A story called "Emotional Training Helps Kids Fight Depression" aired this morning on National Public Radio. The story opens with an adult man talking about how he's lived with negative self-talk his whole life. After years of cognitive behavioral therapy, he finally replaced the self-flagellation with talk of, "I'll be able to do it better next time."
The interviewer moves to a class full of 10-year-old kids, where the teacher is trying to teach them emotional resilience skills so that they don't spend a lifetime telling themselves they're not good enough. Good enough for what? For whom? Why do we kill the joy in children so early? Programs like Smart-Girl try to mitigate the effects of this social training, but how much permanent change can we effect when the problem is so big? Why, as a society, are we stuck in this endless loop of unfulfilled unhappiness?
Sometimes (and I wish there were more of those times), I feel so connected to the universal consciousness that I float free, blissfully unshackled from the tape in my head. In those moments, I see and know and feel everything and am at peace with it all. The moments don't last long, but I know from conversations with others that I'm lucky to have them at all. Oh, to capture the complex path of neural connections that happens in those moments and be able to repeat them, on command. Maybe scientists should focus on THAT task instead of curing all of the diseases we develop because of stress and constant worry.
But I do my part by being involved with Smart-Girl, curtailing my own recording, and demonstrating for my mentee Consuelo that setbacks are temporary and not to be taken personally. We shall overcome.
2 comments:
I heard this story, too, and was fascinated by it. Experts are now saying that we are too kind to our children, leading them to believe that they are special no matter what they do or how they perform, i.e. giving them high praise for tasks just because they completed them, giving them ribbons for just participating in some sport even if their performance was not stellar, etc. I am confused by these conflicting studies. Should we encourage but not really, telling children they were good but could always be better? It's a wiggly world. The older I get, the less I feel I understand.
Good point. I'd err on the side of making my kid feel too good rather than bad. But in that story, they were saying that teaching your kid coping skills for when times are bad--and there will inevitably be bad times--is what's most important. Resilience gets you through.
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