And your children need to know it
I am one of those parents who had to fight for every rung of the ladder. As an African-American woman raised in a working-class family by two parents who, at that time, had not been to college, I learned early that nothing of lasting value arrives without effort. Scholarships and fellowships kept me from drowning in student loan debt. God’s grace opened doors my parents could not have imagined. And though my struggle looked different from theirs, it was a struggle all the same. That struggle is precisely what shaped me.
Which is why, when I look around at my fellow Gen X parents — people who overcame tremendous odds and now live comfortably — I notice something that quietly concerns me: many of us are working very hard to make sure our children never struggle at all.
Why We Cannot Afford to Protect Them from Everything
Our instinct is understandable. We know what it felt like to go without, to stress, to work twice as hard for half the recognition. Of course we want better for our children. But there is a meaningful difference between wanting better for them and wanting easier for them — and we must not confuse the two.
Part of the reason so many of us are educated, professionally accomplished, and financially stable is that we persevered through difficulty. The struggle was not pleasant. It was not something we would have chosen. But it gave us discipline, endurance, problem-solving capacity, and grit — the very qualities our children will need when they walk out of our homes and into a world that will not soften itself for them.
How I Intentionally Create the Struggle
When you have been blessed to build a comfortable life, sometimes you have to be deliberate about instilling the lessons that hardship once taught naturally.
First, my children know they are broke. Not in a shaming way — in a clarifying, honest way. I am the one who gets up and goes to work. The lifestyle we enjoy belongs to me and to the labor I put in to sustain it. They do not simply get things because they want them. They earn them, or they wait. Chores are done. Grades are maintained. That is their contribution to a household running smoothly.
When my older daughter started driving, I made it clear she would not be receiving a new car. She would be driving my twenty-year-old Toyota 4Runner — and even then, the car was mine. I was lending it to her. Several of her classmates were being handed BMWs and Lexus SUVs at sixteen. My daughter knew that I did not get my BMW until I was thirty-five, and that if she wanted one for herself, she would need to work toward it.
I did not let comfort become her baseline expectation. Comfort is something you build — it is not something you are simply born into.
Second, I do not swoop in every time there is conflict. When my children face difficulty with a peer or a teacher, my first move is not intervention — it is guidance. I work with them to think through the problem, identify their options, and try to resolve it themselves. I make clear that I am available, and that I will step in if the situation truly requires it. But I am the last resort — not the first.
Parenting this way has meant that I have rarely had to intervene in my children’s conflicts at all. They have learned to handle themselves and their problems with both assertiveness and grace. They know their own capabilities. And they know I am in their corner when it counts.
Some questions worth carrying with you:
Discomfort is not the same as harm. Sit with that distinction for a moment.
I have watched my children walk through some genuinely hard things. And more than once, holding back from rescuing them was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. Knowing that I had, in certain cases, deliberately created the circumstances that were stretching them — that was harder still. But watching them come through it? That is everything.
