The 6 Big Mistakes in Parenting – Mistake #6
Unfortunately many parents spend more effort protecting their children than preparing them. I believe that their desire that nothing bad will happen to their kids becomes a philosophy: nothing bad will ever happen.
Let me give you two rules of life that apply to everyone:
1) Your children WILL encounter many crises in their personal lives – and there is NOTHING you can do to prevent that. My friend Geoff Frisch says it like this: “If you go up to anyone in the world and say, ‘I heard about your problem,’ every single one will say: ‘Who told you?’”
2) You will ill-equip your children to solve the crises they will encounter in life. We know this because, hopefully, your parents loved you, and yet there are things you have gone through (and are going through) that they did not prepare you for. This is not because they didn’t care, but because they couldn’t imagine it happening.
That doesn’t mean we should throw our children to the wolves. But it does mean we have to give them the ability to think about their problems because we won’t always be able to give them the answers.