RULE 8

Your navel is not that interesting. Don’t spend your life gazing at it.

The British philosopher John Stuart Mill once observed that the best way to avoid being depressed is to avoid being self-absorbed. The only people who are happy, he wrote, are those “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

In other words, you won’t find happiness curled up with the lint in your navel. As Sommers and Satel have documented in great detail, America is besieged by “a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, work-shoppers, healers, and traumatologists” encouraging you to look for it there.48 But as absorbing as navel picking might be for the practitioners of the various kinds of kumbayaism, it rarely results in courageous or self-reliant adults

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At one time such groups as the Girl Scouts prepared young women for the challenges and rigors of life, but even the scouts seem to have succumbed to the cult of self-obsession. Lest young girls be ground under by the anxieties of pushing Caramel deLites and Reduced Fat Lemon Pastry Cremes, the Girl Scouts have unveiled the “Stress Less” badge, which is described as designed “to help girls cope with the pressure-cooker conditions confronting even young children today.”49

In this case they are talking about the “pressure-cooker conditions” of being eight or nine years old. The program is designed to bring the therapeutic advantages of foot massages, aromatherapy, deep-breathing exercises, worry stones, and stress squeeze balls to preadolescent girls.

All of this is supposedly more stress-relieving for eight-to-ten-year-olds than, say, swimming, hiking, or actually doing anything constructive at all. But that may be beside the point, since the “stress-reduction badge” seems less a counter measure against the wrenching pressure of fourth grade than the projection of the mommys’ own very adult, very particular anxieties. The nervous mom of an eleven-year-old confided, “My goal as a mom was to just lift the stress off her.”50 Note: Not to teach her how to cope with the stress, or to deal with it, or to work through it on her own. But to lift it off her. And what better way than to go to the spa! According to one newspaper account, one girl named Claire helped “earn” her stress-reduction merit badge by giving her mother a creamy avocado facial and a back rub.

Other merit-badge activities included “smoothing peach-scented lotion on her hands, keeping a journal of her happy and sad moments, meditating in a yoga position, burning an ocean-scented candle, dancing around the room to upbeat music and analyzing her daily schedule.”

Sure to come: the Spoiled Suburban Princess Merit Badge.

This obsession with feelings means that even opportunities for children to think about people other than themselves—for example, the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the aftermath—are turned into more occasions for navel gazing.

Lest children be tempted to focus too heavily on the courage of the heroes of that day—policemen, firefighters, rescue workers, and those inside the World Trade Center towers who tried to help the injured and disabled—one organization named the Families and Work Institute created a program encouraging children to ask, “What’s Special About Me?”51

Last year, as we watched the events of September 11th, one of the things most people felt very good about were all the people who helped in the rescue and recovery. We saw the police and the firemen, and we liked them because they were so brave. One of the things we don’t often pay much attention to, though, is liking ourselves.

And in case children might be tempted to think about what they owe other adults in their lives, the lesson continued:

We know that we like the police and firemen because they are there to help us when we are in trouble. We like our mother because she is so kind, or our big brother because he can fix things, or our grandmother because she is such a good cook and makes us the special things that we like to eat. But I bet most of you haven’t thought very much about the things you really like about yourself.

In the days after 9/11, “child-trauma experts” told New York’s public school teachers to “avoid clichés such as ‘Be strong’ and ‘You are doing so well.…’”52

But, as Sommers and Satel noted, “‘Be strong’ is a vital life lesson, not an insensitive cliché.”53