A Fine Parent

“Daaaaaaad!!!!! Get it!!!! NOW!!!!”

My 3 year old points to the street, where my husband had just set out the trash, at the bags of aqua green flitting in the wind.

She can’t stand it. The sight of anything BLOWING. It fills her with anxiety and dread. You can see it on her face. My husband has to run out to the curb and retrieve the bags he just moments before hefted toward the street.

When he comes back in through the door, her little body relaxes and she goes about her business. I look at my husband and give a whisper of thanks.

I, too, was just there last week. Running like an idiot through the parking lot of Walmart to chase a flyaway bag because I thought she was going to have a heart attack.

Or the time I heard screaming coming from the bathroom. “MAKE IT STOPPPP!”

I thought something terrible had happened.

I raced into the bathroom to nothing spectacular, much to my relief. Just the towels on the towel bar blossoming slightly upward from the force of furnace air emanating from the register.

Then it all came back to me. The garbage bags. The parking lot. The wind. All of these factors equaled one thing and one thing only: they made my girl ANXIOUS.

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There is nothing like hearing your child yell the dreaded F-word for the first time.

It’s especially nerve-racking when it’s in front of the entire extended family. Including the grandparents.

At a family dinner, my eleven-year-old nephew was deliberately jostled by his younger brother, resulting in his half laden plate tilting. With hot curry spilling over his hand, he yelled the F-word as loudly as he could.

Amidst the cacophony of family banter and the clattering of cutlery, you would have thought the word would have gone unnoticed but nope! There was complete silence around the dining table as if someone had pushed the pause button. Several pairs of eyes (including mine) zeroed in on the culprit.

Like a well-rehearsed play, the scene played out.

The youngsters looked down and snickered. Some of the adults (including me) tried to ignore what we had just heard. But not the grandparents!

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Close your eyes and imagine your child all grown up, savoring a free weekend. What do you see?

Is your daughter grabbing brunch with her pals? Is your son joining his pick-up basketball team on the court? Or perhaps you envision your kids enjoying a hike or a museum exhibit with a couple of close friends?

Regardless of what your vision for your child’s future involves, I bet it doesn’t include him or her sitting miserably at home, feeling lonely and friendless. As parents, we want our children to thrive socially, forming close bonds with their peers.

So, we encourage our children to make friends from the first years of their lives. We sign them up for baby classes and send them to preschool. We arrange playdates and nudge them towards other children at the playground. We tell them to share, organize group games, and teach conflict resolution skills to handle any inevitable skirmishes that arise between them and their new buddies.

But as we work to support our kids’ fledgling social lives, how many of us nurture our own friendships? How many of us are focused on our own social bonds with our own peers?

Too often, the responsibilities of work, home, and parenting take priority over our own social lives. We spend our days chasing down Hydra-esque To-Do lists – for every item we cross off, two seem to grow in its place.

We lose touch with friends who aren’t parents because they seem to be living in a different world. And we lose touch with friends who are parents because they’re as insanely busy as we are.

Making Friends for my Child’s Sake

A shy and awkward kid, I went through a lot of social drama. In school, I felt that no one understood me and often struggled to make friends. As a nerd, immigrant, and scholarship student at a fancy private school, I was objectively very different from my classmates.

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Grit

Determination

Tenacity

They are all words for Resilience.

Resilience is more than the buzzword of the year. It is what gives us “the courage to go after our dreams, despite the very real risk that we’ll fail in some way or other.”

Isn’t that what we want for our kids? To go after their dreams and their passions and achieve them? Ever since I read Carol Dweck’s now-famous book Mindset : The New Psychology of Success I have been looking for ways to teach my kids this kind of resilience.

We go on hikes and do brain-teaser puzzles. We have even tried a ropes course in our quest to build resilience within them. It was in the midst of walking my oldest son through an algebra problem that I realized that resilience isn’t just a mindset, it’s a habit.

Resilience should be as much a habit as brushing your teeth in the morning or having a snack after school.

It’s something that we should be building into our everyday lives in such a way it becomes an unconscious choice. We simply don’t consider giving up when we don’t get that math problem right the first time. Trying again is our habit.

My boys are good at showing resilience in big moments or for specific projects. For example, my oldest son wanted to experiment with parallel circuits for a science project. He had all kinds of issues with the connections between the wires. The tape would slip or the wires wouldn’t be making good contact with the battery or he attached the wire incorrectly.

There were definitely moments of extreme frustration. He lost his temper several times and had to walk away from his project a few times. But he always came back and tried it all again.

In his everyday life he doesn’t seem to have that kind of resilience as his default. We recently got new kittens. I asked him to open the can of food for them and that’s when the trouble hit. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to open a can of cat food, but that flip-top lid can be difficult to open. When he was unable to get the can open he just gave up!

He didn’t even ask for help! He just stopped trying completely and left the can on the counter for me to find. The resilience to keep trying at the lid was not a part of his default setting.

So how do we make it a real habit? How can we teach them everyday resilience?

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