“Easy for you to say

Your heart has never been broken

Your pride has never been stolen

Not yet, not yet, not yet”

-Dave Grohl/Foo Fighters

“These Days”/Wasting Light

You know your kids have to get hurt. They have to grow scar tissue in order to toughen them up for future days. They need to gain experience by making mistakes and learning from them. They need to absorb hits from life’s hammer in order to develop resiliency.

We know these things because we have lived them, survived them really. We know this because as much as life changes, certain truths endure.

Knowing is one thing. Understanding is another. Allowing our kids to feel emotional pain is whole other.

But they have to. We did, our parents did, our grandparents did, every generation before us did. Yet, at the age when my great-grandfather came over from Ireland because “the pigs were eating better than [he] was,” my youngest son’s biggest struggles are that Fortnite lags sometimes on the PlayStation and that my oldest tends to hog the XBox that runs faster.

I love my kids and they are by far the most important thing in my world. When they succeed, the sun shines a little brighter and I feel a degree of joy that is unattainable in any other aspect of my life.

My wife and I celebrate them and do what we can to prepare our boys for a world that is at once cruel and beautiful. We want to imbue in them a sense of independence that will serve them in college and then prepare them not to live in the basement for terribly long. All this is, as Dave Grohl wrote, easy for me to say. Of course I want the best for them.

But their hearts have not been broken.

Their pride has not been stolen.

Not yet.

That adverb suggests — no, states — that these experiences are inevitable. If they haven’t happened, they will. Maybe just not yet.

A girl will break their heart. Friends will betray them. Heartbreak need not be romantic. Maybe someone they trust to lead them will do it. Worse, it might be me. No matter, someone will break their hearts.

More terrifying still is that their pride will be stolen. Dear God, I don’t know how many ways that can happen; I just know that the outcome is always awful.

Not yet.

So where does that leave us? How do we help cushion the blow and ensure that they get back to their feet when life knocks them over?

How do we instill in them a sense of toughness? A moral compass that helps them face in the right direction? Is it with unwavering support? An awareness that my ear will always be attuned to them, and then, if needed, a shoulder will always be there?

How do we do all this without coddling or suffocating them? How do we allow them to learn that the hurt they feel can be overcome?

We’ll figure it out. Maybe just not yet.