Parents, You Are Not Enough
Why our kids need tradition, heroes, standards, expectations, judgment, and a concerted effort to help them become “a certain kind of person.”
Hello Bar-Setters!
A few Sundays ago my wife and I caught our six-year-old son in a lie. Nothing grand, just a typical six-year-old lie. He claimed he’d brushed his teeth when he hadn’t. Still, it was the third or fourth lie we’d caught him in that week, so I wanted to make an impression.
I grabbed our copy of The Children’s Book of Virtues and had Ace sit down with me. We read the story of George Washington chopping down his father’s cherry tree and then we talked about it. We talked about how proud Washington’s father had been that young George had told the truth and how he said his son’s honesty was “…worth more than a thousand cherry trees.”
Then we turned to The Boy Who Cried Wolf. We read the story and then talked about it. We talked about how when you lie people stop trusting you—how you can’t have good friendships without trust and how it feels when people lie to you.
It didn’t matter that the cherry tree story isn’t true or that wolves aren’t much of a threat nowadays. Now, Ace has a concrete framework to think about honesty, truth, and lies. He has a positive model associated with honesty and a negative one associated with lies. This is the virtue of a moral tradition, and it is essential to the development of our children.
Morality is About More Than Just “Being Good”
Giving your children clear virtues, heroes, and ideals provides an essential compass to help them navigate our complex world. As the brilliant C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man:
No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.
But more than just helping us to behave better, having a clear moral framework is essential to our ability to connect with others and to find meaning in our lives.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, the phenomenal social-psychologist, Dr. Jonathan Haidt, explains why having a common set of virtues and values is so important to our mental wellbeing. As he explains:
Asking children to grow virtues… looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking them each to invent their own language. Even if they could do it, the resulting isolation would be crippling.
Haidt argues that we rely on a common set of ideals in order to connect with other people. He points to the work of Emile Durkheim, the father of sociology, to make his case:
Durkheim, the sociologist who found that freedom from social ties is correlated with suicide, also gave us the word anomie (normlessness). Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value. In an anomic society, people can do as they please, but without any clear standards… it is harder for people to find anything they want to do (bolding is mine). Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety, and leads to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior. Modern sociological research strongly supports Durkheim: one of the best predictors of the health of an American neighborhood is the degree to which adults respond to the misdeeds of other people’s children, rather than look the other way. When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his or her own business, there is freedom and anomie (bolding is mine).
Standards are essential. They direct people towards more fruitful behaviors, they rally society to support those behaviors, and they provide the conditions from which meaning can grow.
A Certain Kind of Person
Over the last year I’ve talked a lot about why standards and expectations matter and why they matter now more than ever. There has been a radical devolution in our communities and community standards. This coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of temptations and their ability to create addictions. I’ll summarize our predicament like this:
Stronger and More Abundant Temptations
+ Fewer Standards
= Human Devolution, Anomie, and Meaninglessness
Since we aren’t in a position to reduce the strength or abundance of temptations, standards are where we should put our attention.
I’ve argued that our issues with schools, parenting norms, and the culture at large all stem from a lack of clarity about the type of person that we want to help create.
There is little sense that we are trying to create an adult, or even what that means. Consequently, many adolescents don’t want to grow up or become anything, in particular. They’d rather stay insulated and comfortable. As Robert Henderson wrote:
Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who stated that “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys.” Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age.
It’s backwards. Rather than aspire to become something, adults aspire to fit in with the younger generation. We lack a compelling ideal. We need to explicitly define the type of person that we want our children to become:
…someone honest, persistent, reliable, hardworking, and fun-loving…
…someone who brings energy and zest to their interactions and creates a sense of possibility among the people they work with…
…someone who isn’t limited by fears and plagued by compulsions…
…someone who knows who they are and what they stand for, and who is willing to sacrifice for a larger mission…
But it has to be more vivid and tangible than just that…
Most cultures, throughout human history, have been very intentional about creating a certain type of person.
They’ve had a clear sense of the character that defined their group along with clear heroes, milestones, and benchmarks which supported that ideal archetype. The chief focus of every successful society has been to inculcate the next generation in a particular tradition with a particular set of values, behaviors, and capabilities.
Past societies had to have this vision, because their citizens had to cultivate certain skills and dispositions… otherwise the village would not survive.
So, What Happened?
Starting around 1973, the clarity of the “certain kind of person” that we wanted our children to become began to wither considerably in American society. There were many contributing causes, but they all shared a common root: technological development.
We no longer needed humans to be capable of filling the types of roles that they always had before. In fact, we could continue to expect improvements in our already unparalleled standard of living without needing the majority of citizens to achieve any sort of baseline competency. The rapid increase of technological progress and daily conveniences would continue even without the efforts of most citizens.
And so, once-basic standards of conduct and capacity fell away (things like holding doors for others, being a knowledgeable voter, or the ability to climb to the top of a rope in P.E.), because these were no longer necessities for the success of a community and its way of life.
Technological progress has freed us to focus even more on our own desires without ever having to consider the vast web of infrastructure that we depend upon each day. We’re able to pull more from our society than any people in history, while also having less recognition for how impossibly abundant our lifestyles are, how unique our civilization, and how much we owe to the giants who came before us.
Technological progress has freed us from terribly high infant mortality rates and a number of awful diseases. It allows us to see the world and talk to people a world away. But that progress has come with unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, obesity, and lifestyle related illness. It has led to a devolution in the human spirit and it has made it harder for humans to meet their most fundamental spiritual needs, most notably, connection and competency.
As Sebastian Junger explains in his book Tribe:
“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.”
Adapting Better
This is about meaning and the fundamental building blocks that make meaning possible.
We need standards, expectations, and values that guide our judgments. These give us the ability find purpose and to navigate a world of impossibly boundless temptations.
Instant gratification is more available to us than ever, but more than comfort or pleasure, what we need is meaning, community, and earned self-respect.
If anything, the pace of technological innovation and the potential for human unnecessariness has only increased. I don’t foresee a scenario where we will rekindle a common national ideal which captures the type of character, capacity, and sense of duty that we should expect of our citizens. But I do think such an ideal is necessary for our kids to grow up with a sense of self-worth and purpose. I think our kids need this in order to live a good life and in order to be fulfilled.
My vision going forward is to be a bit more prescriptive…
…to point to specific duties, expectations, milestones, hero’s, books, etc. This effort might be called “re-norming.” I’m in the process of codifying all of this and I’ll be releasing it as I go. I’d love any and all feedback that can help me improve this project.
But before I can do that, I need to finish clarifying the ideal—the “certain type of person” that can serve as our lodestar.
This “certain type of person” is the model which will direct our parenting efforts and inspire our children to aspire towards more.
That will be my focus next Tuesday, when I, finally, introduce my vision of the Fire-Carrier.
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Carry the fire!
Shane