Building resilience (in plants and kids)

Spending a lot of time in the sun does funny things to a girl. Take Saturday, for instance. I decided that it was time to stop talking about doing useful things in my vegie patch and actually do them. So Mr3 and I pulled on our wellie boots - as an aside, mine are new, brown with tweed and very stylish (imagine horsey, but without the horse) - and set forth with small spades in hand.

First, we attacked the cauliflowers. And when I say attacked, I mean hauled those suckers out of there. They were all leaf, no cauli. Not even a flower. I'd given them three months. Dumped. Mr3 had a fabulous time digging them out, keeping strictly to the right-hand side of the shallots, as instructed. Meanwhile, I weeded, and weeded, and weeded. Turn your back on a vegie patch for five minutes and the invasion begins.

Later, as I weeded my way through the large garden bed under the camphor laurel, I found myself thinking a little too hard about weeds. About who decided what was a weed and what wasn't. How the weeds always seemed to do better than the nurtured, composted, hot-housed wimps that we'd actually planted. How if we'd just gone with the weeds in the first place I wouldn't be out here in the blazing sun, fork in hand.

To give you an idea of how tired I was, my thoughts went from weeding to parenting. To the hands-on, nurturing, enriching, hot-housing style of parenting that is in vogue at present. Much is written about resilience these days - mostly about how children these days don't have any. They are not left to fend for themselves enough. They are not thrown into situations where they must problem-solve and survive.

I wrote a story a little while ago for happychild.com.au (you can read it here) and received some good advice from child psychologist and author Andrew Fuller. "Kids are pretty resilient as long as we don't muck them up by trying to solve every problem for them," he says.

I'm not a natural 'free range' parent. My tendency to overthink everything has every step of my children's day thought out three or four steps ahead. The Builder is an excellent foil to that. He's not a worrier. He's a thinker, a planner, a perfectionist, but not a worrier. He can walk ahead of the boys at the beach, not looking behind, knowing that they'll be okay. I have to walk behind them. Warning them not to go to deep, not to stray too far, not to... have fun.

I worry that I worry too much. I worry that Mr6 worries too much. He's probably worried that I'm worried. Mr3 is too busy going to parties with Alla Hoo Hoo to worry about much at all.

As I worried away at the weeds in my garden, cutting them off in their prime, it occurred to me that there's strength in adversity. Which is not to say that I won't be encouraging the growth of my prize specimens. But I might water a little less, mulch a little more, and spend a little less time in the sun.

No worries.

{image: Pete Dungey}