Features: The Heart of Parenting

Raising Kids with Courage

July, 2005

  "Courage" is one of those personal qualities that often inspire the most grandiose expectations. It's as if we think that only super-heroes can aspire to be courageous--and that the rest of us must be content to settle for simply being brave now and then. Our ideas about courage have been grossly inflated through the influence of popular culture. The summer blockbuster movies have the usual spectacles with many examples of big-screen heroism. The actors (with all the advantages of big muscles, special effects, great hair, and scripts that guarantee happy endings) will show us once again that courage is a quality not readily available to ordinary mortals like you and I.

But, as defined in the dictionary, courage isn't a special human characteristic found only in the most legendary figures. Instead, courage is described as the "strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty." In earlier times, words used to describe courage had a natural down to earth quality, such as: "grit," "gumption," and "backbone." These were the kind of words used to describe the hard work and tenacity of everyday life.

Sometimes I think that, as adults, we don't really appreciate how much courage our children have, and how much they use it on a day-to-day basis. Children have to use a lot of courage from the start because they each begin their lives as little people living in a world of giants. In comparison to how weak and uninformed a small child feels, they see adults as the "giants" who magically seem to know everything, who can do everything, and who are able to make anything happen.

Fortunately, every child is born with an inherent sense of courage and the determination to struggle against those feelings of inferiority. Because of this courage, children ultimately learn for themselves how to live in the giant's world. With a tenacious spirit, children get up every morning willing and able to take new risks and to continue to learn. As a result, children also enjoy the satisfaction of learning for themselves how to understand and make their way in their world.

As parents, we can both appreciate our children's courage and encourage them to see themselves as courageous people. This is especially valuable when our kids are feeling the most disheartened. Children, like all of us, have a hard time seeing themselves as courageous or remembering what they are capable of when they are feeling the most discouraged. One of the nicest ways to help a child who is feeling downhearted is by serving as your child's personal biographer. So, for example, you could tell your child, "I remember when you were only a little baby and you fearlessly climbed all the way to the top of the stairs by yourself! I bet a kid who was that brave when he was only 10 months old, is brave enough to jump of the diving board when he is 10 years old."

Children learn the most about their own courage from their experiences and from the people who have faith in them. The fastest way for an adult to undercut a child's courage is to either use shame or to overprotect a child. Shaming hurts by making a child feel smaller than they are --"How could you be so thoughtless?" "I expected better from you!" Overprotecting hurts because it demonstrates to a child that you don't think that they are capable of doing something new--so how can they think they can do it? "You better not do that, you'll get hurt!" "Let me do that for you, you're too little to try that."

Hollywood gives us one image of courage where the hero is always wonderful and the ending is always perfect. But, in real life, courage simply means to try and to not give up, even when one is afraid or the way is difficult. Raising children who have that kind of courage can happen in a family atmosphere where mistakes are considered problems to be solved, and everyone is encouraged to try again as many times as it takes.

In an encouraging family, children learn that "Courage!" is not for heroes only.