F*ck Feelings (10 page)

If there's one responsibility that parents take seriously, more than making their kids wear helmets just to breathe or considering a full hazmat suit to be the only suitable protection against the sun, it's shielding their children's self-esteem.

You may not be able to teach a child math, baseball, or music, but you haven't really failed unless he or she comes out of childhood without good self-esteem. This overvaluation of self-esteem may be responsible for the ESE epidemic (see above), beginning with kids who actually believe they are the most perfectest special snowflakes who can be presidents of the universe and solve all the problems that exist with one smile from their precious, angel faces that were crafted by Jesus Himself in His heavenly garage/woodshop.

Unfortunately, your ability to control your child's self-esteem is even worse than your control over your own. You can provide lots of love, good nutrition, a functional parenting partnership, and reasonable schooling and security, and still not be able to protect her from having a rough time academically or socially or from just being a very nervous, perfectionistic, self-hating little weirdo.

It's scary to have kids, knowing how easily things can go wrong and how little your love can do to protect their self-esteem. We'd much rather watch movies about the redemptive powers of love, be they wielded by a parent or stern inner-city principal, to rescue a kid from misery and self-hate. Measuring your parenting effectiveness by your child's lack of self-esteem can make you feel like a failure, which will probably make you an ineffective parent, even if you were pretty good to begin with. But at least now you and your kid can bond over feeling like shit.

The domino theory of good self-esteem would lead you to believe that if you can help your child become competent in math, sports, etc., self-confidence will follow, which will help social skills, which will cause success, wealth, happiness, and amazingly good luck, which will make you feel successful after all. On the other hand, if anything gets in the way of one of these dominoes that happens to lie outside of your control, the last domino will never tip into success, leaving your mission as a parent forever unfulfilled.

We know why parents impose this global responsibility on themselves; it hurts to watch your kid feel like a loser and not be able to help. Nevertheless, it's part of the parenting job description for many unlucky parents. Sometimes, no matter how much you adore your kids, your love just doesn't get through and they don't like themselves. So your job, though it may sound heartless, is to do your best to build them up, remember you've done your best, and then go do something else. Otherwise, you'll burn out and do your kid and yourself harm, instead of surviving to help another day.

What makes parents most awesome, however, is not the power of love, as wonderful as that is. It's the power to love when love is doing no good, not take your kids' suffering personally, survive, and keep on loving. It's the loving parents of self-hating kids who are genuinely the most amazing, specialest snowflake parents of all.

Among the wishes people express when they want to protect their kids' self-esteem are:

• To figure out what's wrong

• To get through to their kids with their love and admiration

• To help her do better and/or get away from bad friends and drugs

• To find a treatment or therapist that will help

Here are three examples:

I know my fifteen-year-old daughter lies because she never wants to admit she hasn't done her homework, even though it's obvious she hasn't. Still, she lies every goddamned time, even though her lying gets her into tons of trouble, and then she feels awful when teachers who have tried to help her just give up and tell her she's let them down. I've punished her and I've been understanding, I go to meetings with the teachers and get her tutoring, but nothing works. My goal is to get her out of this cycle of doing poorly, lying, punishment, and feeling like a total failure.

My son has been a mess since his girlfriend dumped him a year ago when he was a high school sophomore, and we just can't get him out of it. He's seen a shrink, tried antidepressants, and nothing works. He
stopped going to school for a month but he's been going now; he just isn't able to learn very much and he won't answer the phone. I check with him to make sure he's not suicidal, but beyond that I don't know what to do. My goal is to help him recover.

Simply put, my daughter is big. My wife and I have tried everything to help her without making it worse—our house only has healthy food, we have her doing physical activities after school, we've talked to our pediatrician a million times—but even at her thinnest, she's still both heavier and taller than the other girls in her class, and the teasing has been terrible from boys and girls alike. She cries all the time and we're terrified that she's going to hit puberty and start cutting or starving herself. My goal, with my wife, is to protect her from bullying by helping her become less bully-able.

The best way to help your kid with his self-esteem is to help him limit his responsibilities, just as you must limit your own. This seems like anathema to many parents, who feel the only way to develop their kids' strengths and gifts is to load them so full of responsibilities and activities that they have to schedule pee breaks. Limiting responsibilities also seems overly permissive to parents and teachers who are trying to help kids manage inner monsters, outer peer pressure, or just hormones.

The fact is, however, that kids and adults often have limits to their self-control, and pushing responsibility across this limit breaks, not creates, confidence.

If you give yourself unlimited responsibility for your kid's happiness, you can never be successful, and the same applies to him. If he takes full responsibility for finishing his work well, controlling his behavior, being a good kid, being happy,
and
not being judged or bullied, he may well wind up hating himself for flaws or just situations he can't control, particularly considering how little it takes to mess up something on that list above.

Your mandate, to him as well as yourself, is to do as well as you can and certainly to recognize your flaws and work on them, but also to
understand that certain problems may not be solvable and that doesn't make you a failure. For kids in particular, certain problems that may not be solvable this year may be solvable in the future as their brains grow and mature. In any case, acknowledging limits is necessary for restricting the damage of caring too much about flaws and failures that can't be helped.

So don't look too hard for bad choices, either yours or his. Be careful to note the things he does well and the things you've done right as a parent. Don't assume he's unhappy or doing poorly because of something you didn't notice or didn't take care of. The only thing you may have done wrong is having unprotected sex with your spouse wherein the one wonky egg or gas-huffing sperm won the day, thus transmitting some difficult genes that are hard to live with.

Just because educators are there to help you on your quest to improve your child's self-esteem doesn't mean they don't share your sense of overresponsibility and thus the need to search for what and who's to blame for whatever's wrong. Meetings start out friendly, but then get tense as everybody finds faults in the other guy's performance. Don't go down that road or react to teachers who are caught up in that negative process.

The best way to team up with teachers, instead of being sucked into polarizing discussions about what should or could have happened, is to note what they're doing well for a problem that many people haven't been able to solve. Give them the same protection from blame as you do your child and yourself.

Of course, embrace reasonable responsibility for trying to control whatever you think
can
be controlled; there are rules for bad behavior that you can enforce with incentives, even if no one knows how your child will respond, and there are procedures you can follow to track homework and provide extra help. There are also procedures for setting limits on bad impulses and eating disorders. If they don't work, get advice and try something else. In any case, stop frequently to take pride in your efforts, your child's efforts, and the strengths you take for granted when he's doing well. For instance, notice what
your child does well in spite of obesity, not just what goes wrong because of it.

By recognizing your efforts as a parent, regardless of results, you can prevent frustration and helplessness from poisoning your parenting and your hope for your child's future. At least until he's eighteen, when the law says your kid and his self-esteem are no longer your responsibility.

Here's what you wish for and can't have:

• Power to shore up your child's confidence

• Confidence in your own ability to protect your child from depression and self-dislike

• Access to treatment resources that will do the above

• Knowledge that things won't go sour tomorrow

Here's what you can aim for and actually achieve:

• Get to be a pretty good parent

• Know what you can and can't do for most problems

• Get reasonable professional help and judge whether it's worthwhile

• Know when pretty good parenting and other help just aren't enough

• Keep up morale when nothing is working

Here's how you can do it:

• Through reading, watching others, and/or your experience with your parents, create standards for being a pretty good parent that don't depend on anyone's being happy

• Using the same methods, develop reasonable procedures for managing tough problems

• Accept the notion that kids can suffer lots of misery, including not liking themselves, even though everyone is doing their best to do their job, including your kid

• Always remember the good things you and others are doing, despite a bad situation

• Never assume that a lack of progress means that someone has failed to do what they could have and should have done

• Never assume that your child's lack of self-esteem is a personal failure or that it necessarily requires more work and attention on your part

Here's what to say to yourself or a worried third party who wonders why your kid is so unhappy and lacking in self-esteem.

Dear [Me/Relative/Teacher/Shrink/Angry Social Worker],

I share your concern about my child's [misery/bad grades/bad behavior/status as a human black cloud] and have for some time. I think my spouse and I and [insert list of professional helpers] have come up with some good ideas about how to help him/her, and some have worked, but not enough. Right now we're considering a new [psychotherapy/home-based care/change in meds/military school]. We see some positive signs, but it's still touch and go. We appreciate the good help we've received.

No matter what popular psychology tells you, don't pay too much attention to self-esteem, as nice as it is to have (and as often as the plea for you to like yourself comes with a pitch for a product to help you do just that). Develop your own objective methods for determining whether you or someone you care about is doing a good enough job and rely on the facts to tell you whether you should hold yourself responsible for whatever is going wrong. In almost every situation you can think of, there are commonsense procedures for defining a
good-enough effort and seeing how you measure up, given whatever it is you don't control. Then, regardless of whether your self-esteem is too low or too high, you can figure out how to make the best of bad situations, take pride in your effort, and have confidence in your ability to do the right thing. You can like what you do with your choices, even if you don't love yourself.

Seeking justice and valuing fairness are supposed to be ideals worth pursuing, especially if you believe books by politicians, movies starring guys in capes, and shows involving law and/or order (not limited to
Law & Order
). Unfortunately, while justice makes for a good motivation in fiction, it's a dangerous goal in real life.

Since movies, TV shows, and a politician's ramblings are mostly fantasy, they can get away with depicting a world that is fundamentally just. The world we actually live in, however, is basically unfair, so seeking justice can become an excuse for pursuing unattainable dreams while ignoring important but much less satisfying obligations, like getting to work, making a living, and doing all the boring stuff, like taking out the garbage and paying the cable bill, for which capes are totally unnecessary.

Admittedly, experiencing personal injustice leaves lasting scars and a strong desire not just for revenge but for that better fantasy world where unfair acts aren't allowed.

That's why the need for justice and fairness is not just a philosophical notion but a deep craving that easily blinds us to consequences and the existence of other priorities. We spend our leisure hours watching criminal things happen to innocent people, just because it satisfies a deep need to see the bad guys get identified, kicked, and permanently trussed in the end.

A willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of justice is what turns you into a crusader and martyr, caped or not, but the fact that most cartoon crusaders often wear masks, uniforms, and generic faces points to another side effect of justice lust: it erases your individuality. Whatever your responsibility to friends, family, parenting, and self-protection, pursuing justice rationalizes self-endangerment and thus imposes a lower priority on all the other things that make you you.