The Parents We Mean To Be
Father of three child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Education. His new book ‘The Parents We Mean To Be’ argues that parents have a much greater influence on their children’s moral lives than peers or popular culture. Serving as a Scoutmaster involves a fair amount o exposure to many different styles of parenting and I believe that Weissbourd’s ideas form a solid approach. He discusses that preoccupation with achievement, superficial happiness and attempts to befriend our children often misdirect a parent’s attempt to develop moral, balanced, functioning human beings. I was drawn to his ideas because Scouting meets Weissbourd’s prescription for good parenting. His book is available at Amazon “What matters most as a parent is not whether my wife and I are ‘perfect’ role models or how much we talk about values, but the hundreds of ways – as living, breathing, imperfect human beings—we influence our children in the complex, messy relationships we have with them day to day.” “Many parents are narrowly focused on their children’s happiness and believe that happiness and self-esteem are at the root of morality. We may be the first generation of parents in history who hold that belief. We think that a child who feels good, and who feels good about herself, is more likely to be good. Historically, parents have thought that suffering, burdens, and sacrifices were an important basis of morality, that through suffering children learned empathy. But in many day-to-day ways, we as parents place our children’s happiness above their caring about others. We are too quick to let our kids write off friends they find annoying. We fail to insist that they return phone calls from friends, or give credit to other children for their achievements, or reach out to friendless children at the playground. Or we fail to interrupt our children when they talk too much when they’re around other kids or adults.” “Morality is comprised of many attributes—courage, honesty, kindness, a sense of justice, moral reasoning, etc.—and there are many different ways that adults can promote these qualities. We can model appropriate moral behavior, help our children register kindness and unkindness in the world around them, define clearly their responsibilities toward others, listen responsively to their moral dilemmas and questions, hold them to high moral standards, and develop in them from an early age the habit of attending to and caring about others. We can do much more to emphasize kindness rather than happiness—rather than telling our kids all the time that the most important thing is that they’re happy, it wouldn’t hurt to tell them that the most important thing is that they’re kind. But if I could give just one piece of advice to adults, it would be to focus not on children’s happiness or self-esteem but on their maturity . Maturity, including the ability to manage destructive feelings, to balance and coordinate our needs with those of others, to receive feedback constructively, to be reflective and self-critical—to fairly and generously assess our behavior is the basis of both morality and lasting well-being. It is these capacities that enable children and adults to appreciate others despite conflicts of interest and differences in perspective, to adhere to important principles and to engage in sturdy, meaningful relationships and endeavors that create lasting self-worth.” “Many of us have unacknowledged fears about our children not achieving at a high level. And because of these unrecognized fears, many of us are quietly organizing our children’s lives around achievement and sending inconsistent and hypocritical messages to our kids. The kids we interviewed talked about these hypocrisies. Kids would point out, for instance, that their parents would tell them they don’t care how much they achieve and then pay jaw-dropping amounts of money for SAT-prep courses. When parents tell teenagers to achieve at a high level so they “can have options,” teenagers sniff out that their parents are talking only about certain options—it’s not really okay for them to be beauticians or firefighters, for example. These hypocrisies undermine us as moral mentors. We should make achievement for our children one theme in the larger composition of a life, and we need to understand our own feelings better so we can have more authentic conversations with our children about their achievements.” “Yet the reality is that every stage of adult life can bring new moral strengths and weaknesses, and that these changes have profound consequences for children’s moral growth. “There is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else,” the civil rights leader Whitney Young said. “The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.” Parenting can spur either great moral growth or regression—think of the large number of fathers who abandon their children. We send a smug and false message to our children when we suggest that morality simply arrives with adulthood and that all they have to do is imitate our moral qualities and values. If we parents work at it, we can greatly increase our own capacity for fairness, caring, and idealism, and our developing morality will be deeply interwoven with our children’s developing morality.”