How do we grow humility in an age of grievance?
Questions we can ask our young people right now
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Unless you live under a rock (which, personally, sounds appealing most days), you are reading this while being well aware of the angry, violent discord in this country. Whether it is in our government, our college campuses, or in our town square, many of us feel like the temperature of our conversations and of our interactions, is too high.
To try and reframe this intensity, I had the honor of speaking with journalist and professor Frank Bruni, author of the new book The Age of Grievance, for this week’s episode of the Raising Good Humans Podcast.
I asked Frank how we can find balance between supporting our children when they disagree with us, and infusing their worldview with more nuance, with more understanding, and with more humility. This is the hard work that many of us are grappling with ourselves, let alone trying to model for our kids.
We are navigating a time when it feels like we need balance between being able to do the enormous good of identifying urgent moral changes, and understanding that everything cannot be so highly charged that we stop hearing; we stop listening; we stop talking; and we stop being able to have reasonable conversations with each other.
Dr. Aliza Pressman
So much of this work starts with us. Though we may do this in the service of raising our children, this is also about raising ourselves. We must find a way to change the tone of the conversation, to ask deeper questions, to help to expand our children’s lens on the world. If not for them, for the rest of our society and for our collective future.
It is so important that we get a hold on our extremism with grievances, and that we examine and tweak our own behavior. Not only because of what that will do in real time to the ability to solve problems, pass legislation, etc, but because children are watching us. They are taking cues from us; they are imitating us; and they are the future.
Frank Bruni
While we want to support our children in cultivating and expressing their own views, let’s acknowledge that young people are still in the process of cognitive and moral development. They need guidance from their parents to help them make sense of the complexities of the world, and understand the distinction between identifying and supporting an ideology, and engaging in hateful behavior that harms others. Human development doesn’t end at 18, or even 25, it’s an ongoing process of maturation throughout the lifespan.
If our children are seeing us react to our grievances, seeing us act in extremes, or feeling us fight against perceived injustices that are really just misunderstandings, or situations where there is subtlety and compromise, they are getting the loud and clear message that this type of behavior is acceptable to us. Our children may be learning that they are always “right,” or that their view is always the most important. Though we don’t mean to do this in the pursuit of helping and defending our children, we have to be careful about rescuing, instead of helping our children to work toward change in a more meaningful, understanding, and cooperative way.
If we are telling our children that anything that doesn't go the way they want it to in life is an insult, is an indignity, is a wrong that they should be angry about, we are setting them up for a lifetime of misery.
Frank Bruni
Beyond their physical needs, parents are also responsible for our children's moral development. It is a fine balance for parents to give our children independence, while recognizing that their moral development is still a work in progress. As adults, we need to shepherd young people into higher levels of more complex thinking. An important distinction exists between encouraging our children to find their voice and their identity, and helping them to understand ideology that spews hate toward others. We don’t need to agree with all of the ideology our children support, but we need open conversation between parents and kids - especially as they gain more independence, including when they're emerging adults.
How can you instill the values - whatever your individual family values or community values are, or whatever you're hoping to infuse into your household water - and also help your kids be critical thinkers, and maybe even disagree with you. How do you balance that?
Dr. Aliza Pressman
Frank Bruni suggests that the antidote to this “age of grievance” is humility. I love this view because it helps me to find hope, to find a path forward, and to get grounded in solutions. He suggests asking our children the following questions to get started:
When you are angry about something, are you intoxicated by that anger?
How much of the fury, or the intensity of your feelings, is steering you away from the actual merits of the situation?
Why do the people who disagree with you feel the way they do?
Where are the people who disagree with you coming from, and why is it that way?
Are you getting any closer to what you hope for, with what you are doing?
Are you (or we) demanding that the world conform or be tailored to our liking? Is that reasonable? Is that mature?
From here, we can begin to understand the thinking of our young people. We can start conversations around their passions, their causes, and their vitriol. We can stoke the important flames of activism, while also helping them to learn critical thinking, perspective taking, and yes, humility.
While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they're every bit as complex as we are, with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.
Frank Bruni, The Age of Grievance
As a final note, I want to share something that I think all of us can use TODAY. It is the opportunity to introduce the idea of grace, of forgiveness, of compassion, and of nuance into our conversations with others.
In the episode, we outline it this way:
First: Outline for your child that our brains are flawed mechanisms. “What we say and what we mean is not always a clean line.”
Next: Explain how the intensity of the stakes does not benefit them. “You don’t want the stakes of a poorly expressed thought, or a missed syllable to be so high. You want to be able to express yourself without the fear of being misunderstood and punished.”
Finally: Help them draw the line from themselves, to others. “You can’t make the stakes so high for others, either. That’s not grace, that’s not humility, and it isn’t going to help us get closer to change, or toward creating a better situation for anyone.”
There has to be a way to have certainty about our core values, and a capacity for openness and nuance with others.
Dr. Aliza Pressman
This is hard. This feels scary. This is possible. Let’s find hope in the opportunity. As Frank says, “Our march toward a more perfect union is a march through a lot of imperfection.”
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