For Kids, Suffering and Perspective is Power

The recent killing of the Reiners is gut-wrenching but it got me thinking.

How could this happen to such loving parents?

Too many times, I’ve seen parents shield their kids from struggle out of love, only to create troubled adults in the process—kids who grow up and have no perspective and no consequences.

If you’ve seen the recent Charlie Sheen Netflix documentary, then you realize what can happen when you have no real consequences.

When my son was a junior at the University of St. Andrews, he told me he was getting a credit card to build his credit rating. We had a short discussion about how to use the card responsibly, and I told him to make sure he paid off the balance monthly or else the high interest rates would eat him like a T-rex.

A year later, the call came.

“Dad, I F’d up. I have over 10k in credit card debt. Can you help?”

I told Jackson absolutely not.

A year and a half later, with much stress and suffering, he paid it off.

Then he thanked me for the lesson. He also told me some of his friends thought I was a jerk for not helping.

It’s incredibly tough to hold your ground in these situations. The last thing we want is our kids to suffer, but sometimes suffering is the way.

Perspective is power.

Not the Instagram quote kind.

The kind earned with bloody knuckles, when your ego is bruised, and nobody is clapping.

I learned early in life that comfort is a liar.

It whispers that you deserve ease before you have earned competence.

It tells kids they are special without requiring them to be useful.

If you want strong kids, stop insulating them from reality.

Expose them to service and struggle while their character is still wet cement. Let gratitude become muscle memory.

If you protect them from the consequences of their poor decisions, you are just compounding the eventual crash landing. And it will likely have a large blast radius.

Service is the great equalizer.

Take your kids to a homeless shelter on an ordinary rainy winter day and watch the transformation.

Service like this strips away entitlement and replaces it with awareness.

When a child helps serve meals to people who are hungry and down on their luck, something rewires upstairs. When they see adults who work brutal hours and still show up with dignity, the world gets real fast.

Gratitude stops being theoretical.

Struggle is not trauma. It is training. There is a difference. We have confused discomfort with damage in the modern parenting era.

We rush in to remove every obstacle. Meanwhile, kids grow up allergic to effort and shocked by reality.

And in severe cases, they get angry, make bad decisions, and worse, they slip away from reality with the help of drugs.

Let them struggle appropriately. Let them fail in low-stakes environments.

Let them earn things instead of being handed trophies for just showing up.

The world does not care about participation. It cares about contribution.

Take your kids out of the bubble. Put them to work serving others. Not as a social media photo op. Not as a resume bullet. Real service where no one knows their name and nobody thanks them twice.

Do that consistently, and something dangerous happens.

They grow resilient. They become grateful. They stop whining about WiFi speed and start noticing how good they actually have it.

That is power.

Not loud. Not flashy. Quiet and unshakeable.

Thoughts and prayers to the Reiner family.