The Importance of Struggle

I’m going to bring up an “S” word that we talk about a lot in therapy – struggle. This usually comes up in relation to some struggle that we are dealing with that we want to make easier (or make go away). And herein lies the problem: when we talk about struggle, the focus is on identifying ways to make the thing we are struggling with easier. For example, make it easier for me to make friends, make it easier for me to be assertive, make it easier for my child to calm down, make it easier for me to communicate with my teenager.

As a therapist, I can teach social skills, interpersonal effectiveness skills, or emotion regulation skills, and that’s all well and good. Those are good skills. And people start feeling better, and things start feeling easier.

And then there comes a time in everyone’s life where something feels hard again. It’s a struggle again. And we want a skill, a specific thing we can do to make it easier again. And the cycle continues.

I’m all for making things feel easier, and I think we’re missing something important here – how we handle what’s hard (the struggle). Sometimes, the only thing that we can do is struggle well. But what does that even mean? How do you struggle well?

Consider this common scenario. Your child is melting down. They are hungry, tired, overstimulated, and despite your best efforts to maintain balance and harmony, their sibling took the thing that they wanted, and now they are flying off the handle. In this moment, we are probably pulled to make the meltdown stop, or to fix the problem of the meltdown. Maybe we give in and appease just to make it through this moment, because now is not a good time or place for a meltdown (e.g., on an airplane, at the grocery store, at a birthday party).

And, we also have another choice. We could recognize that meltdowns are an inevitable part of childhood and parenting. We could bring to the forefront of our mind that although meltdowns are uncomfortable and largely inconvenient, we have handled every one of them up until this point, and we can do it again. In this moment, we can choose to struggle well and ride the wave of the meltdown.

The key to struggling well is to feel confident that you can handle the difficult situation. We can get so caught up in these ideas of how high stakes the problem is, how disastrous the consequences might be, and how awful of a parent we are when our kids are struggling. We lose sight of the fact that we have handled every difficult thing our kids have faced up to this point. None of it has broken us or our kids. Name that there is a struggle. And name that you, as a family, have handled every hard thing together, and can do it again.

Adversity is an inevitable part of life, especially for children and adolescents in an ever-changing world. And adversity is a necessary part of life. So, this is what I want for you all: I want it to feel easier, and I want you to feel better about how you are handling what’s hard.

Let’s struggle well together.