I LIKE ME
I’m sharing another little portion of a chapter of my new book HOMESTEAD TSUNAMI: Good for Country, Critters, and Kids. Remember we ‘re offering this at a $5 off discount as an introductory option until October 1. You can get it at www.polyfaceyum.com. This excerpt is from a chapter titled I LIKE ME.
Am I valuable? If so, where is my value best actualized? What can I contribute to society, to family, to the world?
These are heady questions with profound practical implications. Affirming individual worth and feeling needed are primal requirements for emotional and physical functionality. Nearly every school shooting involves a person who feels worthless or unworthy. Whether it’s bullying, poor grades, not fitting in or socio-political prejudice, these violent people, by and large, feel unable to contribute positively. In vengeance, retribution, or a final effort to be noticed, they commit horrendous violence against others.
As police investigate these incidents for motive, more often than not they discover a hodgepodge of perceived unfairness, being passed over, and hopelessness. These troubled young people finally come to a point where they don’t think they’ll ever be accepted, affirmed, or understood, and in a final act, go down in a blaze of ignominy. The patterns expressing this depression and vengefulness follow different routes between boys and girls. To my knowledge, not a single school shooter has been female.
But eating disorders are primarily female. Self-abuse is a kissing cousin to others-abuse; one is inward and one is outward. I’m no psychologist, but the findings I’ve read indicate that both stem from unhealthy personal metrics of self-worth. If a boy doesn’t feel good enough, he tends to take it out on others. If a girl doesn’t feel good enough, she takes it out on herself to achieve acceptance, attention, or audience.
If you talk to any school psychologist today, any counselor who works with young people, you will hear stories that tear your heart out. The maladies plaguing our young people these days are escalating dramatically. You can tell a lot about the health of a society by trend lines, and the trend lines for mental health among our young people are not good. Again, I’m not a scientist in this sphere but I do read widely because I’m deeply concerned about dysfunctional young people that become dysfunctional adults.
Further, I’m surrounded every day by a cadre of young people through our stewardship and apprenticeship programs, and personnel on our farm team. Unlike most farmers, I’m immersed daily in young people’s lives and keeping this team, assembled from all over the nation, held together with mutual love and respect. It’s not always pretty. Managing people is substantially harder than managing cows.
At any rate, the two things that constantly seem to bubble to the surface when dealing with unhappy young people are affirmation and expectations. My son Daniel says the quickest way to destroy a relationship is with unexpressed expectations. We can’t read each others’ minds, so if we want someone to know what we expect, we need to express it. How many break-ups have occurred because we assumed someone understood our desires, and it turns out we simply had different expectations?
This is not a psychology book, but my experience drives me to make an observation: we learn our self-worth through doing. We don’t feel valuable because a focus group or self-help group made us feel valuable. Who we are is a direct result of what we do. Our thinking and actions go hand-in-hand; I don’t know which comes first, but I know they are inextricably related. You can’t do right without thinking right; and you can’t think right without doing right and seeing good results.
This idea is certainly consistent with Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in Matthew 6:19-21 (KJV): “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The point here is that if you start doing right, your heart will follow. Too often we pummel people with “get your heart right” instead of just encouraging them to do the right thing and their head will come around.
A close relative to the doing is treatment of things. How do we treat things? Do we have anything for which we’re responsible? Today’s notion that children should have no responsibilities except to play video games and satisfy academia denies them experience in practical stewardship of physical things. If you’re not responsible for a bank account due to having a business (yes, every 8-10 year old should have a business), or if you don’t develop an appreciation for workshop or kitchen tools, you can’t value things.
Children who aren’t responsible for jobs or things don’t value either and therefore never connect the value dots back to themselves. If I’m in charge of an activity or certain things like animals, plants, or tools, I learn to care. I care how the project looks when I’m done. I care about how the tomatoes look. I care if the tools work, like whether the ax is sharp or dull. Worth outside ourselves is the foundation for worth inside ourselves.
When children can’t, won’t, or don’t have project and ownership responsibilities, they see themselves as worthless. Feeling needed and contributing to the good of family and society is the foundation for developing self-worth.
Don’t think this is an excuse to be materialistic. I think having fewer things makes each item more precious. My argument here is not about how much we have, but how we value what we have. Even more important is what we do with what we have.
Here is my completely unscientific anecdotal old geezer observational hypothesis: accomplishment drives worthiness. The rest of this chapter builds on this idea. I’ll start with my own life, sharing a deeply personal but transformative story.