ability to keep treating us that way.
The Suffering We Pass Down
This goes to a larger theme we need to be aware of as parents. Every human goes through a lot of futile, unnecessary suffering, and we went through our share. Sometimes we unconsciously direct our children toward a kind of hazing process: you have to do it because I did.
I was thinking about this the other day. In my generation it was very common to be woken up at a set time on the weekend. My wife and I both went through it, even though our parents were radically different, almost polar opposites. I don’t do that with my kids unless something calls for it, like a day of skiing, climbing a mountain, or some responsibility. Generally, if there isn’t a plan, I let my teenager sleep.
Those weekend mornings were a lot of adversity for me. I was tired, often because of my own bad choices about getting to bed at a proper time. In what way was that adversity helpful? Meanwhile the nurturing, accommodating side of the question has the science behind it. A growing teenage body needs a lot of sleep.
The Child in Front of Us
None of this can be separated from the realities of the child in front of us. Making a child sit down and paint a naturalistic scene when they have absolutely no interest in art and no natural ability in it is its own kind of adversity.
So what is the base? There is a base everyone should probably persevere through: learning our fundamental ways of engaging the world, such as art, science, math, English, and history. Past that base, the question becomes at what point it stops being necessary for a child to persevere through something that is both subjectively unfulfilling and out of line with their trait-given aptitudes.
Checking Our Own Beliefs
This is where the question gets tricky, and why no post can answer it definitively. What a post can offer is a way of conceptualizing it, and an encouragement to look at how our old patterns, our old schemas, are leading us.
Some of us believe in the innate value of adversity when that isn’t necessarily true. Some of us believe in the innate value of comfort and nurturance when there is an opportunity for growth that would help a child develop the skill sets to best serve their ambitions and their sense of fulfillment. Both beliefs push us toward answering the push-or-comfort question in predictable ways. Seeing our tendency, seeing what influenced it, and having the humility to check it, which is the work of differentiation, is what lets us look at the contextual variables of this child and this moment.
Suffering for Growth
Maybe that is the answer, or as close to one as this question allows: not suffering for suffering’s sake, but suffering for growth in the direction of being one’s most congruent and integrated self.
Growth in this sense is personal. Fulfillment is contextual, developmental, and different for every child, so the same hard thing can build one child toward what they want and be empty for another. The adversity worth encouraging is the kind that lines up with who this child is becoming.
And Some of It Just Is
Here is where we have to contradict ourselves. Do we need resilience to the reality that life isn’t fair, that entropy happens, that sometimes we will be hurt for no logical reason and have to endure it even though it does nothing of benefit? Yes.
I have a very good work ethic, and I grew up in a generation where bosses were strict and always wanted us productive. I worked at a beach concession, and one stretch it rained for days. I deep cleaned the same exact tasks five days in a row. There was no reason for it. The shelf was clean after day one, and I still removed every candy box and wiped under it.
There is a duality even in that. The cleaning was meaningless, and it also taught me that I can suffer through meaninglessness.
The Middle Ground
Whenever possible, the answer is also to meet in the middle: to offer compassion while encouraging perseverance when it is in line with fulfillment, growth, and development. We can acknowledge that falling hurt, offer comfort, and still encourage another attempt.
The Choice Moment
My twelve-year-old was recently playing in a basketball tournament. A teammate passed him the ball, he panicked and pulled his hands in, and the ball went past him. The coach said something rather direct to him about his play style. It was a lot for him, a little too much.
He was feeling lots of feelings. There was what happened in the moment. There was his sense of how his friends might view it, the justice or injustice of the coach’s words, and his shame about disappointing the coach. Underneath all of it, he is at a point in development where the question is how much discomfort he is supposed to tolerate. At twelve, he is at a transition.
In a lot of moments like this, the emotional weight might be too much for a child to carry alone. That changes at every stage of development, along with the degree of adversity a person is expected to persevere through.
So I spent a lot of time listening, reflecting, and nurturing. Then came the choice. He had another game that day, and he didn’t want to go. Do I make him go?
I chose yes, and that was heavy on me. I want him to know that I’m here for him, that I believe him, that I get the significance of all of it. Life is also hard and at times unfair, and at times people are unfair or a little excessive. To meet our ambitions, we need the ability to keep going even in the face of that.
The question returns each time to this child and this situation: what we are asking them to persevere through, what it is likely to grow, and what support they need within it.
