Maybe your children are very young and the prospect of them going off into the world and being independent of you seems a far away dream. Your children are a part of your life and don’t have a life of their own so dependent are they on your inputs. You help them understand the world based on your understanding. Your views, your filtering of what they see, your nurturing and disciplining shapes their very understanding of reality. You’ve already taught them to count and the names of the colors, how fundamental is your impact? It can’t be understated.
There is a conversation your child will have some day, you can absolutely count on it, where your child will represent to a friend their views of the “how things are”. This perspective held by your child will be believed to the core. He or she will believe with complete certainty that those thoughts and beliefs coming out of their mouth originated with them. Yet, if you were a fly on the wall, you’d recognize them one by one. You could probably even recall the instance that you explained this idea or that. Yes, this collage of ideas, perspectives, optimism, open-mindedness, logic, emotion, and view of the world will have a distinctive family mark. You’ve poured into them all that you are and they will somehow assemble the pieces into a masterwork of art. It’s truly amazing.
A recent exchange our daughter had with another young lady also in her twenties was such a conversation. Now, you may think that some conversation your child has 25 years from now is too distant to focus on. But it’s a conversation like this that sets the mindset along the way. What should you be working towards as your child grows through their late single digits and enters their teen years? It’s their mental state that they articulate to others, because that mindset expresses their view of reality.
This young lady our daughter was talking with is black. She’s from Italy living in Sweden where our daughter lives. She was living with a white family. She had, from her perspective, experienced racism and was very upset about it. This family had made rude comments, poor jokes about culture, and made her feel unwelcome. Now, what should our daughter’s reaction be? How should she respond to this hurt? Think about the countless high school conversations your daughter will have where some perceived wrong will come up, how do you want her to react? Can’t you just see the piling on by friends wanting to show solidarity and emotional support? Is that the way it’s supposed to be? The aggrieved party then sits in their justification of being the victim, their mind spinning on the hurt, and the gap widening between the parties. Isn’t that the norm? Wouldn’t you want your family to instead take the higher ground?
Our daughter wanted to show support, not for this young lady’s current state of mind, but instead a higher, future state of mind where she sees past the hurt and seeks a reconciling perspective. She affirmed her emotional state and yet asked her to view the encounter with the possibility that skin color played no role. Maybe the family was just awkward and immature. Didn’t they know she was black when they invited her to live with them in the first place? Yes. So maybe it wasn’t racism, but just a misunderstanding. Didn’t the young lady run the risk of viewing the world as hostile when it might not be? Certainly there are racists in the world, but every negative encounter doesn’t mean that there was racist intent behind it, our daughter said. Shouldn’t she give them the benefit of the doubt? And maybe, and this would take a bit of strength, shouldn’t she give the offending family the opportunity to explain themselves and see her views? Wouldn’t that close the gap a little and lead to reconciliation?
Your child will see the world based on their current state of maturity. Your job is to continually present a family perspective that seeks reconciliation and understanding despite our human ways. There will be hurts, many hurts, where your child has been seemingly wronged, middle school is a petri dish for this. This is a learning ground to teach your child to suspend their feelings of being victimized by some person or some event and instead seek the higher ground. Not just in providing forgiveness, but in understanding an alternative perspective that allows true forgiveness and reconciliation. Then, armored with this more mature way of looking at life, they go back into the fray of their world to practice this latest version of family values.
And this is how your family culture becomes ingrained in your child, conversation after conversation. As your child confronts increasingly complex social situations guided by the principles of your long-forgotten instructions, they will own the mindset seeking higher ground to bring people together.
To your higher family mindset,
Lis and Dave Marr