By Michel Hendricks
Have you ever been hungry, and intended to eat a little snack before dinner and ended up eating way too much and ruining your appetite? Have you ever gotten so obsessed by a sport or hobby that you ignored other important things? Have you ever been hooked on a substance or behavior to the point that it feels like you will die if you don’t give in to the craving? Welcome to the skill of knowing what satisfies!
As you hopefully read in Michael Sullivant’s previous blog article (Beyond Comfort – How Difficult Tasks Fuel Growth – Life Model Works), when we cross the line between being an infant to being a child (around age four), we are primed to learn how to take care of ourselves. We need to learn to do hard things and even endure suffering that brings long term benefit. One of the central skills we learn that enables us to take care of ourselves is knowing what truly satisfies.
There are a lot of things out there in our world that promise satisfaction but don’t deliver. For me as a young child, a bag full of Halloween candy promised eternal happiness. I enjoyed the candy for a while but eventually ended up feeling sick and not being able to sleep. That is a golden moment for parents to teach their children how to enjoy candy without getting sick. You are also teaching your child how to control his or her appetites in a way that is satisfying.
In college during my freshman year, it seemed like everyone wanted to drink as much alcohol as humanly possible. I joined in a few times but quickly learned my lesson. Alcohol can be enjoyable if we know how to listen when our bodies say stop. It is also perfectly fine to abstain entirely. Life is not hopeless or joyless without alcohol. I say this as a moderate drinker. When we don’t learn this lesson, we end up ruining our health, our relationships and get stuck in a pre-child maturity where we don’t know what satisfies.
Addictions are a catastrophic failure to reach adult maturity. More specifically, addictions are a failure to know what satisfies. For this reason, it is very important for parents to talk about satisfaction with their children. For parents, there is a time to let our children learn satisfaction by letting them fail. In appropriate situations, letting a child binge on something that later feels bad is a good teaching moment. You will bless your children by sharing your own stories of failing to recognize false promises of satisfaction in your own life. Share stories of when you recognized the time to stop doing something pleasurable and how thankful you were afterwards. Additionally, take your children through list of child skills found in the Life Model Maturity Pathway guide. Teaching our kids to recognize what satisfies sets them up for a healthy adulthood and greatly diminishes the allure of addictions.
Claudia and I decided to let our son, Elias, learn a lesson on satisfaction. We were flying home on a red eye flight from visiting family in Argentina. The plane left Buenos Aires at 11pm and flew all night. International flights offer a wide selection of movies. Normally, after several hours, I would tell the kids to turn off their screens and get some sleep. Our son was in middle school, so we decided to give him some freedom and see how he handled it. After a few hours I was getting sleepy, and before closing my eyes I looked back at Elias, and he was still watching movies. As I drifted to sleep, I wondered if he would recognize when it was time to turn off the screen.
I awoke with a stiff neck several hours later. I looked down the dark fuselage and my son’s face glowed with the reflection of the movie he was watching. Hmmm. Then I shifted positions and fell asleep again. I was awakened by the breakfast cart rolling up the aisle, and as I prepared for the meal, I glanced back to see my son watching his umpteenth movie.
We had a long layover in Maimi, and our son was a zombie. He couldn’t follow a conversation and didn’t enjoy the layover like he usually would. As we all walked to the gate of our next flight, I looked back and Elias was not with us. Claudia and the girls looked around and yelled his name. I saw a janitor’s closet nearby and opened the door and there was Elias! He was standing in a dark janitor’s closet, asleep on his feet.
It took us five minutes to stop laughing, so that was not the day to explain to him the lesson of satisfaction. We had several teaching moments later about what he learned on that flight. What a blessing it is to enjoy something for a while and then turn it off! This is a skill that many grown adults have never learned, so we must learn it ourselves so we can pass it on to others. If you are a single person, you are not off the hook. Now is the time to shore up these child relational skills so that you can operate in the fullness of your adulthood as God designed it.
Michel Hendricks is an author, coach, inventor, and trainer. He is the director of Life Model Consulting at Life Model Works.
