Too Much Comfort

Today’s parents work so hard in order to surround their kids with luxuries they themselves never knew of in their own youth. They have been taught by the modern educational system that personality is a creature of the environment. And so they try to pamper their children with commodious freedoms and comfortable conditions, so that the little ones may develop fully. Inadvertently, these parents are making life so easy for their young.

Material provisions are good to give to children – but up to a limit. Parental love means so much more, including a hand that strokes and a hand that strikes. Giving too much comfort and convenience can deflect the growing child’s attention from the secret of living fully. Young people might be expecting to find life, to pick it up, and go on their way. It doesn’t go that way.

One never finds life; he creates it. So much so, parents cannot live life in behalf of their children. Often the best teacher a person can have is a difficult environment to awaken the courageous drive and endurance of his half-awake soul. With a steady string of adversity and discomfort, one develops personal strength.

Mankind has been continually waging, generation after generation across the centuries, a fight between free indulgence and self-control, between immorality and decency, between faith in God and total reliance on ourselves. A person who has been raised in frills and comforts without having to earn it will develop a bloated self-concept – feeling that he can do whatever he wants, that he is the center of the universe.

On the other hand, such person will so easily trip off at the uncertainties of life – because life is a territory he has not substantially explored. And so, as he goes on his own, he is plagued with insecurities – intellectually, emotionally, and even economically, because he has not learned the art of equitable exchange; after all, he has only been on the receiving end all along. 

He is likely to get dazzled by constant change, and dreadfully suspicious of other people. His experience of life may seem fleeting, because his faith is founded on man-made technologies that are constantly being upgraded. And his anxieties spiral up further as his belief in a God blurs away.

As this person finds himself in a bewildering situation, his now ageing parents realize their child-rearing slip. They should have exposed their dear child to some hardship and pain. It would have taught the child to value poise, balance, level-headedness, good sense and moral strength. These qualities are investments that traverse existences, valuable in the here-and-now as well as in the hereafter.

This kind of person is not hard to find nowadays. We are seeing a world that is increasingly becoming so willing to exchange its moral convictions for little comforts and conveniences, the very things that many were raised in. We are forgetting that there is something deeper about us than these cravings for transitory delights.

All religions preach that faith in God does contribute to strength of character, that it enables man to stand up under things that otherwise would astound him or crush him.

It is important for young children to be taught to hold on to humanity’s collective spiritual heritage – and be constantly reminded that this physical existence is just mere clothing to our true identity. Believing in God is the one true comfort – it can make all the worldly woes that overwhelm us now seem light.