Protect or Prepare our Kids?

She and I have talked quite a bit over the last year meeting for lunch or coffee.  I am grateful for the relationship and for her desire to be mentored.  She is younger than me, married and parenting a fifteen-year-old son.  We have talked about a lot of things, mostly surrounding family, in-laws, parenting and how to respond in Godly ways to life. 

I began to notice her talking quite a bit about how she needed to do this and to do that to ‘protect’ her son.  As I pondered and prayed about this I had an Ah-Ha moment.  Is it our job as parents to protect our kids—or prepare them?

Sure, we do many things as parents for our newborns and toddlers and preschoolers and preteens and teenagers to protect them from harm.  We put them in cribs so they won’t roll onto the floor.  We wrap them up to keep them warm.  We put plugs in the electric sockets so they won’t electrocute themselves.  We put locks on our doors so that intruders won’t have easy access.  We do lots of things to protect them from harm…..and we should!!

We also try to protect them from disappointment.  Failure.  Hurt.  Loss.  Pain.  Suffering.  We love them and we don’t want them to ever have to go through the disappointments and failures and hurts and loss and pain and suffering we have experienced so we constantly intervene.  Isn’t that what any loving parent should do?  Or is it?

To be honest, I am not sure that protecting our kids from disappointment or failure or hurt or loss or pain or suffering is the wisest, most Godly approach.  Perhaps, instead, we should be preparing them for disappointment, failure, hurt and loss and suffering.  Scripture is clear….they will happen!!  “When you suffer….” Paul says.

So many of us were protected and not prepared for these things growing up so when they DO happen to us we are caught off guard, or panic, or become distressed and fearful and depressed and want to give up or crawl into a hole.  Do we want our kids to respond like that?  Or do we want them to respond Biblically?  Do we want them to do as Paul says and “consider it all joy’? 

Here is my friend’s response when I shared with her that perhaps our job as parents is not to protect our kids but to prepare them….her text verbatim.  “Whew!  This has rocked my mind!  I just realized I am amazing at PROTECTING but think I am failing at PREPARING!  U will never know how this has changed me.  Pray for me to change.  I think I would like to study this topic with you.”

Parents, let’s challenge one another to put as much (or more) energy into preparing our children for disappointment or failure or hurt or loss or pain or suffering than we do protecting them from it!!

Also, I would love to hear ways you find yourself protecting them and how you could turn it around to prepare them instead!  A later text from my friend says this, "So when you are 15 and still cannot find the extra Kleenex box.....this is protected not prepared right????? Lol"