An interesting perspective from The Atlantic, describing roads paved with good parental intentions.
“Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. “But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.” It’s precisely this goal, though, that many modern parents focus on obsessively—only to see it backfire. Observing this phenomenon, my colleagues and I began to wonder: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?
Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA who came to speak at my clinic, says the answer may be yes. Based on what he sees in his practice, Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.
Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains, this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later in life. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves. If, on the other hand, the child trips on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second beforegoing over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second, but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own—but parents never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she doesn’t need protection.
Which made me think, of course, of my own sprints across the sand the second my toddler would fall. And of the time when he was 4 and a friend of mine died of cancer and I considered … not telling him! After all, he didn’t even know she’d been sick (once, commenting on her head scarves, he’d asked me if she was an Orthodox Jew, and like a wuss, I said no, she just really likes scarves). I knew he might notice that we didn’t see her anymore, but all of the parenting listservs I consulted said that hearing about a parent’s death would be too scary for a child, and that, without lying (because God forbid that we enlightened, attuned parents ever lie to our children), I should sugarcoat it in all these ways that I knew would never withstand my preschooler’s onslaught of cross-examining
whys.
In the end, I told my son the truth. He asked a lot of questions, but he did not faint from the shock. If anything, according to Bohn, my trusting him to handle the news probably made him more trusting of me, and ultimately more emotionally secure. By telling him, I was communicating that I believed he could tolerate sadness and anxiety, and that I was here to help him through it. Not telling him would have sent a very different message: that I didn’t feel he could handle discomfort. And that’s a message many of us send our kids in subtle ways every day.
This seems really relevant in two ways. First, it illustrates a concept that can be very difficult for parents of children who already experience more than their fair share of anxiety, fear, frustration, and other so-called negative emotions: our goal is not to ensure that children always feel happy, rather, our goal is to help children to feel safe, confident, and loved across the full range of human emotions.
It’s true that one of our first steps in supporting children with processing and praxis challenges is to join them in their ideas, sharing the burden of problem solving and scaffolding their success. These children need the deck to be stacked the deck and the scales to to tipped in their favor in order to bolster their sense of self-efficacy and agency in the world. However, as those underlying capacities grow, so must our support. Often, the best way to do support a child’s confidence and self-efficacy is to convey implicit message that “We know you can do this!” by standing by, allowing them to struggle, and being available to celebrate their successes or mourn their shortcomings.
When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance. (All failures are reframed as “good tries.”) According to Twenge, indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But, she says, what starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of oneself—a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.
Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger, because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”
Perhaps the key here is to shift from support and feedback that bolsters the child’s self-esteem to support and feedback that builds a sense of self-efficacy; the differences in these concepts are subtle, but important. Where former is a measure of one’s overall worth and importance (“I’m smart!”), the latter is a measure of one’s feeling of competence and ability (“If I work hard, I can figure it out.”) The former is fragile, potentially shattered by adversity, but the latter is stable and resilient.
The other concept that the article eludes to is the importance of expanding the child’s capacity to share attention, not exclusively around their own experience and ideas, but also with the experiences and ideas of others. Again, the distinction between self-esteem and self-efficacy is relevant: self-esteem is a comparative measure to which another’s success may be perceived as a threat. Self-efficacy is far less fragile and is often bolstered by observing and learning from the success and skill of others.
In early adulthood, this becomes a big problem. “People who feel like they’re unusually special end up alienating those around them,” Twenge says. “They don’t know how to work on teams as well or deal with limits. They get into the workplace and expect to be stimulated all the time, because their worlds were so structured with activities. They don’t like being told by a boss that their work might need improvement, and they feel insecure if they don’t get a constant stream of praise. They grew up in a culture where everyone gets a trophy just for participating, which is ludicrous and makes no sense when you apply it to actual sports games or work performance. Who would watch an NBA game with no winners or losers? Should everyone get paid the same amount, or get promoted, when some people have superior performance? They grew up in a bubble, so they get out into the real world and they start to feel lost and helpless. Kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems. And they’re right—they don’t.”
Read the full article here.
