Families Aren't Perfect
THE CHALLENGE OF FAMILY LIFE
High Expectations
Everyone has hopes and dreams for their children. Right from the beginning parents hope that their baby will be healthy, cooperative and content. Later, they hope that their toddler will make an easy, positive transition to play group. Over the next two decades they hope their child will succeed academically and develop excellent character traits. As the child becomes a young adult, parents hope that he or she will set up a beautiful home and raise perfect grandchildren.
What happens when things don’t go quite as expected? What happens when the baby is neither cooperative nor content? How do the parents manage when the toddler fails to make a smooth transition to play group or when the child’s behavioral problems create difficulties in every school setting? How do parents cope when their children have academic challenges, when they have trouble making friends, when their physical health is challenged or when they develop mental health problems? In other words, how do parents deal with the real job of parenting as opposed to the rosy ideal of their dreams?
Family Life is Complicated
The real job of parenting involves lots of laughter, pleasure and joy, lots of stress, worry, disappointment and pain. Like life itself, family life is complex. Constantly happy faces are picture-book images, not real life images. In real homes, children don’t always get along with each other—they fight, argue, insult each other and hurt each other’s feelings. Children don’t always feel close to their parents and many parents have trouble relating well to each one of their kids. Husbands and wives do not always live in constant harmony. The number of people in a house is constantly changing as the family adds and subtracts members and the dynamics of the house follows suit. There are calmer times and more chaotic times. There are “mixed” times as well: for instance, when there are lots of children in the family, many can be doing very well during the same period of time that one or more are floundering. Nothing about family life is black and white.
Parents usually try their hardest to provide their children with every opportunity and every form of support, but their efforts cannot always prevent a child from experiencing emotional distress, trauma and suffering. Every child is on their own spiritual journey. We cannot save our children from pain; this fact itself is a major source of parenting pain.
However, once we understand the value of struggle—our struggle as well as our children’s struggle—we can cope with difficulties so much better. Struggle is an excellent tutor in the school of personal development. It can bring forth wisdom, maturity, strength and beauty. Valuing struggle while keeping an eye on the future, imagining and working toward positive outcomes, is a strategy that can help one survive and thrive in difficult times.
We’re in This Together
In dealing positively with the vicissitudes of family life, another helpful strategy for parents is to acknowledge that family struggles are actually normal. Although it may appear that someone else is having an easier time, wise parents aren’t fooled. What we see when bump into others at the supermarket is not the same as what we would see if we were a “fly on the wall” in their homes. Fortunately, most people know how to behave in public. In their hearrts and homes, however, there is always a jumble of emotion. Even the perfectly normal trials and tribulations of parenting and marriage cause plenty of stress.
Those who cope best remember King Solomon’s famous ring with the inscription “this too shall pass.” No matter what is going wrong at the moment in family life, it will change for the better again. Family life is all about ups and downs: good hours and “bad” hours, good weeks and “bad” weeks, good years and “bad” years and even good decades and not-so-good ones!
Adjusting our unrealistic expectations of family life can make the reality easier to handle. Clients often tell me, “I didn’t sign up for this..” referring to some serious family problem they are experiencing. Actually, when we build a family, we are signing up for the challenge. We’re signing up for the growth experience of a lifetime.
