The Delicate Dance of Modern Parenting

Just the other day, during a particularly heavy rain, I found myself wrapped up in work when my phone buzzed. It was my son. “Papa,” he said, “everyone else’s parents came to pick them up because of the rain. I’m walking to the train alone.” His voice held a hint of frustration.

At first, I brushed it off with practical dad advice, “You’ve got your umbrella, right?” But it was more than the rain that bothered him. He was alone, and that struck a deeper chord with me long after we hung up.

This moment lingered in my mind, leading me to ponder: Are we, as parents, becoming overprotective? This isn’t just about shielding our kids from a downpour. It’s about the larger implications of our choices and the kind of generation we are nurturing.

Our instincts to protect are primal, but I wonder if we’re inadvertently sending a message that they can’t handle adversity – be it a storm or life’s figurative rains.

This brings me back to a piece of wisdom I once read, about the cyclical nature of society: from hardship comes resilience, from resilience comes abundance, and from abundance, inevitably, comes complacency. Are we in the complacency phase, leading our society towards those predicted tough times?

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”