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 mother had found this album of all these old slides from the '50s of me as a kid and I said, 'We should have these made into pictures because the color's so beautiful.' There were pictures of me from 1955 as a little baby wearing all these elaborate outfits, and in these pictures was this amazing story of a gay man and his mother.
We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.
Be the best father you can be to your children. Because nothing is more important.
Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation
My mother was the greatest mother in the world. She thought I was the greatest thing on two feet. I'd come home with a little composition I had written at school, and she'd look at it and say, 'It's wonderful! You're another Shakespeare!' I always assumed I could do anything. It really is amazing how much that has to do with your attitude.
No one understands my ills, nor the terror that fills my breast, who does not know the heart of a mother.
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