RAISING children nowadays has seen challenges for parents like never before.
I have often mused about what challenges parents faced in the generations before us. Too much time listening to the "iRadio"? Dealing with the addiction of hopscotch or marbles? Or comforting your daughter when someone "posted" an unflattering picture of her on the school noticeboard?
I also wonder how my great grandparents would have responded to the words "I'm bored" coming from their children's mouths. I don't think the children would have dared say that, as they would have been put to work pretty quickly.
A close friend of mine who worked as a nanny firmly believes that children are indulged nowadays. She said her father grew up on a farm without any luxuries and he was expected to help out on the farm. In fact, his parents had lots of children so they could help on the farm.
Generally speaking, I think children today have it far easier than the children of previous generations. I think a big contributing factor to this is our addiction to comfort and safety. On this matter, Ron Rolheiser (theologist) has said:
"Once we have grown used to safety, good food, clean water, proper hygiene, access to good doctors and proper medicine, access to constant entertainment, access to instant information, regular connection with our loved ones, boundless educational and recreational opportunities and wonderful creature comforts of all sorts, the danger looms large that we will not easily, or at all, be able to let go of any of these".
Abraham Maslow (hierarchy of needs) said that what drives us is our search for comfort. We seek to meet our basic needs first (food, water, shelter) before seeking higher order psychological needs (eg, self-esteem), in order to achieve a state of comfort.
But in the modern world we have unprecedented comforts. According to Robert Biswas Diener, we no longer "seek comfort" as we have come to "achieve it". This means we have modified our circumstances to become even more comfortable in life.
Not only have we come to achieve comfort but we have also come to depend on it. These comforts become our new normal of being. As a result this narrows our range of experience with which we are comfortable. Many of us are unable to "rough it" while camping, don't let our children walk to school in the rain and are unable to tolerate a range of negative experiences. Biswas Diener has said we fall out of practice with discomfort, we no longer grapple with hardship or know how to navigate tough circumstances. He says comfort is our new natural resting state, which makes us psychologically weaker.
I share Rolheiser's concerns about our comfort addiction. He says that although we may still end up as good people we will not be able to self-sacrifice. Not only will we be unwilling to sacrifice our lives for our friends and country, but we will be unable to give up our comfort for the sake of others. What sort of future does this create?
I wonder if we will see the same level of athleticism in the future, the same calibre of intrepid explorers and scientists? How will our Defence Force fare? Will we continue to discover new things in the world if we can no longer tolerate discomfort?
There are lots of things we do in our family to manage our comfort addiction, but we can do much better.
One example is my ability to tolerate boredom. I have always hated, vehemently hated, being bored ... I think it is an ADHD thing. "One must not be bored" has been a mantra in our house. But in the past few years I have learned that when my kids are bored they play more creatively, they dig deeper and figure out how to get along so they can play a cool game, or conquer an evil force that has descended upon our house.
If not for the creative play that arises out of boredom, my boys would never realise all the ways to kill baddies and there would be a permanent infestation of baddies at our house.
I saw boredom create a brilliant cricket player. A family friend lives on a farm and she doesn't have any iPads, computer games or "i" anything, as far as I can tell. Consequently, her 8-year-old boy, in his boredom, would go out and practise cricket. He got bored, he practised, he got better at cricket, which felt good, so he practised some more, and on it went. He is a bloody good cricket player.
I think we need to create more opportunities for discomfort in our children.
Let them be bored, let them be disappointed, let them feel bad. Comfort your children, but don't sugar-coat a bad situation or change it to make them feel better. Sometimes it is in discomfort that growth happens and this is what sets our children up for a brighter future.
A registered psychologist with a masters in applied psychology, Wanganui mother-of-two Kristen Hamling is studying for a PhD in wellbeing at Auckland University of Technology.