The Parents We Mean To Be

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Our well-meaning actions can often blow up in our face. In this helpful and insightful book, Harvard child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd exposes some of the ways well-intentioned parents undermine their children's moral and emotional development.

Though we must see our teenagers as they really are - adolescents who derive self-meaning largely from their peers - parents must not abandon their desire to raise a principled child. Just because adolescence is a distinct developmental stage, teenagers should not be treated as if they are from another planet. "It's a high-wire act, but we as adults need to be able to hold in our heads two seemingly contradictory ideas, an essential irony about teens--that they are at the same time peer-dependent and developing high inner standards" (31).

Parents must seek to understand their teenager's unique developmental stage, while at the same time, insisting on high standards and important principles. This may result in some heated exchanges, but parents must be willing to endure their child's anger for the good of the child:

When parents are unwilling to withstand their children's anger in the service of promoting a valued moral quality in their child, they fail to communicate many critical messages: that there are higher values than being well-liked; that their children are capable of withstanding their disapproval; and that they themselves, the people their child is supposed to idealize and internalize, are capable of withstanding anger and disdain. (31)

While recognizing the power and importance of peers,

adults must engage teens in developing principles and moral commitments that are larger than the approval or disapproval of their peers and larger than themselves. For it is these commitments that not only make adolescents less vulnerable to their peers but that can become in adulthood the foundation of a moral identity and the bedrock of the self. (34)

Our children need a stronger foundation than self-interest and peer approval. We need to help our children nurture and develop their moral commitments. This is what it used to mean to "believe in yourself": "believing in yourself used to mean believing in your principles; now it means believing in and advancing your innermost desires" (34).

Our children need causes higher than the self in order to become mature adults.

But in shifting attention to the needs of the self, we have left our children in a troubling predicament. Our children are being pushed to stand up for themselves when the self by itself is a flimsy thing to stand up for. Rather than focusing narrowly on the dangers of peer pressure, adults should ask themselves whether they are helping children find causes and commitments that are larger than the self that are worth sacrificing for... It could be... an ideal worth sacrificing for such as a commitment to end an injustice; a religious commitment to caring for or taking responsibility for others; or just a kind of inner pact to be kind, generous, altruistic. Any of these alone or in combination may give children enough of a sense of self outside their peer group to perhaps at critical moments stop worshiping at the altar of popularity and hold their ground. And this capacity is vital both to children's morality and to their psychological health.  (34-35)

Weissbourd argues that we must reclaim the ancient idea that goodness and virtue are the keys to the development of happiness. Our self-centered culture has reversed this order. It holds that happiness is the key to virtue. In other words, we must be happy first, and then virtue follows. This is the oxygen-mask version of life: Get your mask on first, fill yourself up, then help your neighbor.

There is a problem in reversing the ancient order:

Yet while it's one thing to say that positive moods can create generosity, it is clearly quite another to view happiness or self-esteem as a long-term foundation for morality. It's important to pause and consider how unique this belief is--that many parents are conveying that happiness or self-esteem leads to morality appears to be unprecedented in American history and may be unprecedented in the history of humankind. (44)

High self-esteem is no guarantee of moral virtue:

Similarly, while there are certainly problems in conceptualizing and measuring self-esteem, numerous studies reach a similar conclusion: self-esteem, typically defined as a favorable evaluation of oneself, neither deters violence, drug use, and other moral problems, nor does it spark moral conduct. On the contrary, studies show that gang leaders, playground bullies, violent criminals, and delinquents often have high self-esteem and that their high opinion of themselves can make them care not one whit what their victims think. Self-esteem can come in part from feeling powerful. And gang leaders and playground bullies--or high school athletes who abuse their girlfriends--can feel very powerful controlling and degrading others. (46)

Though it is true that goodness and virtue are the keys to the development of happiness, we must not make the mistake of assuming that the good life is always the happy life:

Yet while it's too simple and misdirected to say that happiness will lead to goodness, it's also too simple--and can be harmful--to say that goodness will lead to happiness. Good people can clearly be miserable. Standing up for important principles or for friends, for example, may bring painful ostracism. To expect morality to make us happy, to tell children to be good because it will make them feel good, is to violate a core element of morality--our obligations to others for their own sake, our responsibility to do what's right whether or not it's helpful or harmful to us. While we ought, then, to tell our children that certain kinds of goodness can be rewarding, we should not tell them to be good or moral simply because it will make them happy. We should tell our children to be moral because it is moral, because it is vital to our collective good, and because the well-being of others is as important as their own. (47)

We are our child's parents, teachers, and mentors. For the good of our children, these roles must come first. Tragically, some parents want to be their child's friend first. This well-intentioned desire has negative consequences:

Parents who idealize their children or who want to be their children's friends can disrupt the process of idealization in several ways. It's clearly much harder for children to idealize us when we engage them as "equals," ... when we fail to represent our authority. Children have no incentive to become like us--because the message we're giving is that they already are--and the world can simply be frightening to children who don't think we have more moral wisdom or authority than they do. (91)

Our children need us to be parents, teachers, and mentors. This is not always easy. Often we find ourselves walking a tightrope. Often we find ourselves the object of anger. But we must be willing to endure immature and childish responses. We must not "believe that the best way to shore up [our] children's happiness and self-esteem is not only to shield them from suffering but to cater to their every need and to remove from their lives even tiny burdens" (49).

We must be parents, teachers, and mentors for our children's sake. For parenting is not about us feeling good, but about our children becoming good, principled, moral adults.

Quotes excerpted from The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development by Richard Weissbourd

© Richard J. Vincent, 2009