Aside from the physical demands of parenting (keeping up with endlessly energetic kids), and the financial challenges (from birth to 18, the average American child costs over $310,000 according to the Brookings Institution), the emotional cost of being a mom or dad can feel overwhelming.
If you’re like most parents, fear and anxiety about your children’s safety and well-being weighs you down. The cliché about kids giving you gray hair is rooted in scientific truth.
The list of concerns parents have for their children is long, according to a recent report by Pew: the threat of drug and alcohol use, becoming a parent too early, getting bullied, getting into trouble with the law, and becoming a victim of a crime.
But by far the top concern is our children’s mental health. Three-quarters of parents say they are worried about their kids struggling with anxiety or depression, for example.
Kids today are a greater risk than ever of being exposed to mental health threats.
Parents, whether you realize it or not, you are in a battle against myriad threats to your children’s mental and emotional well-being.
You fight for and protect your children. More importantly, you face the fears of threats to them and yet you demonstrate daily the courage to continue.
What is a warrior?
A warrior is someone ready for battle. It is someone who trains, leads others, and puts cause above self. It is someone who lives by a warrior ethos.
American Soldiers operate by an ethos that includes four tenets. They apply perfectly to the parenting struggle.
Mission first. Warriors know their objective. They organize, train, and fight to meet it. They refuse to let distractions cloud their vision. They give their all to the mission.
As parents, you have a mission — to protect your kids and prepare them to thrive in a complex world. When the mission is properly understood, directing your resources toward it becomes easier. It empowers you to analyze risks and know what you are willing to accept. All this in the context of what you really want for your children.
Missions can be organized into phases — short-, medium-, and long-term gains that advance you toward your objective. Defining these phases helps warriors put wins and losses into the right perspective.
Never accept defeat. Winners know the odds, they just commit to a mindset that says they will win. By framing your mind around victory, you open up your creativity and stores of energy to find ways to accomplish what you need to.
As a parent, you operate with a victory mindset. You visualize success, and it shapes your choices every day.
Never quit. In the words of the Lt. Gen.Hal Moore (of We Were Soldiers fame), “there is always one more thing you can do to increase your odds of success.”
You are tireless in your efforts toward mission success. When things get hard, you reach into deep wells of energy, patience, and resolve.
Never leave a fallen comrade. This tenet of ethos binds the individual to the team. It elevates the value of the individual by casting each one as indispensable, thereby raising the power of the team.
Families benefit from the “no one left behind” mantra. Parents know how much each child matters in their own unique way and as a member of the unit. It’s not always about physical proximity, though. Making sure that everyone is accounted for requires that they get what they need in their moment.
The four tenets of the modern American Warrior Ethos summarize the martial wisdom of the ancients. All that wisdom, ancient and modern, was gleaned to get young men and women to fight for something in the face of sometimes paralyzing fear.
“The greatest counterpoise to fear, the ancients believed, is love,” according to military historian Stephen Pressfield.
Love. It underpins the way of the warrior.
Dienekes, the bravest of all the Spartan warriors, told his Soldiers at the cusp of their annihilation at the battle of Thermopylae to “fight for this alone: the man who stands at your shoulder.” In other words, put all your efforts to doing right by your fellow warriors, the ones in your team. And parents — for the ones in your family.
“All warrior cultures train their youths to feel this love,” writes Pressfield.
Modern science reinforces this aged lesson. Social scientist Arthur Brooks explains how fear and love interrelate:
“Fear and love both start in the limbic system [but] they are processed in different hemispheres of the prefrontal cortex. While love is processed in the left hemisphere, fear is processed in the right hemisphere of the brain. Research has discovered that both fear and love inhibit or downregulate the other, meaning that the presence of one crowds out the other.”
“To reduce fear, we need to bring more love into our lives,” he says.
The most powerful warriors — and parents — practice love effectively.
Are parents warriors?
In some sense, a metaphor is an attention-getter. Metaphors in popular culture are often advanced to reframe an issue or bring new clarity to a topic.
So here is the reframe: Parents should see their role as if the outcome of a very real war depended on their focus and intensity. Because it does.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has described the mental health prospects of American youth as nothing short of a public health crisis.
While most policy prescriptions call for more mental health providers — social workers, psychologists, therapists, and the like — parents on are the front lines.
In an interesting twist, Gen. George Patton, one of the greatest American warriors, believed that warriors constituted an important cultural stabilizing force. They did so by maintaining values that made a culture strong and reliable.
Parents are warriors in this final regard. In a world that seems to be spinning faster, they are there to help kids slow down and grow up at an appropriate pace, passing on the values that will lead to happiness across generations.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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