A Facebook friend of mine recently posted the following quote:
Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?
Jane Nelson
I was curious about this statement. What I infer from her quote is that someone, somewhere believes humiliating people, and treating them unfairly is a formula for positive results. On the contrary, neither of these two behaviors seem to lend to a positive outcome. How someone would come to believe that others actually do this intentionally is confusing to me.
“Did you feeli like cooperating or doing better?” No, I would not feel like cooperating or doing better. I would feel like going somewhere else, where there are other people who aren’t manipulative, using humiliation to attempt to mold someone into what they want them to be, rather than what they were designed to be.
I’m making an assumption, but I believe that this quote is in reference to overcoming failure, which is a huge sore spot for me, when it comes to raising children, of which I have none. I do have common sense, however.
If we protect our children from failure, they will not learn to survive on their own. When they enter the real world, they will soon discover how much they have been trained to behave like a victim when things don’t go “fairly” for them.
If, we push our children into failure, and we intentionally humiliate them, then we are doing as much damage as if we were to allow them not to fail by manufacturing “fair” environments.
One of the most recent examples of “fair” that I can think of was a story of a neighborhood easter egg hunt. A few kids found most of the eggs, some of the kids found some of the eggs, and a large group of kids found nothing. A parent who protested managed to convince the rest of the neighborhood parents to take all of the eggs from all of the children and divide them evenly amongst each other.
For those children who failed to collect any eggs, what lesson have we taught them? Isn’t it more detrimental to their future to falsely impress upon them that it’s impossible to be knocked off the proverbial “horse” in life? Don’t we want them to understand “getting right back on that horse?”
If a child puts his or herself in a situation which requires hard work to achieve a goal, such as joining a soccer team, or being part of a choir, let them experience failure, so the next time they try, when they work harder to achieve their goal, and they succeed at what they previously failed at, their achievement will be sweeter, and will build self-confidence. Let them try and let them fail. But don’t force them to fail, and do all of it in love.
Her response answered my question, but the way she hesitated before offering the answer confused me. Why was that such a difficult question to answer? It took me a good minute to realize that the question I had asked made absolutely no sense. It didn’t make sense to her, and it didn’t make sense to me. But, she was able to answer it regardless.
