A Little Frustration Never Hurt Anybody
reposted with permission

Should I do what I can to make my child happy? It seems like a simple question, yet it is one that I often hear from parents. It’s almost like we are trained to have this “parental responsibility of happiness” mindset from the time of our child’s birth. When a baby cries, we are told that they are either hot/cold, hungry, or sleepy.

We immediately go into the “need-meeting” mode of parenting. As soon as we meet the need, they calm down and all is well. At this point, it is easy to confuse the notion of meeting needs and keeping our child happy. Meeting needs is one thing, eliminating frustration in our child’s lives is quite another.
In the first few years of life, there are very few needs that parents do not meet鈥ext, come the wants. Children, and many adults, have difficulty distinguishing needs from wants and have very similar emotional reactions to both. We, as parents, are not always successful at deciphering the cause of our child’s emotional discord and assume that if we are calming them down and keeping them happy, then we are meeting their needs.

Yes, this means that those who are over the top with spoiling their children may actually believe that they are doing the right thing. In fact, most of the parents that I have worked with over the last three decades with this issue, want the best for their kids and have a hard time coming to grips with the reality that what they have been doing is counterproductive. By eliminating our children’s frustrations whenever they occur, we are making it more difficult for our children to function in the teenage and adult world.

When we take on the responsibility of making our children happy, several negative messages begin growing in our children’s minds. The first is that there is something wrong with being upset or having negative emotions. This mindset can cause great confusion and frustration in a child. Children will have negative emotions; this will never stop.

When a child believes that these experiences are bad, yet continue to have them, they may begin to question themselves鈥� even asking “What is wrong with me?” Another, even more, problematic thought, is that emotions are more important than they really are and that being happy is necessary for life. Children, who are never allowed to suffer, have difficulty understanding that a person’s life can be just fine although they are not happy or satisfied at the moment.

When a person believes this, yet has a period of prolonged negative emotion, it can be devastating. It is interesting that with the thousands of suicidal teenagers I have known over the years, I can count on one hand the number that truly wanted to kill themselves. The majority wanted to kill how they were feeling. They did not know how to function in a state of emotional discord and they misinterpreted their negative emotions to mean that their lives were no good or not worth living. They had given too much importance to their emotions and had not learned how to effectively solve problems.

In response to these children, the work is to help them understand that their emotions are not always accurate indicators of either who they are or the quality of their life. This is then followed with helping to equip them to handle difficult emotions, a lesson that needs to be taught earlier in life.

It is vital that we allow our children to suffer, not always get what they want, hear NO, be upset, cry, etc. Our goal is not to keep them happy, but to equip them to handle all of their emotions. A big part of that is realizing that a sturdy child is more of the target than a happy child. Peace and contentment is more important than feeling happy.

It is not surprising that the book of James relates that we should be joyful when we struggle because this builds perseverance, which leads to maturity and wisdom. It is the act of learning to struggle well, that is truly the engine to growth and maturity in the lives of our children. The challenge is to ask ourselves, are we truly equipping our children to deal with their emotions or are we just trying to keep them happy? In my experience, an equipped child will find more happiness.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle” (Frederick Douglass).

鈥� Keith McCurdy

In More Than Dates & Dead People: Recovering a Christian View of History, a wonderful little book our students read in 7^th grade, Stephen Mansfield defines religion as 鈥渦ltimate concern.鈥� He explains that if you can put your finger on a people鈥檚 ultimate concern, what is most important to them, you have identified their religion. He goes on to define other important terms in light of this:

• Culture is religion externalized
• Art is religion symbolized
• Law is religion codified
• Education is religion transferred

Education, then, can be thought of as our ultimate concerns handed on to the next generation. Similarly, GK Chesterton defined education in this way: 鈥淓ducation is not a subject, and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead a transfer of a way of life.鈥� Thinking of education in this way differs greatly from a more modern view of education that focuses on job skills and test scores.

That education is much more than data transfer and information download has always been at the heart of classical Christian education. 91原创 isn鈥檛 a factory, and our students are not just numbers in seats or faces in a crowd. Instead, they are eternal souls made in the image of God who live in His created world and have purpose and meaning. From these basic facts stems our mission statement:

91原创 exists to serve families by providing a distinctly classical and decidedly Christian education that equips students to lead lives of virtue, display mature character, love learning, and serve the Triune God.

This mission statement deliberately points to virtue, maturity, and character as the aims of education, rather than merely academic achievement or career-based skills. And if education is the transfer of a way of life to the next generation, then virtue, maturity, and character are of far more importance to cultural preservation than mere information download. In fact, it means the field of education is one of the most important, front-line battle fields in our day.

I pondered all of this during a couple of recent field trips, first, with our 6^th grade class to Washington DC, and second, with our senior class to London and Paris. I had never been to DC nor overseas, and while I expected it to be an enjoyable time, I did not anticipate how much it would stir in me a sense of wonder, gratitude, and perspective. During these trips, I witnessed various representations of our heritage, our story, something we鈥檝e been given. I stood over some of our founding documents. I visited Arlington National Cemetery and various war memorials honoring the lives of those who鈥檝e fought and died to secure the freedoms and liberties that our nation has enjoyed. I walked through cathedrals, viewed the Magna Carta, and stood in places where our ancestors once stood hundreds of years before. Some of them fought against tyranny, others preached the gospel, and some helped establish a structure of government outlining God-given rights, freedoms, and limits of power.

But our heritage seems to be in jeopardy. While we live in a time and place with more freedoms, opportunities, and comforts than just about anyone else in all of history has ever known, at the same time we are witnessing a squandering of that inheritance. We live in a day where many rights, freedoms, and Christian cultural norms have faded or even disappeared right before our eyes. Is it simply inevitable that these trends will continue until we completely forget where we鈥檝e come from and from whom all our blessings have come? Or is it possible to turn things around, to reclaimcultural ground, and to preserve freedom and liberty? I鈥檇 like to suggest that 91原创鈥檚 mission offers us an opportunity to play a crucial role in the preservation and cultivation of Christian culture in our day. We can preserve freedoms and liberties and reclaim Christian cultural ground if there are men and women who want to preserve those things and who are also equipped to do so.

So how can an education at 91原创 equip students to make such a cultural impact? Our goal all along has not been to simply provide an alternative educational option or to simply offer a drug-free, gang-free environment where boys must use one restroom and girls use another. We鈥檙e in favor of those things, of course, but they are by-products of a much bigger and broader mission, one that seeks to inculcate biblical virtue, maturity, sound reason and faith, and a love for and a desire to serve others. A generation equipped with such tools can have a tremendous and godly impact on our culture.

Someone might argue that a private education like what 91原创 offers is all well and good for the really bright over-achievers who will go on to study at big name colleges or work in important fields (like politics) where the real cultural battles are fought. But I鈥檇 like to suggest that the most important cultural battles to be fought are in the hearts and minds of our children, in our homes, and in our communities. And that鈥檚 why the aims of classical Christian education and the goals of 91原创 are not simply about high achievement, college prep, rigor for the sake of rigor, information download, or data transfer. To be clear, students of classical Christian education have achieved quite a lot and tend to be much more prepared for college and jobs than their peers, but there is so much more to education than that.

This equipping of students at 91原创 takes place each day as students wrestle with deep and difficult questions which civilizations have sought to answer for centuries. As our kindergarteners line up with 鈥渂ubbles and ducktails,鈥� they are learning what it means to love their neighbors as they walk down the hall. Transformation happens when students are armed with critical thinking skills to distinguish between sound reason and foolish arguments and as they stand in the hall and have a heart-to-heart talk with their teacher about their behavior in class. Students are equipped wit

h culture-transforming traits when they learn to sing and serve, play, fall down, and get back up, as they win championship games, and as they lose them.

Considering education as 鈥渞eligion transferred鈥� or the 鈥渢ransfer of a way of life鈥� makes the field of education one of the mostcritical issues for any generation. Shepherding hearts, training affections, and seeking objective, biblical truth, beauty, and goodness, is the only way to equip the next generation to reclaim and to advance our Christian heritage. By God鈥檚 grace, cultivating virtue, maturity, and faithfulness in our students can produce a truly educated people who appreciate the heritage they鈥檝e been given, honor and respect those who鈥檝e gone before them, and are prepared to faithfully labor in whatever part of God鈥檚 kingdom they find themselves.

 

Lance Vermillion

Grammar School Principal