The 3 Things Every Kid Needs (But We Struggle to Give Them)

In large part, most parents are great at giving their kids more than enough love, attention, stability, structure, and safety. But when I’m asked what kids really need, my answer usually isn’t very popular.

All kids need (really, everybody): adversity, failure, and boredom.

I recently heard Brené Brown describe where we might be going wrong in parenting. She explained that we are likely confusing adversity with trauma. Trauma is a real thing, and there are different degrees of it, but it’s not the same as adversity. Adversity is where we grow, expand, and evolve. We all need it. But if every time our kids experience adversity, our body registers it as trauma, we will naturally step in and try to take the adversity away.

As parents, we need to understand the difference. That’s where practices like PARR can be very helpful. You pause, take a deep mindful breath, then acknowledge the discomfort you feel when your child is struggling. You remind yourself they’re safe, and then respond based on what they need.

Later, as you reflect — the last step in PARR — notice what comes up for you when you see your child in discomfort. What story are you telling yourself in that moment?

A good parent doesn’t let their child struggle.
I have to protect them no matter what because that wasn’t done for me.
I’ll never let my child experience the pain I felt.
I just want them to be happy.

As a mom of now two young adults, I struggled when my kids struggled. That discomfort led me to become the fixer parent. The rescuer. Even though every part of me knew they needed these experiences.

If they didn’t make the soccer team, I wanted to join them in blaming the coach. When they were left out of social events with friends, I wanted to partake in bashing the so-called friends who left them out. When they called panicked from school to tell me they’d forgotten their homework at home, I wanted to rush up to the school and bring it to them. When they were riddled with self-doubt, I was the best cheerleader a kid could ask for.

And then one day, my daughter said to me:

“I don’t want you to fix it. I just want you to listen.”

It was exactly what I needed to hear.

Being the fix-it parent does not serve them. I allowed my kids to struggle because I knew they needed to. Every time I jumped in, I was taking the lesson, the wisdom, and the insight away. So I did the work I needed to do. This was my problem, not theirs.

I started to observe myself when discomfort hit. What was my patterning when I felt uncomfortable? I wanted to avoid discomfort at all costs, so hypervigilance and control became my default mode whenever I sensed discomfort on the horizon.

I started sitting with discomfort rather than running from it. I chose to allow the feelings to accompany the hard moments without rushing to fix anything. The more I did this, the more I learned to create space before responding. The more I allowed for this process, the steadier and more resilient I became. I learned more about myself and gained a new level of confidence after each moment.

Kids don’t need us to save them. They need parents who believe they have what it takes to move through a challenge. That’s the beauty of struggle. It really is there to teach.

Ugh. Damn failure.

If opportunities for struggle are hard, brace yourself for failure. But failure is one of our wisest teachers.

I’ve worked with several children who are afraid of making mistakes — children as young as three years old. To be so aware of doing something wrong at such a young age was fascinating to me. But a deep fear of making mistakes is really a fear of failure.

I started paying attention to how we, as a culture, approach failure. If you’re a sports family like mine, think about the dialogue that follows your favorite team losing because they didn’t play well. I’m sure we’re not saying the kindest or most compassionate things.

How do we respond to good grades versus bad grades? What happens when our kids perform well, or when they miss the mark?

We say the right things about failure when it’s distant and theoretical. But our kids are always listening and watching. When we badmouth the player who missed the free throw, they make their own interpretations.

Making mistakes means you’re bad.
Failing means people won’t like me.

If we hope to raise resilient kids who are confident and willing to take chances, then we need to let kids fail and change the way we present failure to them.

It’s really that simple: let them fail, and notice how you talk about failure.

I remember when I was a kid, if I said I was bored, I would get in trouble. It was treated as offensively as any other disrespectful behavior.

My parents, both immigrants, came from humble beginnings. They worked tirelessly to give my brother and me anything we needed to create better lives for ourselves. So yes, if we uttered the words “I’m bored,” they were not happy.

After all, they saw our surroundings as vastly different from the way they grew up, so how dare we say we had nothing to do?

The good news is that we made our own fun.

To put it simply, boredom is a problem for your kids to solve, not you.

When we allow boredom to exist, the following skills begin to develop: creativity, problem-solving, frustration tolerance, resourcefulness, language skills, and healthy play skills.

If I had written an article about what kids need and listed love, attention, and presence, you all hopefully would have rolled your eyes. While some may argue that sleepless nights and mental and physical fatigue are the hardest parts of parenting, I would tell you that one of the hardest parts is making room for these three experiences.

It requires us to tolerate struggle, failure, and boredom.

And maybe that’s the real work of parenting.

Not protecting our kids from every uncomfortable feeling, but learning how to tolerate discomfort ourselves. Learning how to stay grounded when life doesn’t go the way we hoped. Learning how to trust that our kids are capable.

This is what it looks like to become your own inner parent. This is why it’s critical to keep growing alongside your child.

Ultimately, the degree to which you can tolerate struggle, failure, and boredom will directly shape your child’s ability to become resilient.

Love always,

Albiona