Life is like a fight. In the beginning, we’re wearing one of those fat sumo suits where if we make a mistake or get knocked on our butt, it won’t hurt much.
As we progress through life, we slowly start increasing in levels of difficulty, risk, and pain. The mistakes we make run the risk of being more consequential to our lives. So after the sumo suit, maybe we are wearing headgear, training gloves, kneepads, etc. And when we get into junior high or high school, maybe we’re just wearing boxing gear. By the time we graduate college, we are now preparing for a world of bareknuckle boxing.
There will always be difficulties in life, but for the parents who try to clear a path and not let their kids ever fall or get hurt, they are actually doing them a disservice. Because when their kids get out into the real world and have to face other bareknuckle boxers, but they haven’t made it past their sumo suit training, they are going to be in a world of pain and not know what to do with it.
We need to build up our pain tolerance (and our children’s pain tolerance) by failing early and failing often. Life is not meant to be all rainbows and butterflies. We’re not only going to have sunny days. We need to encounter the dark days and know that we’ll make it through. It will help us overcome the challenges that inevitably come with living.
Think about that when you’re parenting. It sucks to watch your kid experience any sort of pain, whether that’s physical or emotional. But your job as a parent isn’t to make sure they never experience pain, it’s to make sure that they know how to respond to it and come back stronger.