Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
—Marcus Aurelius
There are things that nobody ever wants to happen—especially to their kids. Whether it’s breaking an arm or being bullied, life visits things upon us. Things that frustrate, things that hurt, things that cause problems.
While we’d never choose for these things to happen, we have to remember that when they do happen, we still do retain some choice: as James Stockdale did upon his descent into the North Vietnamese jungle, we choose how we see these difficult events. We choose the story we tell ourselves about them.
The power of this idea—whether it was embraced or rejected—revealed itself in the attitudes of parents during the pandemic. Too many parents chose to see that their children had been harmed, be it by distance learning or by not seeing their grandparents. Of course, these events were undesirable. And there were consequences. But “harmed”? This is a subjective word. This is a choice.
Will your children be affected by things that happen? By having to change teachers midyear because of a move? By having glasses? By a divorce? By their learning issues? Yes. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise. But negatively affected? That’s up to you. Because how you decide to see it and, more important, how you choose to respond are going to determine how your children perceive these events as well.