Richard Hogan: We have to teach our kids to embrace change

If they manage big changes, they will feel powerful

We have to learn how to manage ourselves in relation to all this change we go through. Picture: Moya Nolan

Life is change. You are never one thing for too long. The moment you are comfortable in the sun, a leaf falls. Aging can be tricky, watching the mutated damage of time slowly creeping on your face. Waiting for the sleep mark to disappear, only to realise it’s a new line. Ah vanity! You’re a cruel mistress. Because if looks are your only value, how do you feel as you age? Nothing positive. 

So much of the marketing industry is designed around warding off the signs of aging. So much of it is attempting to sell the lie that you can stop change from occurring. But the only certainty we have is change. Our bodies change, our relationships change, even our relationship with ourselves changes. So we should be able to manage life transitions, because all we really have is change. The second law of thermodynamics states that the more we move forward the more likely it is we move towards entropy, destruction. That’s perhaps the change we fear the most. But it is ahead of us all. So, as I said, life is change. And yet, we fear it, or at the very least, we resist it more than most aspects of life.

Something I have come to understand about change, in all the therapeutic conversations I have had over the years, is that people don’t exactly fear change, they fear what might be lost in change. Organisations and systems are constantly changing, and people have to cope with all that disruption to how they used to do things. That can be challenging, as we like to know how things will operate. There is a comfort in being able to predict how things will be. But that never lasts for long. 

Currently AI is the big disrupter, promising to change how we think about work forever. How we educate our children to prepare them for this new world has to change too. Universities will have to change the product they offer students. The world we send our children out into, is constantly changing, it’s never the same place. So, we have to help our children take control of the fact that life is change. We are now in August. In three weeks, many students across the country will enter into secondary school. That is one of the biggest changes they will go through in their young life. 

Last year, I lived this experience with my eldest daughter. I have been giving parents tips for years on how to help their child navigate life transitions. As I said, people fear what will be lost in change, but as a parent, you can teach your child not to be fearful but open to all of the bounty that is going to come into their life. One of the most successful tips for managing this movement from primary to secondary school is increasing your child’s network of friends. Children often only have one or two very good friends and they come to rely on them for all social experiences. This can be a recipe for catastrophe because that one good friend, in my experience working with teenagers, can profoundly let them down by joining a new group that they are left out of. I often hear teenagers describe the loneliness of having their lunch in the toilet because they don’t want to be seen on their own ‘like a loser’. So, getting them involved in local groups, with peers who are going into their school that September will significantly reduce the chances of your child being isolated or fearful. 

I watched this play out with my own daughter last year. Having been involved with hockey, Scouts and cricket, I heard her excitement going into a new school with all these new friends she had made over the summer. I also listened as she described ruptures in peer relationships over the academic year. But she wasn’t overly impacted by it, because she had different friendship groups to bounce in and out of. That makes children bulletproof. Exclusion is the most devastating weapon teenage girls use to hurt each other. It can be world shattering for a teenager to be pushed outside their friendship group. Their entire makeup is designed to be connected to each other. 

Regions in the brain associated with peer-reinforcement are most sensitive at this period of maturation, so they feel that exclusion like a physical hurt. It can be a hurt that lasts a lifetime, as they come to believe they were rejected because there is something unlikeable in them. That can be a brutal voice to live with. But the more friends your child has the less likely it is they will be excluded. But also when they have managed a change like this, they will feel powerful. They will know they have the capacity to change, and that is such an important life lesson for children.

This world is a constantly changing place. We have to learn how to manage ourselves in relation to all this change we go through. If we pay attention to it, we don’t resist it and we grow. If we really pay attention, we thrive.