Identity

The evening my son Ethan came home from a friend’s birthday party and sat quietly at the kitchen table in our suburban Denver home, I knew something was weighing on him. He was eleven years old, and the silence was unusual enough that I put down my book and asked what was wrong. The story came out slowly, in the halting way that children tell stories they are not sure they should be telling. At the party, a group of boys had started making fun of a quieter kid named Sam for liking a video game that the group had decided was uncool. Ethan had laughed along, not because he thought the game was uncool, but because he did not want to be the next target. Sam had left early. Ethan had stayed. And now, sitting at our kitchen table with a half-eaten cookie he had brought home, Ethan said the words that every parent dreads and secretly hopes to hear: “I do not think I was a good person tonight.” In that moment, I saw the beginning of something profound: the awakening of a personal values system that had been operating on autopilot and was now, for the first time, being examined consciously. ...

Last Monday, my 8-year-old came home upset because her teacher said another student’s artwork was “the best in the class.” She looked at me with tears and asked, “Does that mean my art isn’t good?” Instead of immediately reassuring her or contacting the teacher, I remembered our family’s commitment to the Life-Ready approach. I said, “I know that hurts. Your art is unique to you. How can we think about this?” The look of hurt mixed with growing self-awareness on her face told me we had a perfect opportunity to practice handling comparisons in a low-stakes environment. ...