Kindness and collectivism

One thing I spend a bit of time thinking about, is how the idea of collectivism cultivated at home.

Looking at my son move from infant to toddler, his ego cracking from its nascent shell, I am often amazed at how demanding it is.

What scares me though, is that he enters a society says, those with the dominant ego, who aim to achieve most, win.

So much of modern society is built for the individual ego. From the gutting of civil services over the past four decades in the name of liberalism. To the rise of influencers, who cultivate an image of self that ignores cares little for the impact it has on others.

To succeed in this environment, we are left scrap for any crumbs we find as we climb the capitalist hill. This is not a society that cares, rather, it’s a society where the ego seeks to succeed at any cost, even if that cost is society itself (see Donald Trump for this taken to excess).

Everything that’s occurred in the last decade, for me, is a reminder of how we need to encourage collective will and kindness in society. To patch up our broken fabric, and care for all our parts.

The article, Stop Trying to Raise Successful Kids, raises an interesting thought, society’s obsession on individual success is making the society at large, less successful. And by that taken, we as individual are lesser for it.

Today, parents and teachers are rightly investing more time and energy in nurturing confidence and leadership in girls. Unfortunately, there isn’t the same momentum around developing generosity and helpfulness in boys. The result is less attention to caring across the board. Kids, with their sensitive antennae, pick up on all this. They see their peers being celebrated primarily for the grades they get and the goals they score, not for the generosity they show. They see adults marking their achievements without paying as much attention to their character.

As a parent, what I particularly like about this article, is by changing the conversation, we can help our children understand understand that caring helps all of us.

To demonstrate that caring is a core value, we realized that we needed to give it comparable attention. We started by changing our questions. At our family dinners, we now ask our children what they did to help others. At first, “I forget” was the default reply. But after a while, they started giving more thoughtful answers. “I shared my snack with a friend who didn’t have one,” for example, or “I helped a classmate understand a question she got wrong on a quiz.” They had begun actively looking for opportunities to be helpful, and acting upon them.