Do we have to suck it up?

On pain, pain management, and learning to make hard choices.

I caught up with a friend recently who asked if we were considering sending our kid back to school in order to give ourselves more time to work. We’re desperate for more work time but we haven’t really considered this option.

“Tell the kid to suck it up,” my friend suggested. “Isn’t that what kids are supposed to do?”

I understand this attitude, especially coming from a person who is old enough to not remember what sucking it up felt like in childhood, and also happens to not have kids, and has therefore never had to face the heart-shattering reality of a six-year-old’s deep anguish (deeper than deep, Mariana Trench deep), especially if that six-year-old happens to be someone you’d cut off your own head to save.

But also, respectfully, fuck sucking it up.

I spent a lot of time sucking it up as a kid, at least when it came to physical discomfort. I was raised by people who were deeply mistrustful of doctors. When I started getting my period, my mother was happy to let me take as many days off school as I needed, but she never handed me a pain killer for my debilitating cramps, because we never stocked any in the house. I don’t know how she would have reacted if I brought a bottle of Midol home, but at the age of twelve it did not occur to me to do so, and wouldn’t for some years to come.

When my impacted wisdom teeth had to be extracted, my parents didn’t give me any of the Tylenol #3s I was prescribed. Tylenol #3 contains codeine, and I understand why parents might be wary of introducing their teenager to opiates, but I don’t recall being given a couple of regular ol’ Advils instead, which might have helped reduce the inflammation in my gums. Instead, I ate through a straw for three weeks and waited patiently for the swelling to go down on its own.

My father worked for a pharmaceutical company in the ‘70s and was horrified by much of what he experienced (from the high-pressure tactics pharma reps used to get doctors to prescribe their products, to far worse). He is now in his 80s, and attributes the fact that he’s been generally healthy all his life to the fact that he never goes to the doctor, but isn’t willing to consider the possibility that he never has to go to the doctor because he’s been generally healthy all his life — a fairly standard bit of privilege-blindness.

For the past few months, I’ve had to visit the paediatric emergency room at my local hospital several times with my kid. Each time, I was relieved to learn that his ailments were not serious, but did require medical intervention, such as antibiotics for a bad ear infection or a case of strep throat, precisely the sort of thing that a trip to urgent care is good for.

Thumbs up and thumbs down with dad in the ER waiting area.

Once, when the kid’s mysterious symptoms mimicked Kawasaki disease, we spent a few hours in a private room, waiting for a paediatrician to review his bloodwork. She ultimately reassured us that while the ER docs were right to flag the possibility, his pristine results (and various other details that she, as a specialist, was able to pick up on) precluded any scary diagnosis. Phew.

I’m profoundly grateful to have this place in my neighbourhood — an emergency room just for kids, where the vibes are chill and the diagnostic services far exceed a regular walk-in clinic.

[PSA for my Ontarian readers: please vote in the upcoming provincial election. Our healthcare system is in many ways in crisis, but when it works, it’s a reminder that we are very, very, very lucky here, and should not allow our government to dismantle what we have. You know where I stand on Doug Ford, the only person my kid is allowed to call “stupid,” but y’know, vote with your conscience.]

Back to sucking it up.

I don’t blame my parents for the choices they made. They were doing their best to live their own values, and I respect that. I grew into an adult who dislikes pain but sees it as my body’s most reliable gauge of internal-okayness, and when it is artificially removed, I feel lost and scared that I’m masking an important alarm bell.

That means I kill only the pain I know well. I’ll take ibuprofen at the first hint of menstrual cramps or a headache, but I didn’t even consider pain relief¹ during the birth of my ten-pound baby because the thought of not “feeling my labour” freaked me out.

When my kid tells me that he’s in pain, or feeling really sick, I believe him. I don’t assume he’s faking it to get out of doing something, and I don’t assume he’s overreacting (though he is an absolute drama queeeeeeeeeeen in many ways).

I don’t mistrust doctors, and neither does my kid, which means I often let him take the lead on deciding whether to go to the hospital. He knows it involves a lot of waiting, some potentially uncomfortable tests or weird-tasting medicines. If he wants to go through all that, then I accept that it’s necessary. He’s generally correct in his self-assessments, and I never ask him to suck it up.

When it comes to emotional or mental pain, I have even less interest in forcing him to accept unnecessary hardship. Lord knows, I’ve stuck with relationships and jobs and other life situations well past their expiry date because I didn’t trust my gut about when to abandon ship. I want to help my kid develop his self-assessment abilities to include this too. I want him to trust himself, when it comes to judging whether something is worth sticking with.

Allowing a child some agency when it comes to avoiding the avoidable challenges feels like a no-brainer, when life is so full of unavoidable ones. Children don’t indiscriminately run from hard things, though many adults seem to assume they would, if given the opportunity. They can be remarkably good at making well-considered choices, when given the chance to practice. Our culture does not give them many such chances.

My kid has no choice but to learn how to cope with horrors big and small — from losing his grandmother, to losing the Science Centre, to losing a game of Fortnite when he was so close to a victory royale.

School can teach kids a lot of very good things, but when it starts to teach them to hate themselves and the world around them, it’s time to reassess whether the lessons being learned are good, or necessary. He spent a whole school year telling me that his school was not the right place for him, before I was able to listen. I won’t make the same mistake again. Hard pass on making him suck it up.

We can’t force our kids to adopt our values, but we can choose the level of hardship we want them to endure for the sake of those values, or for the (dubious) sake of learning life lessons. Right now, we’re continuing to choose a little more hardship (financial, and otherwise) for the grown-ups, and a little less for the young child. He still has to deal with his mother’s relentlessly cheerful insistence that we continue to practice our cursive writing at home, and perhaps that’s enough.

1. I am not immune to health privilege myself — I can only say that I “didn’t consider” a medicated birth because nothing went sideways, and I got to have my choice. As someone who was born by C-section myself, I know how often things don’t go as planned in the delivery room.