Creating Room for Growth
For one week each summer, my kids and I go to what I like to call, “Mimi Camp.” My dad has done a great job making our house a fun place for a family of boys to go back to, and my Mom, armed with her years of raising kids as a fun stay at home mom and an elementary education background, ensures that our kids are well-occupied and having fun the entire time. I even get to read a little, too.
For the longest time in college and in my early twenties, coming home felt like I was transported back to being a kid, which can be a comforting feeling when you are yearning for a place to be found, and a contentious feeling when you realize you are growing out of your pot.
The internal tension I felt made me wonder what was wrong with me because my family was and is amazing!
However, I was becoming a person outside of my family of origin which can feel scary because you realize that some parts of you no longer fit how they did before.
At the beginning of every school year, I like to do a growth mindset/fixed mindset mini lesson, and I was shocked the first time I took the growth mindset quiz to realize that my mind was more fixed than I thought.
A fixed mindset feels safe, though, because when things are black and white and fit into neat little boxes, we know where we belong.
But when a variable is introduced that changes the shape of our box or the color of our worldview, it gets uncomfortable.
If you are paying attention, you are likely noticing growing pains within yourself and in the world around us, and right now it probably feels easy to reach for the boxes to categorize our world and ensure that we are safely settled into what we perceive as right.
The problem with the boxes is that we do not give ourselves room to outgrow the box, and we run the risk of teaching our kids that safety comes in the fixed mindset.
To create room to grow, we have to create space for our mindset to shift. We have to be OK with feeling tension. We have to be OK with having real conversations, face to face, and not just participating in the feedback loop that social media algorithms feed us. We have to intentionally put ourselves in positions with people who look differently than we do, talk differently than we do, and bring different experiences to the table.
If we can make our community diverse in appearance, thought, and lifestyle, we will find that we are creating a rich tapestry gives our children room to grow into beautiful thinkers.
This type of community can be messy and uncomfortable. But - where there is tension, there is growth.