Patience is educated with patience
Educating requires a maximum degree of patience, a masterful art that comes from knowing what to do in each moment, giving or not to yield, compromise or demand. Do not lose your nerves or calm, although things do not go well the first time, it is the best way to educate children. But how to do it? With patience, a virtue that requires great doses of tenderness.
The world of education in the family is currently characterized by the pursuit of happiness of our children, without stopping to measure the means to achieve it. That happiness we usually interpret as getting them a environment without contradictions, without great efforts, without personal sacrifices and all wrapped up in a hope to enjoy life to the full, without limits, without regrets.
In many cases, children they avoid contact with pain and suffering, both personal and foreign, with the intention of facilitating the search for happiness. Sometimes, we even disguise reality to take them by the hand for a life of color, sweetened in all its dimensions as long as they are fully happy.
However, time passes, children grow up and when they have grown older, they are not always ready to faceand and successfully overcome the challenges and difficulties that arise in life. Parents must provide our children with the tools that allow them to face and strengthen themselves in the face of difficulties, acquiring alone the resources to overcome obstacles and turn limitations into opportunities thanks to effort, personal sacrifice and detachment.
Getting happy children to be, tomorrow, happy adults is born of our own strength. Adults have the obligation to provide our children with these tools, those life strategies that make them a fighters, winners who complete their goals with the joy that produces the success achieved after a hard, hard, tired, full work of complications. Everything, from the base of patience.
Do we remember what Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance are? They are not just virtues that we learned as children and that are almost forgotten. Are those qualities of the human being that allow you to achieve that happiness that we intend to dress, but really, seriously, deep, substantial; those qualities that make us happy because they make us free.
And, like any virtue, it is not reached in two days. It needs facts that we convert into good routines that, as such, end up becoming part of our essence, our way of being, our character. And this only requires two pillars that settle our day to day: will and patience.
The precise will of clear objectives, an adequate demand, learning to overcome obstacles, a lot of desire for personal improvement and patience, a lot of patience. "Ability to suffer or endure something without being disturbed, ability to do heavy or meticulous things, the ability to know how to wait when something is desired", that is patience.
Lourdes Giner. Teacher and coordinator of Primary in the Orvalle School (Madrid)
