Do your kids walk through a store and “have to have” every cool thing they see? If allowed, would they eat candy until they were sick to their stomach? Do they often feel jealous of the new shoes, bike, toy or game their friends have? If so, they may not yet have learned the important skill of satisfaction.
Sadly, not only do many kids struggle with the skill of satisfaction, I know lots of adults (including me!) who still haven’t mastered this. When we have a weakness in our skill of knowing what satisfies it makes us easy prey to the new, cool, pleasurable or tasty thing that comes across our path and leaves us feeling only temporary enjoyment rather than lasting satisfaction.
Learning what satisfies is one of the childhood tasks of maturity (see Living from the Heart Jesus Gave You and the series Growing a More Human Community to learn more about maturity). For children this is usually learned through small things in their daily lives like their food, clothes, games and play. Experimenting in these areas helps them identify what is truly satisfying as opposed to what is temporarily pleasurable.
Knowing what is truly satisfying has been a struggle for me. For much of my life I have been running on the fuel of fear rather than the fuel of desire and joy (doing things because of the fear of what will happen if I don’t rather than doing them out of desire and joy). When functioning on the fuel of fear it is challenging to slow down and notice whether or not something is satisfying because everything is done out of necessity rather than desire.
Unfortunately we cannot pass skills on to our children that we don’t have ourselves, so this has been a weakness in our boys since it has been such a struggle for me. Thankfully this is a skill we can work on together as a family so our boys can grow even as we ourselves are growing.
Satisfaction is learned through noticing the small things. Jim Wilder says in Volume Two of his book series Growing a More Human Community, page 77, “We learn satisfaction from things like which salad dressing is most satisfying? What shirt is most satisfying at a special event? What time is it most satisfying to get up or go to bed? Which friends are most satisfying? Of all the things today, what was the most and least satisfying?”.
As we recognized how helpful it would be to strengthen this skill for our family, we started taking intentional steps to notice and share what brings us satisfaction. In some ways satisfaction can feel counterintuitive. Something can be pleasurable, like eating a whole gallon of ice cream, but the resulting stomach ache is not satisfying. On the other hand, something can be hard but the results can be satisfying, like training for a sport or cleaning our room. Once we were clear on what we mean by “satisfying” we started sharing over dinner things that were satisfying from our day. We’ve added variations over time like sharing something that was hard but satisfying or pleasurable but not satisfying. Sometimes we share the top two most satisfying and least satisfying things from our day.
Learning to notice whether or not the outcome is satisfying has helped all of us to find joy in hard things and resist pleasurable things that don’t truly satisfy us. As we continue to better grasp what is truly satisfying we can better act in ways that reflect what we are learning. This has been very timely as our boys are transitioning into the Adult Stage of maturity and we are giving them more indepence to make decisions for themselves. Having the grid of satisfaction and taking time to reflect as a family is preparing them to make decisions they can be pleased with in the long run rather than just choosing what feels good in the moment.
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