Karl Clancy: I was prone to many a day 'on the dag' as were many of my contemporaries

As a parent I sometimes find myself torn between wanting to look out for my children and prevent harm coming to them and wanting them to learn resilience and how to learn to cope with adversity for themselves.

As children of the 70s and 80s, my generation grew up in an environment that still clung to parenting as it had been done for generations previous to ours.

The emphasis was on keeping us fed, clothed and warm while making sure we received some semblance of an education, no matter how hard we tried to undermine the efforts of parents and teachers alike.

I was prone to many a day “on the dag” as were many of my contemporaries.

Evenings, after obligatory homework and dinner, were spent running free until dark with precious little parental knowledge or investment.

Those were the halcyon days where we did so many stupid things in the name of adventure that I’m often surprised that we survived ourselves into adulthood.

We walked, ran or cycled everywhere.

To friends’ houses or to school and now, oh how we love to regale our own kids with examples of how easy they have it compared to the hardships we endured in the boot camps of our youth.

At the same time though, we drop our kids everywhere, we provide every possible thing that they may need or want and we try to keep them from the vagaries of the world, starting in preschool and continuing well into adulthood.

In an attempt to ensure that we don’t behave like previous generations whose parenting knowledge and skills were rudimentary at best and in some areas non-existent at all, we have fallen foul of overcompensating and run the risk of what’s become known as “helicopter parenting”, always hovering above them and guiding them away from pitfalls, helping them succeed and creating an environment where the name of the game is participation and where there are no winners lauded or losers consoled with a better luck next time.

It’s one of the reasons I like to see kids engaged in any pursuit where losing is a possibility and where it’s accepted as part of the nature of the struggle to succeed, whether in sport, debate, art, in fact any competitive endeavour.

In learning to lose they learn to cope with losing, learn that loss doesn’t make them less worthy as people and that with more work they can eventually learn to win, and when they do it’ll be all the sweeter for having lost so many times before.

I’ve seen my own children experience loss in sports or other endeavours and it has broken my heart to share their disappointment and I’ve often played counsellor in an effort to mitigate their frustrations and disappointments.

It’s taken me a long time to learn that even though they have sometimes lost, each of them has developed into adults who understand adversity and how to cope with it, usually without my intervention and sometimes in spite of it!

We have to let them fall and get themselves back up, we have to let them gain an understanding that life will have more moments of failing than success and that failure isn’t the end, it’s just a way of teaching us what we don’t know or of teaching us that we aren’t doing something in the right way, or perhaps that we need to try doing something else entirely.

We, as parents, are guilty of extolling that participation is the key, that no one really loses, and that sets our children up for a rough ride later on when real life teaches them the exact opposite.

It goes even further in this current generation’s case, because they struggle with pressures that we have little or no handle on because they didn’t exist for us.

The pressures of image and conformity to an aesthetic ideal as promoted by social media, the pressure to speak and think and behave in a way that is under constant scrutiny, where the slightest imperfection of image or character is vilified and where they live in a world where every possible piece of information is at everyone’s fingertips but the ability to cope with it sadly isn’t.

This generation, our children becoming young adults now, haven’t been taught resilience by us, their parents, in a way that teaches them to value and back themselves, that teaches them to understand self-reliance and to understand that nothing in life actually comes to us unless we strive and struggle for it.

We don’t serve them well if we provide every answer, iron out every wrinkle and make everything easy.

The old adage “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child” is one that we would do well to remember.

Acceptance isn’t always easy, especially when we have to accept that not doing something or going against our instincts may not only be necessary but be better for our children, but if we want to hand the reins over to capable, resilient and strong minded adults then we have to let them learn how to be adults like we did, through trial and many errors.

To be as old and wise as we like to think we are, first we have to be young and unwise just like we actually were.