“When you criticize a child, they don’t necessarily stop loving you, psychologists say; they stop loving themselves.”
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“Yet what I have learned in my research is that when we let kids skip out on chores or family events so they can study or practice for their soccer games, we support an overly self-focused outlook in them. It doesn’t just make them selfish and self-involved and a little hard to live with. Too much self-focus is unhealthy for them. It’s associated with clinical depression, personality disorders, and anxiety.”
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“Conditional regard” is the psychological term for parental affection that depends on a child meeting certain expectations, whether academic, athletic, or behavioral. Researchers distinguish between two types of conditional regard: positive, like when children feel their parents provide more warmth and affection than usual when expectations are met, and negative, when affection is withheld after expectations aren’t met. Psychologists have shown that conditional regard undermines a child’s self-esteem. Instead of figuring out who they really are, adolescents fixate on pleasing others.”
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“Choosing intrinsic values—like investing in friendships, neighbors, or volunteer groups—has been found to sustain our happiness and well-being in a way that pursuing extrinsic goals, like higher income or higher status in a career, doesn’t.”
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“Nurture parent-teacher relationships. When students feel that parents are talking negatively about their teacher, it undermines that critical relationship, akin to the acrimonious divorce of parents, notes Suniya Luthar. Students learn best from teachers they feel close to, and teachers play an essential role in buffering against achievement stress. Show respect and appreciation when you speak about or interact with their teachers. Actively build a partnership with educators so that a child can be best supported. “Replace” yourself. Consider creating your own council of parents. Value and appreciate the adults in your children’s lives. Guard that time so that they can enjoy a wider safety net of support. You might even make it formal, as some parents I interviewed did, by creating a master sheet of phone numbers and meeting together as a group. Encourage gratitude. Help children to get into the habit of telling others explicitly why they matter. You might adopt a regular gratitude practice at home, like “the one thing I love about the birthday person.” Teach kids how to think gratefully. Point out when someone goes out of their way to find a present for them, or when they do something kind that makes your child’s life better. Researchers find gratitude is the glue that binds relationships together.”
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“Since the 1980s, a growing body of research finds that mattering—the feeling that we are valued and add value to others—is key to positive mental health and to thriving in adolescence and beyond. “Mattering” offers a rich, almost intuitive framework for understanding the pressure assailing our kids—and how to protect them from it. It is as profound as it is practical. It doesn’t involve spending more money on tutors or coaches or adding another activity to an already overpacked schedule. Instead, it offers a radical new lens for how we as adults—parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors—see our kids and communicate to them about their worth, potential, and value to society.”
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“Make home a “mattering haven.” Parents can provide a child’s most significant source of mattering—or be the greatest source of contingent mattering, feeling like they matter only when they’re performing. Because our kids are bombarded with messages on the importance of achievement, home needs to be a safe place to land, a place where their mattering is never in question.”
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“When we talk about pressure, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, and loneliness in kids, what we are really talking about is an unmet need to feel valued unconditionally, away from the trophies, the acceptance letters, the likes, and the accolades. When we say that “pressure” is detrimental to children’s (and parents’) well-being, what we mean by “pressure” is a set of circumstances that cause our children to wrongfully perceive their value as contingent on achievement. When an adolescent believes they must sustain a certain level of success in order to earn their parents’ love and affection, they feel inadequate, and this interferes with a healthy, stable identity.”
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“Critical to the well-being of these high school students, Rosenberg found, was feeling valued: those who felt they mattered to their parents enjoyed higher self-esteem and lower rates of depression than peers who felt they mattered less. When you feel like you matter, you are secure in the knowledge that you have strong, meaningful connections and that you are not going through this life alone, explained Gordon Flett, a professor at York University in Toronto and a leading researcher on perfectionism and mattering. Mattering expresses the deep need we all have to feel seen, cared for, and understood by those around us, notes social psychologist Gregory Elliott of Brown University. Elliott describes the feeling of mattering this way: Do people take an interest in you and what you have to say?”
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“Normalize difficult feelings. From time to time, everyone feels envious or compares themselves to others. Explain to kids that we don’t have to judge ourselves for having these universal feelings, but we do have to hold ourselves accountable for how we act on them. Talk about the difference between healthy and unhealthy competition and give kids the tools to mine these competitive feelings, even when they are painful, for their own self-knowledge and success. Most of all, short-circuit feelings of envy by loving and accepting your child for who they are.”
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“A parent’s pressure might manifest as hypervigilance about a child’s grades, intrusive involvement in a child’s schedule, or excessive criticism of their failures. The parent-child bond is the most important relationship for a child’s mental health. When a child cannot meet a parent’s high expectations, that bond becomes jeopardized. Criticism feels like rejection, a loss of love.”
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“Lead with lunch. When kids walk through the door, instead of peppering them with performance-related questions (How’d you do on that test?), consider leading with “What did you have for lunch today?” This innocuous question opens children up and sends the subtle signal that we see them as more than a grade or performance. Don’t get discouraged if teens continue to give monosyllabic responses—push through and keep the lines of communication going.”
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“Do people depend on you and rely on you for guidance and help? As long as we live, this instinctual need to matter never changes. You’ve likely never heard about the specific framework of mattering, but you’ve surely felt it. Mattering occurs in life’s big moments, like being celebrated with heartfelt toasts by friends. It’s found in everyday moments, too, like when you’re sick and a friend brings over a pot of homemade soup. The feeling that hits you when you open the door is mattering, that you are deeply valued by your friend and worthy of love and support. When a teacher assigns a child a classroom chore like watering plants, that child feels like they matter, that they are counted on and capable of adding important value to their little world. Mattering has many layers. It begins with mattering to our parents and then extends outward to our community and the wider world. The more we feel valued, the more likely we are to add value, and the other way around—a virtuous cycle of interdependence that can continuously feed our sense of mattering, notes the community psychologist Isaac Prilleltensky. Mattering is what he describes as a “meta need,” or an umbrella”
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“One study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed data from almost fourteen thousand college students. What they found was alarming: empathy has been decreasing over the past thirty years, so much so that the college kids in their study measured 40 percent lower in empathy on tests of the trait than their counterparts just a few decades ago. The drop is so startling some researchers have even declared a “narcissism epidemic.”
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“In one study, researchers asked hundreds of middle school students to rank the values their parents prioritized. Half of the values centered on achievement, such as attending a good college, excelling academically, and having a successful career. The other half focused on character traits, such as being respectful, helpful, and kind. Adolescents who reported that their parents valued character traits as much as or more than their performance exhibited greater mental health, enjoyed higher levels of achievement, and engaged in less rule-breaking behavior than peers who believed their parents were primarily focused on how they were performing”
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“Tell failure stories. Live life out loud in front of your kids so they can see up close what the adults in their lives get wrong. When you make a mistake, consider modeling self-compassion out loud: Okay, I made a mistake and here’s what I learned. Now I must stop being so hard on myself. Everyone makes mistakes. I am human. I am not my mistakes.”
