How To Raise A Bully
I’ve written before about the relative who encouraged her daughter to bully my son. The other reason she refuses to come over, or to be in our lives–other than that I foolishly and spitefully insist on a no bullying policy in this house–is that I make the kids share. She, let’s call her X, firmly believes that this is wrong and that by making kids share you teach them things that will set them up for failure, as adults, in the real world.
Yes.
You teach them to value interpersonal relationships over objects.
Is this setting them up for failure? Well, I suppose that depends on how you define success. If success is more, at any cost, then maybe. But the problem with training kids to base their happiness and sense of self worth on that kind of “success” is that you set them up for a worse kind of failure: the failure of not being able to take responsibility for their own state of mind. If, as an adult, your happiness is based on external factors, i.e. what’s in your bank account, then you’ll always suffer at the whims of the universe. Teaching kids from an early age that happiness can come from a different source helps them to understand, conversely, that their happiness is within their control.
No, everyone has good days and bad days. What I’m talking about, here, is happiness in the broader sense. Satisfaction with one’s own life and, most importantly, with one’s own self. In our house, we define success, not as numbers–on tests, in a bank account–but as the natural result of hard work. My son might not always make the grades he wants, or make the cut for the team, or get into the college of his choice, or get the promotion he’s up for, but he can always take pride in knowing that he has the ability to use his presence in the world for good.
When you help a child to share their toys, you help them to experience the joy of lifting a friend’s spirits. Of the deepening of friendship that comes with that first hesitantly extended trust. Of communicating more effectively. One of my son’s favorite Sheriff Callie episodes is about bullying; a bully steals Toby’s toy and when the truth comes out and Toby, along with Sheriff Callie, finally confronts him, Toby explains to the bully that if he’d asked, Toby would have gladly shared his toy. The bully is shocked. Why? Because he had no idea that sharing was something Toby might enjoy.
X is teaching her daughter that the only way to enjoy something is to keep it for herself, thus setting her up for a lifetime of equating happiness with ownership and of solving her problems with shopping sprees. Think I’m jumping the gun? The last time I saw her she told me she couldn’t be happy because she didn’t have the most toys of anyone at school and that she didn’t like me, because I didn’t give her enough toys.
Too many people buy and buy, and spend and spend, and wonder why the hollow ache inside never seems to shrink. They’re like that old commercial about the guy who’s in debt up to his eyeballs, with an expression on his face that says he’s riding that riding mower around the third circle of hell. He wants to leave, more than anything, but doesn’t know how.
Does success diminish in the sharing? Do you have less enjoyment in a toy, when you share it? And, if so, why? These are important questions; the questions that, some day, produce maturity. Whatever one’s economic views, personal or global, whatever one’s political views, one should choose those views, actively choose them, from a place of strength. Not a place of thrall. I want my son to own what he owns, as an adult, whether that’s a yurt in the plains or ten Rolls Royces, not for those things to own him.
Success isn’t your bank account; success isn’t how much stuff you own. Success is who you are as a person. Base your success on your actions, on how you affect the world around you, and your success transcends things.
All the things that, in the final analysis, don’t matter.
Are you happy, because you’re finally successful enough, in material terms, to allow yourself to stop and smell the roses? Or are you successful because, at the end of the day, living the life you have now–this life, this moment–makes you happy? I chose a career as a novelist and a jewelry designer over continuing to practice law, because that made me happy. I wasn’t thinking about my bank account; I was thinking about how I wanted to spend my remaining time, however much time that turned out to be, on earth. We all think we get decades; some of us might die tomorrow. We don’t know. So that’s my bias. I realized, a couple of years ago, that the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Are my choices the right choices for everybody? Of course not. But they’re choices I want my son to have the freedom to make. I don’t want him to worry, for one minute, that he’ll be letting his parents down if he does go for that yurt. And I want him to, if he grows up to be the next Peter Lynch and some day the stock market crashes, to wake up the next morning knowing that he still has the things that matter: a family. Love. The respect of his peers, based not on his wallet but on his mind and heart.
The joy of sharing with a friend is so much richer than the joy of simply amassing stuff.
I teach my child to share, not because I want to hold him back but because I want him to be empowered. To find success and, most importantly of all, the success of happiness, within himself and with his good and ethical treatment of others. The only source from which, ultimately, both of those things can meaningfully and lastingly come.
Thoughts?
