Commentary: Cultivating awareness and appreciation in our children
I’m on an airplane returning from Maui with my wife, two daughters and … a vacation nanny.
I cringe typing that last admission, a gigantic departure from my middle-class roots.
Now, however, our nicely appointed hotels and over-priced lunches are standard practice. In fact, I began typing this because the plane has no WiFi (#smh). So, I’m left with my own reflections and thoughts.
No, we’re not popping Dom Perignon, but we do reward our hard work stemming from our demanding careers. The dilemma? How will we keep our daughters both aware and grateful for this life, yet still motivated to create their own?
Children raised in good fortune should not have that held against them, but they must possess a keen awareness of it. To an outsider, they have a beach house, but to them, it’s just their house: too hot, small or boring.
You can ask why they act this way — a typical response when grappling with declining gratitude — but you would also be missing the mark.
Take an extreme climate, like Phoenix, for example. It’s 105 degrees and locals wear pants, walking calmly around the city. Meanwhile, tourists are drenched in sweat and disbelief.
Why? Environment. For locals, heat is standard, mitigated by normalcy and basic irrelevancy.
Many teens exhibit weaning levels of awareness as their paradigm narrows. This is not their fault, for they don’t know what they don’t know.
Likewise, we should not fault the successful for their earned affluence, but we must help children solidify a proper understanding of their good fortune. Sometimes this requires flipping the socioeconomic script.
Recently, community members facilitated a father-son trip to Mexico, constructing a house for beneficiaries who had historically lived in a one-room shanty. Built in stride with the structure were deeper father-son relationships and credence to manual labor and the less fortunate.
The work: excruciating; the reward: compounding, as fathers gained a glimpse into their son’s friendships, less guarded persona and work ethic; while sons observed their fathers’ extensive knowledge base, more relaxed spirits and sore muscles. In all, the tearful reaction of the patriarch accepting his new, and first home, was more transformative than any anecdote regarding poverty could ever be.
The next was a whole family affair with mom, dad, two elementary-aged children and two high-schoolers traveling to Central America to work with an orphanage. Prior to the trip, the kids collected thousands of dollars by launching a social media campaign to purchase basic necessities upon arrival.
The family experienced a life-changing week. Mother and daughter had previously traveled there only months prior to begin the process of establishing more awareness. The once-reluctant teen experienced a paradigmatic reawakening, later spearheading their familial return to Central America.
The fabric of a successful community is woven with innovation, leadership and philanthropy. More families have taken leaps to ensure their children will stay humble yet motivated, and eventually be accountable for their own continued well-being. This practice dictates providing total paradigm shifts via immersion into alternate socioeconomic universes; the realities, polar opposites.
Children must then interface and interact with this reality until they arrive at a place of reflective appreciation. This approach invests time and people over donations and tax deductions. The immersion into a trans-formative setting is invaluable when building perspective; it allows families to gain a tangible appreciation for the stability and vitality in their own lives. Most importantly, it’s done as a family.
Maybe you can afford the experiences like the above families; maybe you can’t. Don’t let that stop you from fostering a reawakening for your children about the life you have built for them. Start small: mow the lawn or do yard work for a veteran. Go medium: get consistently involved at a soup kitchen or senior center. The only failure is to go nowhere, do nothing in hopes that your children will somehow grasp the value-added elements of their lives.
As for me, the lack of WiFi successfully turned a first-world problem into an opportunity to reflect on my own parenting, my children and my plans to keep their level of entitlement in check.
DANIEL PATTERSON is the assistant principal at Corona del Mar High School.