Healthy fuel starts from a very young age. Parents can fuel in one of two ways: dirty fuel, which is criticism or social comparison - something a very tired parent might do to reach a short-term goal, like study for a Spanish quiz.īut, over time, dirty fuel is going to clog that kid’s engine, and they’re going to burn out or they’re going to stop reaching, because they can’t reach higher for fear of failure, which will then be an indictment of their worth. It propelled them with a kind of healthy fuel. What these kids got to enjoy was a healthy level of self-worth that was not tied to success or failures. Home was a haven from the “never-enoughness” in our culture. Their mattering was never contingent on their performance, and their parents hammered that point home to them as much as they could. The kids who were thriving knew that they mattered for who they were at their core. I came across a psychological construct called “mattering.” Mattering was conceptualized in the 1980s by Morris Rosenberg, who brought us self-esteem. I wanted to know what life was like for them. I went in search of the kids who were thriving despite the pressures. We’re doing our best with the knowledge that we have. We’re raising kids in a world that has fewer and fewer social safety nets, and parents are tasked with creating those individual safety nets for each of their kids. We are doing it because a parent’s task is to raise a child who will survive and thrive in their adulthood when we are no longer around to support and guide them, and we’re fearful of the adulthood they’re entering because of very massive changes. We are becoming, in the words of researcher Tom Curran at the London School of Economics, “social conduits”: passing these anxieties onto our kids to prepare them for a more fearful and uncertain future. There’s an enormous amount of stress and anxiety in the air, whether parents are aware of it or not, and we are absorbing these macro-economic forces. We don’t know what jobs will be when our kids are out of college 10, 15, 20 years from now. Now, we’re seeing the first generation of students who most likely will not do as well as their parents.
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