Exposing Children to Hardship

I'm not sure about other parts of the world, but in Canada and the United States, there is a trend towards trying to provide extremely safe environments for our children. This, frankly, is being taken too far and is making our children wimpy, spoiled and incapable of dealing with the inevitable tests and difficulties that are part of being human. Here's a good example.

Here is a little blurb I wrote up for an email list recently in response to the idea that we have to go abroad in order to experience hardship.

I think that no matter where you are in the world you are exposed to hardships. I also think that there is nowhere in the world where it is morally "safe" - where we can go as a retreat from societal ills. The whole world is in a terrible state. Baha'u'llah' s message is necessary for all of us, not just to give hope and encouragement but also to heal the ills that are afflicting the _entire_ world. The extremes of wealth and poverty are one of many ills. Our wealth in North America protects us from many physical hardships but it also opens us up to being exposed to many subtler hardships such as extremes of competition, individualism, apathy, materialism, family breakdown, violence, drug abuse, infidelity, backbiting, etc. etc. etc.

I've only done a little bit of pioneering to poorer parts of the world so my first-hand experience is limited. What I saw was that those places also suffer from many of the same ills. In the Republic of the Marshall Islands, promiscuity and early teen pregnancy was common. The people were very nice, friendly, poor and in many ways it would be easy to idealize their environment as "good hardship" vs. "bad hardship". But it would be a mistake, I think. Many parts of Africa are suffering from a terrible level of the spread of the AIDS virus. That's a sign that they are having a huge amount of trouble with some of these same social ills. In eastern Europe, I have heard that society is suffering from very high levels of alcoholism - if true, it is yet another place suffering from social ills.

No matter where we go, we are exposed to tests and difficulties. We can't run from them, nor can we go any place to have "good tests".

All that said, I strongly agree that it is important to live in other cultures and environments. It helps our children develop compassion, empathy, a sense of world citizenship, etc. But I would recommend the same to a family in India: leave your culture for a time and go to a very different culture. The problem is, not everyone can do this. Not everyone can afford the travel. Not everyone lives in a country it is easy to leave. Our countries in North America actually make it quite hard for people to visit either for a short or an extended period of time.

So I don't think it is strictly necessary to travel to gain this world-encompassing vision, nor to expose our children to hardship.