We Must Decrease: Letting Our Children Grow through Taking Risks

Last winter passed slowly—a trickle of sick days and snow days, mostly—so we spent our Christmas money on roller skates and a disco light and turned our ground floor into a skating rink, my daughters and I cruising from the front door to the back, around the dining table and out again, singing “Eye of the Tiger” loudly and off-key. But our house is not large. It’s old and the floors are uneven, and despite our enthusiasm, this story ended exactly the way you might expect it to: with a fall.

Healing from an ankle sprain, it turns out, can be slow work, so when I landed in a physical therapist’s office months later, I wondered aloud what I could have done differently to help the process along. Surely it shouldn’t be taking this long to heal one stubborn ankle? But the therapist’s answer surprised me: instead of talking about recovery or, perhaps, about not skating in one’s dining room, he talked about movement.

Embracing the Uncomfortable

He explained it this way: as we go through life, we need to put our muscles through a variety of motions. Instead of walking only on even surfaces, we need to walk on sand, trails, rocky beaches, stairs, ladders, and dance floors. We need to introduce our muscles to challenging, uncomfortable, and even awkward situations because these movements teach our muscles what to do when they encounter a stumble.[1] Instead of snapping fully into a sprain, he said, these challenged muscles will be strong and flexible enough to move through the fall without (too much) damage.

I found myself thinking about this long after my appointment. It’s not just muscles that benefit from encounters with weird, uncomfortable situations, I realized: childhood is essentially a series of situations—plenty of them enjoyable, but many weird and uncomfortable—that prepare our children for the uneven terrain of adulthood, where the falls can be sudden and hard and the recovery grueling.

But, I wondered, do I allow my children to risk the falls that develop the muscles they’ll need in the years ahead? Or do I catch them every time they stumble? As my four daughters cross the threshold from childhood to young adulthood, I’ve thought about this a lot, because I am beginning to see how hard they’ll have to work to strengthen the areas where I was too quick to catch them—and how steady they are in the places where they’ve had to struggle.

Knowing Their Need

When our children are small, protecting them is kind of the main thing parents do, because toddlers take risks all the time—walking is risky, as is eating solid foods or petting the dog. But letting a preschooler take risks may mean allowing him to slice his own banana, with a butter knife but without intervention. For an elementary schooler, this may mean encouraging her to wrestle through a just-too-hard karate class even when it seems easier (and, honestly, cheaper) to let her quit. For my teens, this has meant giving them the freedom to ride the city bus and teaching them how to navigate, rather than avoid, uncomfortable situations.

Our children need to experience those moments of right-sized challenge so they can grow through them, but here is why it’s truly so important that we allow our children to do things that unsettle us: when we sweep in too quickly or too often to catch them, we may reinforce the idea that, when our children are in crisis, they need us first. But these are the times when our growing children most need the Lord.

Let’s think back on our own lives for a moment. Which circumstances has God used to teach us to trust him? Seasons of prosperity may teach us to praise the Lord and to cultivate generosity, but it is the seasons of suffering—of prolonged illness, instability, or uncertainty—that teach us to trust him. These are the crucibles the Lord uses to show us that he is steadfast, unchanging, and always present—that when all else fails, we can still call him good. That he is trustworthy.[2]

God is already doing this work in our children’s lives, in ways tailored to them—as they learn to navigate a food allergy that makes them feel like an outsider at every class party; as they learn to work through conflict with a friend or (even scarier) a teacher; as they merge for the first time onto the freeway. Our Lord has lovingly given our children an abundance of opportunities to learn to trust in him as they grow.

Loving and Letting Go

When our children are small, we are a picture of God’s tender care; yes, we should catch and care for them and smooth the road before them. But as our children grow, we can begin to walk beside them, helping them over the stones that are still too big an obstacle while allowing them to navigate the ones that seem just a little too big. We can walk beside our children in hope, praying that as we decrease, the Lord will increase in their lives—that he will become the one they run to first when they are hurting.[3]

But this process doesn’t just challenge our children—it challenges us. As the daughter of an ER nurse and granddaughter of a doctor who required his kids to wear helmets in the car, I have to remind myself often that giving my children permission to grow beyond the boundaries of my (very small) comfort zone is a gift to them. This is one of the ways we get to love our children—by letting them go a little ahead of us on the path, so they can strengthen the muscles they’ll need when the road begins to climb.

[1] Mary K. Mulcahey, MD, FAAOS, “Cross Training,” OrthoInfo, February 2020, https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/staying-healthy/cross-training/#:~:text=Cross%20training%20allows%20you%20to,may%20experience%20fewer%20overuse%20injuries

[2] 1 Peter 1:6–9

[3] James 1:2–4