Celebrate your family's bleakest moments and how your relatives overcame them. In doing so, you will encounter darkness, but you'll give your children the confidence that they, too, shall overcome.
Interpretation
Embrace and learn from challenging times in your family's history to instill resilience in the next generation.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing and celebrating the difficult moments that families face, as they are crucial for growth and learning. By discussing these bleak times openly, parents can provide their children with a sense of confidence and strength, showing them that challenges can be overcome and that resilience is an inherent part of family life.
In practice
During a family gathering, you might quote this to encourage discussions about how you've all overcome struggles.
The simplest consequence of walking on crutches is that you walk slower. Every step must be a necessary one. When you hurry, you get where you're going, but you get there alone. When you go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with a community you've built along the way.
If you tell your own story to your children - that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them - you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they've felt.
When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.
After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.
My grandson Sam Saunders has been playing golf since he could hold a club and I spent a lot of time with him over the years. Like my father taught me, I showed him the fundamentals of the game and helped him make adjustments as he and his game matured over the years.
Raising children, be aware that the piles and piles of laundry will disappear all too soon and that you will, to your surprise, miss them profoundly.
Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
Your great puddin' of a son don' need fattin' anymore Dursley, don't worry
[about being a father] I don't really remember what it was like before. Whatever I had going on, it was bullshit. It wasn't important. It's kind of a nice thing about being a dad. My identity is really about them now, and what I can do for them, so it sort of takes the pressure off of your own life. What am I going to do, who am I? Who cares, you've got to get your kids to school. So I like it that way.
Since I was sent to an orphanage, and I saw very little of my mother, I can counsel mothers that you shouldn't abandon your children. Before you bring a child into the world, think deeply about things, so that they lack absolutely nothing, least of all love.
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