Your Kid Needs Counseling

Seriously, your kids need counseling and this isn’t meant as an insult to you as their parent.Yesterday I wrote about how failure as a parent is inevitable. Parents can’t be awesome all the time. Even the best parents miss the mark and cause damage that lasts.

Recently my wife and I have come into contact with several incredible families with messed up kids. These kids aren’t necessarily messed up because of bad parenting, but because people are broken and things happen. Sometimes this is unavoidable. As a result, my wife and I had a brilliant idea. We’re working hard to give our kids great opportunities. I don’t know if we’ll be able to pay all of their college, but we’re going to do all that we can. However, we’ve thought that an incredible investment that we can give our kids upon graduation from High School or maybe College is several thousand dollars for counseling. Counseling to help them fix, cope with and overcome the ways we might have broken them through our parenting.

Counseling is powerful. Everyone should see a counselor from time to time. Everyone needs a little help in one way or another. What if we realized that we might have indadvertedly passed unhealthy habits, viewpoints and behaviors on to our kids? Things may seem perfectly fine on the exterior, but there could be issues just below the surface that might cause bigger issues when exposed.

I meet too many people who love their parents but aren’t able to talk about certain things because of what might happen if they bring it up. I know too many people who dread visiting their parents because things are broken but no one is talking about it. Actually when I think about it, most people I know seem to have some kind of weirdness with their parents, or at least one of them. I know that I don’t want to experience this with my kids, but if I don’t do anything intentionally different, how do I know that my kids aren’t going to have an unspoken and unresolved issue with me? That’s something some counseling might help with. Maybe the secret is investing in some good counseling for the whole family during the teen years.

Our kids are too important. What parent wants to miss out on the adult part of the relationship that long outlasts the short years they’ll be at home? Maybe it’s worth setting a little something aside to invest in these significant relationships.