February is known as the month of love. Hearts, flowers, sweet notes tucked into lunchboxes. It’s a beautiful reminder to pause and think about the people we love most. For me, it started me thinking about how deeply I love my children—and how sometimes that very love can derail my parenting just a little bit.
When you love someone fiercely, you want to protect them from anything that could harm them. You want to shield them from being left out, from not making the team, from a disappointing grade. Their pain feels like our pain. We don’t just observe it, we absorb it. We feel it deeply.
Watching our children struggle, cry, feel anger, or sit in disappointment can feel almost unbearable. And so, out of love, we step in. We protect. We cover up. We remind. We smooth things over. We manipulate situations so our children are immune from those hard feelings.
Out of love.
But as parents, we must be stronger than that.
We can love deeply and still understand that our children need to be prepared for the rest of their lives. And preparation means allowing them to experience the full range of feelings life gives us including disappointment, loneliness, frustration, sadness.
As adults, we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) how to navigate those emotions. We’ve built resilience. We’ve developed coping skills. We’ve discovered that feelings, even the painful ones, don’t last forever.
Our job is not to eliminate those feelings for our children. Our job is to teach them how to handle them.
Under our roof, they are safest. This is where they can feel disappointment and have us sit beside them. This is where they can fail and try again. This is where they can be sad and learn that sadness doesn’t define them. Home should be the training ground for emotional strength.
Raising children who are not emotionally mature does not set them up for success. Shielding them from every hardship does not make them strong, it does the reverse,it makes them fragile. Strength comes from practice. Resilience comes from experience. Confidence comes from overcoming.
We love our kids so much that we want them to be strong, successful, and capable adults who can handle whatever life throws at them.
It’s hard to watch them struggle. It stretches us. It challenges our instincts. But when we remind ourselves that we are raising amazing human being,human beings who can do hard things,we realize something important:
We can do hard things too.