No One Wants to Raise a Little A--hole

Alfredo Jaar (Mahatma Grandi's "Seven Social Sins")

A little over a decade ago a study led by Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd found that 80 percent of US children believe their parents are more concerned with their grades and test scores than such things as kindness and compassion.

I don't imagine much has changed in the past decade. Recently, Pope Francis felt compelled to defend Jesus Christ's most famous speech, The Sermon on the Mount, because so many congregants, especially in the US, are objecting to its central message of forgiveness, generosity, humility, and peace as being too "woke." This week, on the day we've set aside to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr., we installed a President who, whatever you think of his politics, is a notoriously boastful bully. Many of his supporters say they see this as "strength."

Selfishness and self-interest are clearly ascendant in contemporary society. Perhaps it's always been this way. I mean, politicians and organized religion don't have a particularly clean track record when it comes to virtues, but it does seem, for better or worse, that we've stopped trying to hide it and our children have noticed. We can lecture them all we want. We can tell them stories of goodness. We can let them know how we expect them to behave, but at the end of the day, our counter messages of kindness and compassion, selflessness and humility, are being overwhelmed by the real world.

Or is it? Yes, it's a problem that children think their parents care more about school success than being kind to others. I imagine that had the Harvard study asked their parents, most of them would reply that kindness and compassion come before grades. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but having spoken to thousands of parents about their aspirations for their child, I've never met one who placed academic achievement over virtue. After all, no one wants to raise a little asshole.

There are those who believe that humans are essentially evil, of course, and that there is nothing we can do about any of this other than Skinnerian punishments and rewards. There are others who believe that we are essentially good, and that if parents/schools/society could just ensure that everyone is has their physiological needs met (e.g., food, clothing, shelter), are physically safe, and know that they are loved, then virtue will naturally emerge.

A 2007 study out of Yale found that infants and young as six months old possess an innate sense of morality, can distinguish right from wrong, and show a preference for good over bad. Subsequent research finds that children as young as 18 months will set aside their own pleasure in order to help strangers, even if no reward is offered for doing so. On the other hand, when resources are limited, when children find themselves arbitrarily divided into groups, or when they are explicitly taught that their needs are more important than the needs of others, they tend to behave in selfish ways, including bullying. In other words, children tend to behave according to the environment in which they find themselves. But they start on the side of virtue.

Competitive schooling and parents who focus on academic achievement obviously steer children toward selfishness. Children who are raised in a world in which the wealthy and powerful are raised onto pedestals, obviously learn the lessons of wealth and power. Children who see boastful bullies elevated to positions of power, understandably conclude that kindnesss and compassion are weakness.

As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind, "(T)o stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we're not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employee has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians."

To stand up for goodness is to invite cynicism and ridicule, but only from cynics and those whose power is threatened by goodness. As Bergman tells us, a British study finds that nearly 75 percent of us report that we identify more with "values such as helpfulness, honesty and justice than with wealth, status and power," yet almost the same percentage believe that others are more selfish than they actually are. In other words, it appears that we've been "taught" to assume the worst of one another. We've been taught that if we aren't selfish, we're losers. No wonder so many of us behave like little assholes.

It seems that young children are born knowing the opposite. It also seems that most of us grow into adulthood knowing the difference between right and wrong.

I'm taking a break from the news and am trying to manage my social media use in a way that allows me to focus on my friends, family, and the community of early childhood educators and parents who are attracted to the things Teacher Tom is up to. I'm reading more, especially fiction, which is known to increase empathy and compassion. I'm spending more time with people in the real world, my neighbors and friends, and while I might disagree with them about many things, I find that our opinions about values are more similar to mine than not. In other words, I'm being subversive and even seditious.

Our species has always produced selfish people, but for most of our 300,000 year history they were pointed out as such. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were intolerant of boastful bullies, ridiculing them, and even banishing them if it got too bad. So it hasn't always been this way, but we have always had to act against it. As Bergman says, "That's how good overpowers evil -- by outnumbering it."

We have the numbers, despite what the cynics say, and there are more of us being born every day.

As early childhood educators, we must know that not only are the children in our care programmed by evolution for virtue, at least 75 percent of their parents value virtue as well. "Teaching" the virtues, however, is a famously difficult thing to do: we must live it, role model it, and be courageous (one of the most important virtues) in standing up even when those around us are giving in. This is how our children will come to learn not only that we value goodness over evil, but that it's something for which it's worth fighting.

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