By: LISA BELKIN
Source: New York Times
When the Harvard psychology lecturer Richard Weissbourd last wrote for Motherlode he got many of you thinking, in new ways, about whether today’s parents spend a little too much time prodding their children into discussions about feelings.
Today he is back to question another assumption. Is “self-esteem” (aka “happiness”) the legitimate goal of parenting? Dr. Weissbourd, author of “The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development,” thinks not.
MORALITY, HAPPINESS AND SELF ESTEEM
By Richard Weissbourd
Is it healthy for modern parents to be focused on their children’s self-esteem? The New York Times columnist David Brooks doesn’t think so. In a column, Mr. Brooks wonders whether our culture’s intoxication with self-esteem and being “special” is eroding our ability to be good citizens.
Mr. Brooks is right to wonder.
Around 2005 a team of graduate students and I began conducting research into students’ values and the child-raising priorities of their parents. We questioned parents and students from a wide range of cultures and classes, primarily in five high schools. Our findings suggest that modern parents’ intense focus on children’s happiness and self-esteem doesn’t just affect citizenship. It may imperil something far more fundamental: our children’s basic morality.
Our research showed that many children these days see “being a happy person” as their number-one goal in life – and many parents make their children’s happiness their top child-raising priority. About two-thirds of children considered happiness more important than “being a good person who cares about others,” and about two-thirds of children believed that it was more important to their parents that they were happy than that they were good.
The degree to which parents and children are prioritizing happiness over goodness is troubling. But parents and children are not simply happiness heathens — they care about goodness. In fact, many parents and children believe that positive feelings and high self-esteem will lead to caring more about others.
The idea that self-esteem leads to goodness has been integral to the self-esteem movement. Talk shows, parent advice books and columnists have been bombarding parents with the message for decades that children feeling good about themselves will lead to “being good.” It’s like the oxygen mask instructions the flight attendant gives you: Fill yourself up first, and then help your neighbor.
Think about how radical a change this is. After all, adults in previous generations didn’t think that morality came from self-esteem or happiness. They commonly believed the idea, rooted in the Bible and much of Western literature, that morality came from suffering. Moral character came from making sacrifices, fulfilling difficult obligations, empathizing with the pain and burdens of others, and surviving hard times.
But could modern parents be right? Do happiness and self-esteem lead to goodness and morality? Happiness or self-esteem, to be sure, can enable certain kinds of goodness. We can all recall times when feeling good made us more generous with others. Self-esteem can also make it easier to stand for important principles in the face of disapproval.
But consider this. Positive moods can just as easily lead to arrogance and harm. Contentment infamously breeds indifference. Studies show that gang leaders, delinquents, violent criminals and bullies often have high self-esteem. Self-esteem can come from feeling powerful, and people can feel very powerful when they’re dominating or demeaning others.
And the kicker is that all this focus on children’s happiness and self-esteem isn’t making children happier. The legendary lengths parents go to protect their children from adversity — making sure their children are always on winning teams, swooping in to resolve minor peer conflicts, indulging trivial complaints — often rob children of the coping skills that are key to their long-term well-being.
When we prioritize our children’s moment-to-moment happiness over their attention to others, we also rob children of the skills they need to be good friends, romantic partners, colleagues, parents, and grandparents. Yet these gratifying relationships are commonly the strongest and most durable sources of happiness. Instead, children often become preoccupied with their own feelings and less able to tune in to or organize themselves around others.
In all sorts of subtle ways we can prioritize happiness over attention to others. Too many of us, for example, don’t push our children to fulfill obligations that might distress them. We interviewed parents who debated whether their daughter, a junior in high school, should be allowed to quit the soccer team. The mother said she should quit because she wasn’t having fun. The father said she shouldn’t quit because playing would be important for her college resume. But neither parent asked whether she had any responsibility to the team. How many of us remind our children that they have obligations to their schools, neighborhoods, dance groups or chess clubs?
Too many of us let our kids simply write off peers they find annoying, or be cold to our friends, or fail to thank the bus driver, or dominate conversations with other kids or adults. When my kids were young, I often didn’t require them to write thank you notes, return phone calls from friends or give other kids credit for their achievements.
When it comes to developing our children’s morality, there are no shortcuts or bargains. We can’t expect morality to magically spring from self-esteem. We need to intentionally cultivate it in our children day to day.
We not only need to keep in check the subtle ways we prioritize happiness, we also need to explicitly emphasize goodness. We can push children to care about others even when it’s not comfortable. Rather than telling our children that the most important thing is that they are happy, we can tell them the most important thing is that they are kind. As the novelist Henry James put it: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.”
What could matter most, though, is a fundamental shift in the goal of our child raising. Rather than making happiness the goal, what if we focused on our children’s maturity? Maturity includes managing destructive feelings such as envy, arrogance and anger, taking others’ perspectives and balancing our needs with those of others. It includes the ability to be self-observing and self-critical and to respond effectively to constructive feedback. These capacities help us to appreciate others despite conflicting interests, to care for others effectively and to live by important principles. These capacities enable us to be productive at work and to develop sturdy, meaningful relationships.
We ought to focus on cultivating these skills in children because they will be happier. But more importantly, we ought to nurture these qualities in our kids to help them become strong, caring adults, able to create a better and more just world.