1 - The Curriculum

Last night was a five alarm melt down. Dinner was wrong, all the kids were crying, and when finally, after three hours of coaxing, reminding, explaining, and prodding, the last of my four children finally fell asleep, I was spent. Fortunately, not every night is like that. In fact, very few are. And even more importantly, throughout the requests for another story, and another drink of water, and wailing that the pajamas “felt funny,” I was able to keep calm and not resent my children.

This week one of my dearest friends told me that she is expecting for the first time and in my gushy excitement I promised her that it would be the best and hardest part of her life and that there would be times when she would love it and she would hate it. The key to our happiness and fulfillment as parents is our ability to manage our thoughts about parenthood. Our thoughts dictate our feelings, which fuel our actions and lead to our results as fathers. So if we want to be better fathers and enjoy being fathers, the most important thing we can do is carefully supervise our brains. For example, as my girls are all wailing that dinner is yucky and they want ice cream, I can think, “What is wrong with these kids,” or “I can’t deal with this,” or “This isn’t fair,” or “I’m failing as a parent.” These thoughts lead to feelings of frustration, overwhelm, and resentment.

The root problem is a belief that the difficult parts of parenting should somehow be different. It should be easier. Our brains believe that something is terribly wrong when in actuality everything is fine. How would it feel instead if you believed, “This is exactly how my children should be acting,” “This is what normal five-year-olds do,” or “Man, I am an awesome dad for working through this craziness with my kids.” When we try to resist the difficult and negative parts of ours lives as parents, it aggravates the problem. Resistance compounds suffering. We feel entitled to more, we feel entitled to better. We believe that things should be easier. We start comparing ourselves to others and wonder why they seem to have it more together. None of these feelings of self-pity are useful to us. None of these feels inspire resilience or loving action within us.

One of the most useful paradigms I’ve heard for creating feelings of love and resilience in situations that try our patience comes from Brooke Castillo, creator of the popular Life Coach School Podcast. In episode 151, she describes the difficult circumstances in our lives as the curriculum of life. Overcoming obstacles is the purpose of life. We signed up for this; this is our school. We can choose thoughts that revel in the challenges because we believe that they will make us better, they will make us stronger. The idea that we can become more resilient without facing more adversity is ludicrous. We can lean into the hard parts, we can seek out adversity, we can use courage to embrace the things that exhaust and scare us. She explains that if you were admitted to an Ivy League school and registered for classes, you would not expect them to be easy. In fact, you would be disappointed if the work were easy and the deadlines didn’t matter. When studies became difficult, you would be excited. You would literally say, “Bring it, let’s learn!” The taller the stack of books and the thicker the syllabus the more energized you would be by the growth you would experience.

God sent us to earth to learn and to become more like Him. He is the supreme Curriculum Developer. He has perfectly designed family life to transform us into more patient, more loving, and more resilient people. The difficult parts are hard-coded in for our benefit. Adversity makes the good times possible and more enjoyable. When we try to avoid the difficult parts, or numb ourselves with video games, alcohol, pornography, or too much ESPN we are squandering the tuition we paid to be here. When our children are being truly insane, or when the pressures of work and family mount, we can remind ourselves that this is exactly how things are supposed to be. This is exactly what God intended for me to experience in my life as a parent right now.  We can choose to embrace the opportunity for learning, and this new attitude will summon deeper wells of energy, patience, and love.

If you've found something in this post that is useful to you, please share it below in the comments! I'd also love to hear what other parenting topics would be interesting to you.

Image Credit: Unknown