If you know me and cringed when you read the title, read on anyway. I promise to not excoriate "The Sweatered One" here. At least nothing like I might if we were at dinner and we were all laughing way too much.
The "Mr. Rogers Show" was a PBS show that ran for many years. It featured Fred Rogers, who was apparently the nicest human being ever to walk the earth. Fred trained to be a Presbyterian minister. At the time this was happening (the early '60's), he also became disenchanted with the then current state of children's programming.
I've never really had a problem with Mr. Rogers. What I have a problem with is the glorification of coddling to the point that it excludes teaching and coaching. The former is all about avoiding as much pain as possible and feeling warm and gushy in the moment. The latter is about the hard work of supporting someone through the moment and helping them put one foot in front of the other; helping them take the next step.
Mr. Rogers sat kids on his lap, read them stories and told them they were special.
Our oldest son once upon a time, had a little league manager who approached the matter differently. Toward the beginning of the season, the manager started holding scrimmages during the last half of practice for which he was the only umpire. Along about the second or third of these mock games, a kid slid into second base, obviously safe. The manager called him out and the kid went off. (He actually had been really really safe.) The manager let him go for just a bit and then he said: "If you want to stay on this team, shut your mouth now, go back to the bench, AND DEAL WITH IT!" I capitalized that last bit because he actually did raise his voice a good deal.
As the scrimmages continued, this treatment extended to all members of the team. I have to say, it was brilliant. He was intentionally exposing his team to the injustice and frustration of real world games...and teaching them how to handle that injustice. None of that could have been accomplished anywhere near as effectively by teaching them good, warm lessons about unfair calls.
Gratuitous rhetorical question: "Do all these sorts of things have to always hurt?" No, not always, just usually.
At various times over my life as a parent, I've had occasion to pin each of our children to a doctor's table as the doctor did what was necessary in the moment to preserve their health or on at least 2 occasions, their lives. One of these times, a lab tech offered to get an orderly in to do the job so that I wouldn't have to be there and my child wouldn't have to think of me as the person that held him while horrible things happened. In an all too uncharacteristic moment of self control, I told him in a very quiet voice that I would not abandon my child to the mercy of strangers for the sake of emotion, be it mine, my child's or his.
I held that boy through the procedure, as well as for the rest of that day, including his nap. It was extremely expensive. It remains expensive to this day. I cannot think of it without crying and know that I cried hard writing this.
We must love our children and each other enough to allow the lessons of life that are necessary in order to live the life we've been given. We must not deny them this because it hurts us too much to see them hurt. We must not make the absence of all pain the sum of all virtue.
Of course, we must protect children and loved ones from catastrophe where and whenever we can. That's why we set out to intentionally teach about adversity in the first place. The point is that coddling, insulating and patronizing do not accomplish this. These only serve to insulate us from the difficulty of watching others incur difficulty. And for a brief season, to delay greater pain that must now be incurred without benefit of prior teaching.
Finally, consider that this is the love and respect God gives us as his children. The old saying is, "Things that don't kill you just makes you stronger." As children of God we believe nothing really kills us. I think in the end, walking with God makes us pretty strong.
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