Parenting Outside the Comfort Zone

It's my belief that as individuals, moving ourselves outside our comfort zone is imperative to experiencing a truly rewarding life on earth.  Yet it has occurred to me that when we become parents, we take on a similar responsibility for other humans as well. 
 

As the mom of a four year old son and a nine year old daughter, I am surely guilty of being more on the overprotective side. I try to be aware and fight some of the urges, but it’s just so darn hard sometimes. I have it on good personal authority that suffering is bad. How can I not want to be the “pain bouncer” for that crazy club which is a child’s life? 
 Obviously I have some innate need to give my children a sense of safety which I didn’t perceive in my own youth. I can’t help myself from erring on the side of wanting them to be “comfortable.” Most of my friends would readily admit to doing the same thing. 
 
The natural instinct I share with most other parents I know today is to want to keep our children happy, healthy and safe. How can that be wrong? Comfort good. Pain bad. We protect them. However it’s a natural instinct which can be easily exacerbated by our own experiences and insecurities. 
 
There’s a great scene in the movie “

Finding Nemo.” Marlin (the overprotective widower Dad) tells Dory (the new friend who is Pooh-like due to short-term memory loss), “I promised Nemo that I would never let anything happen to him!” 
 
Dory replies, “Well that’s an odd thing to promise. If nothing ever happened to him, well…then nothing would ever happen to him.”

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To a great extent I am the strong, independent, resilient person I am today because I experienced and successfully conquered adversity from an early age. 
 
The Olympic Creed is proof that the world’s most successful people, got there by working hard and overcoming obstacles:

 
"The most important thing...is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle..."

 
Furthermore, one of my favorite mantras is that increased confidence brings increased capacity.  It makes sense that children need to both succeed and fail to achieve confidence.

 
But just where is the line between protecting and overprotecting? 
 
Until I figure it all out – and just in case I don’t – I have a Therapy Jar in the kitchen into which I deposit a dollar every time I think I may have gotten it wrong. There’s a good chance that the Therapy Jar may someday exceed the College Fund. 

Yet, it’s worth thinking about.  Understandably, we want to keep our children safe, happy, comfortable at all times.  Even more so it seems, if that wasn’t our childhood experience. However, we should never underestimate the powerful lifelong value in independence, struggle and figuring out a few things “the hard way.”