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Four months ago, when an accident left my son Logan as an above-the-knee amputee, his life, and ours, changed in a single night.
He was 22 years old with his whole life ahead of him.
However, Logan has not let the loss of his leg stop him. And we are learning how much we, as abled bodied people, take for granted. But Logan’s life won’t be less than.
We made an investment as parents that he has since grown in value and is using to create his future. He’s creating opportunities.
That’s resilience. The ability to not only bounce back, but bounce beyond to a better future.
Instead of dwelling on limitations, Logan is looking for avenues to lead him into a new future. He has gone kayaking with local Paralympian, Corbin Hart who competed in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics and is off to the Worlds. Corbin’s achievements have Logan setting his sights on the Paralympics.
Logan had completed over 100 skydiving jumps prior to his accident. Skydiving has unique challenges which are exasperated as an amputee. So Logan has connected with an American prosthetic designer and developer. Knowing he can’t be the only one looking for life without limits, it could be that they design a leg together.
I don’t believe resilience is a lottery. I think it’s a savings account. You invest into, save for when it’s needed, and it will grow in value. There is no way we could have known the challenges our son would be facing. But we were determined to do our part to equip our children as best we could for those times when life doesn’t go their way.
We decided not to remove problems, pave the paths or smooth out the lumps for our kids. The reality is, life isn’t fair. As parents, it’s our job to help our children not only see this, but empower them with the skills and tools to overcome the obstacles, challenges and injustice they will inevitably encounter.
For us this meant allowing challenges to be experienced. When the kids made the team, but sat on the bench game after game, we didn’t talk to the coach. We talked to our kids. Encouraged them to work harder. Practice more.
When they got the ‘mean’ teacher at school, we didn’t write to the school and have them moved. We talked to our kids about prejudging people and learning to deal with different personalities.
When they made choices and we knew it was going to go sideways, we let the chips fall where they may. If the consequences weren’t going to cause physical/permanent harm, we would allow the moment to be life education. As parents, we agreed it was better for our kids to learn some lessons early on, when the consequences were relatively small by comparison.
Maybe Logan’s aspirations will come to fruition or maybe he’ll find another path completely. Whichever happens, we know if he is able to bounce back as well as he has, in such a short time, he is sure to bounce even further forward in the future.
Investing in resilience • Teach them that life isn’t fair. Share stories from your own experiences. • Embrace the mistakes – this allows for learning. • Build strong emotional connection with you kids and help them to unpack what is going on to ensure they don’t learn the wrong lessons. • Encourage healthy risk taking. • Resist the urge to fix it. Ask questions instead. • Deliberately hunt out the good in their life and help them to do the same. Gratitude journals are great for this, or it can be a daily dinner table/car ride conversation. • Model resilience in your own life.
