Be good, we say, don’t be selfish. Take care of others, we say, don’t be selfish. Follow my directions, we say, don’t be selfish.
We teach our children not to be selfish. We do not realize that teaching children out of selfishness causes lasting harm to them. In turning children into ‘“teacher’s pet” or “mama’s boy,” we rob them of an essential foundation of well being, which is a capacity to recognize and defend one’s needs.
Children are naturally selfish. Infants are born with the capacity to recognize, articulate and defend their needs. They need to do that in order to call attention from the world, to be fed and changed, to establish their physical roots in this world. Like infants know how to seek support for physical grounding, children know how to seek support for emotional grounding. They accept themselves and their desires and seek our support in navigating through that terrain. Parents hardly lead their infants and toddler, they follow their kids. And all goes well because children are naturally selfish. At the end, most parents, to their own surprise, manage to keep their kids hearty and healthy.
Nature has endowed a healthy level of selfishness in children. However, we see this selfishness as a defect. We often end up denying them opportunity to exercise their judgements towards meeting their needs. In our rush to make them into compliant adults, we teach them out of this healthy level of selfishness. We do not leave space for life and nature to gradually ripen them into adulthood.
What would happen, you know, if we let children grow up naturally? Would their selfishness grow or diminish? Don’t children start sharing their toys with people they life? Don’t teenagers start sharing their feelings with friends they feel understood by? Don’t adults marry people that they trust? It is natural for people to grow out of selfishness if their life affords them such contexts. As parents, we can invest in creating such contexts rather than banning their selfishness. If we ban selfishness, children grow in adults who do not know how to be natural, who do not know how to preserve, who are unable to know what makes them happy.
Frederick Douglass said that “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” But there is a possibility that we break children when we force them to be prematurely strong; by undermining children’s natural rhymes and rhythms, we raise broken men; by force feeding children to be adult-like, we raise broken men; by continuing the cycle of disciplining children so that they don’t turn out defective (like their parents), we continue the cycle of raising broken men. And as broken men, on one hand we struggle to accept ourselves and on the other hand, struggle to accept our children (with their selfishness). May be we learn to be selfish first, from our children, before we teach them how to be selfless!
In conclusion, let us stop raising martyrs, in varying degree. Then, we would not have to teach self-love, self-acceptance to their adult-versions.
