A CHILD WHO MEASURES HIS SELF-WORTH
THROUGH GRADES, POPULARITY, AND EVEN
HIS POSITION ON THE LITTLE LEAGUE TEAM
WILL CARRY THAT INTO ADULTHOOD, AND
HIS ENTIRE LIFE WILL BE COLORED BY
SKEWED, FEAR-DRIVEN VALUES.
“Of all base passions, fear is the most accursed.” Shakespeare uttered those immortal words, and I couldn’t agree more. There are few emotions that exert the debilitating influence of fear, yet children today seem to live in constant fear—so much so that fear seems to be a congenital condition for them. They are afraid of family discord. They are afraid of not being beautiful enough, handsome enough, or popular enough. They are afraid of poor grades, afraid of not being picked for the team, and even, in some cases, afraid of life itself.
To compound matters, we teach our children to be afraid: of strangers, of the unknown, of the future. And we make them afraid by example: “An F! My God, aren’t you ashamed of yourself!” Well, I hope not. To be afraid of an F is far worse than the grade itself: It teaches the child to fear failure.
A parent’s job is to help the child confront his fears, whatever they may be, not to reinforce them through word and deed. When you threaten a child for questionable behavior, for example, you are teaching him to fear your wrath, and if he addresses the behavior at all it is only because he fears the consequences. On the other hand, when you discuss that behavior, without threats, you are conditioning him to address it in an environment that is free of menace. He will find his way because you helped him find his way, not because he was terrorized into doing so.
The goal of these conversations is to inspire the child understand his fears, and thereby to master them. Fear robs us of vitality and humanity. Children who live in fear become less adventurous, less truthful, less alive. Fear is like a dark cloud that blocks out the sunlight. The goal is to live fearlessly, with caution, not to live with so much caution that you live in fear. Fear is a hysterical response to an imagined threat; caution is a calculated response to a real danger.
You might say, “But I want my child to be afraid of that creepy guy in the raincoat, lurking by the school yard!” And I’ll say, “You’re wrong. You want your child to be cautious enough to know that he needs to look out for that creepy guy in the raincoat, not to fear him. If he fears him, he will be afraid to act if anything happens. If he doesn’t fear him, he will speak out and make himself heard.”
I tell my kids, “You can never allow a fear to conquer you, because you’re bigger than any fear, you’re stronger, truly indomitable—nothing can defeat you in life. The only time anything can defeat you is if you become afraid of it.”
Often a child will come to you with a fear that seems unimportant, and the temptation is to dismiss it out of hand. But what the child is really telling you is that he feels alone. Fear speaks to existential angst, even if the child is unaware of it. He wants to know that the world makes sense, that he has some power, that he is not as alone as he feels, and to dismiss his fear as unfounded is unhelpful in the extreme.
When my son Mendy came home that day to tell me that the other boys didn’t want to play football with him, we talked about it at length because I knew how alone it made him feel. It later became the basis of a dinner table conversation about popularity, and about the pitfalls of giving other people the key to your self-esteem. “You must never let someone else decide whether you have value as a person,” I told my kids. “Only you have the power to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you give someone the power to make you feel good, you’re giving them the power to make you feel bad, too. If they invite you to their house for the weekend, you’re happy. If they don’t, you’re sad. Why should they have that kind of power over you? In your zeal to be liked, to be popular, you are looking to them for approval. And while all of us want to be liked, we have to ask ourselves, At what price?”
Grades, popular opinion, style, fashion, looks—all of these can turn into sources of fear, if we let them. A child must learn to be the arbiter of his own value. To let others judge us is to live in fear, and to live in fear is to become diminished. Fear makes us recoil from the world. Fear begets fear and gives rise to new and ever-stronger fears.
One of my favorite fear stories concerns George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Eve, 1776. I often share that incredible story with my kids: “Here was a man who had been humiliated in battle. In the space of a few months, his troops had been reduced to a ragtag army of defeated men chased out of New York, many of them stumbling around with no shoes. People were saying that Washington was the worst general ever, that he was afraid and incompetent, and had he listened to them he might have come to believe that he really was incompetent, that he really was afraid. But he decided not to listen. He listened to his own inner voice. Instead of listening to other people—Love the jacket!/Your hairstyle is way cool!/You’re really brave, dude!—he listened to himself, the one person who really counted, and he devised the most daring plan of his military career. He took his utterly demoralized soldiers, most of whom were starving and woefully underdressed, and on Christmas Eve, 1776, a bitterly cold night, led them across the frozen river in unstable boats and attacked the British forces in Trenton.”
The story of Washington’s crossing is a truly incredible story, and it’s really the only reason we’re Americans today. That was the single most important victory in the Revolutionary War. The colonists had lost hope. But George Washington was fearless—he refused to let himself be defined by anyone else.
I always remind my children: “Despite everything Washington had suffered, despite every setback, despite everything people said about him, he still wasn’t afraid, he still didn’t believe the British were stronger than he was. He still believed in his ability to stand up and fight. And it was his faith in himself, and in his personal leadership, and in the righteousness of his cause, that changed the course of history. Not what other people said; not what other people told him to think or feel about himself; not the thing she was expected to be afraid of. No. Not at all. The reason America is a country today is due to the invincibility and fearlessness of one man. One man. One action. One night. It came down to that.”
Children don’t fight battles, of course, but on a daily basis they struggle with skirmishes of their own. For example, all young girls go through phases of feeling plain and unattractive, and, as girls, they feel instinctively that they are being judged first and foremost for their beauty. You can’t ignore this seminal, contemporary fear. You have to confront it head on.
Tell them, “When you believe you’re beautiful, you are beautiful. When you believe you’re attractive, you become attractive. Not in some shallow way, but in the deepest possible way. The whole of you is attractive: your character, your personality, your looks. It all melds into one powerful package. And I’m telling you that you are beautiful. I know you think I’m biased because I’m your father, but you’re wrong. I know you better than anyone in the world—I know you inside and out. And you are genuinely beautiful.”
I have often told my kids about Cyrano de Bergerac, a truly beautiful man with a big nose. His problem was not that he was ugly, but that he thought he was ugly, so he behaved as such, and as a result he was afraid to speak to Roxanne. He believed he was unattractive, and he never allowed himself to see that he was beautiful in ways that were much larger than his nose. That fear colored his entire life.
I tell my children, “Whatever you’re afraid of, whatever you think you’re afraid of, you need to know that you are bigger and more powerful than this thing. To believe otherwise is to let fear through the door.”
In my opinion, most of our fears are rooted in the feeling that we don’t really matter. A child is unable to express this, of course, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it. A child can be overwhelmed by the oppressive vastness of the universe and by a sense of his own insignificance, even if he can’t put that feeling into words. For him, the feeling usually manifests itself as a terrible loneliness: Nobody cares about me. I’m alone in the world. If anything happened to me, life would go on and no one would even miss me.
This fear—that our lives count for nothing—is not the exclusive domain of children. We carry the feeling into adulthood, and it becomes increasingly complex. Nothing is ever enough—cars, houses, money—but we continue to use those things to measure our value as human beings. That is why it is so important to address a child’s fears, because this is the time to effect changes. Never let your child feel that his grade, or his position on the team, determines his value—it feeds his fear. Tell him, “Good or bad grades no more determine your value as a person than the cool kid who thinks he is the arbiter of popularity.” The fear of not measuring up only exacerbates the feeling that we don’t really matter, especially if we peg it to things like academics or athletic performance.
“As Rabbi Yitz Greenberg once noted, every human being is born with three inherent virtues,” I tell my children. “One, uniqueness: There’s no one on earth like you, which makes you profoundly worthy. Two, equality: No one is better than you; we are all equally God’s children. And three, infinite value: Every human being is of incalculable worth—and that goes double for you guys.”
A child’s fear of insignificance is understandable—the world is a scary, uncertain place—but we mustn’t let it take root. Fear renders us inanimate. It freezes us into inaction. It strips us of our dignity. Like the nose on Cyrano’s face, it has the power to stop us in our tracks. That is why fear—all fear—must be addressed. A child who measures his self-worth through grades, popularity, and even his position on the Little League team will carry those skewed values into adulthood, and his entire life will be colored by the fear that he doesn’t matter. Nothing will ever be enough because he measures himself through the fear-driven values he learned as a child.
As far as I’m concerned, there is only one legitimate fear, and that is the fear of God. If you cross that line, you’re crossing the moral threshold—you’re flirting with wickedness and inhumanity.
I tell my children, “The only thing you need to fear is that you will betray God’s moral code. If you take God’s commandments to heart, and you live by those commandments, you have absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
“That is why they’re there. To live your life according to the Ten Commandments is to live a life that’s free of fear.”