Did You Know . . . Life Is a Special Olympics?
Many people believe Olympic competition is particularly meaningful because it draws together the best of the best in the whole world and validates their excellence using the most advanced measurement techniques available. In their minds, there is no achievement equal to being an Olympic champion (at least until that year’s games are over and they forget that ice dancing ever existed).
The reason we often say, and truly believe, that life is a Special Olympics isn’t because we mean to degrade the achievements of those involved in the actual Special Olympics or those games in any way. It’s because the actual Olympic games aren’t really a fair fight; some countries have more money than others, some athletes get the better performance-enhancing drugs, and everybody cares a lot less about national glory than springboarding a win into a sneaker endorsement.
In real life, many losers work harder than winners, because there is much about winning or losing that is unfair. The competition that should attract more attention and respect, if we thought hard about what it meant, is not the Olympics but the Special Olympics. The person who chooses to compete, knowing their equipment is inferior and unreliable, deserves more respect than the lucky and gifted, and more medals.
If there’s one responsibility that parents take seriously, more than making their kids wear helmets just to breathe or considering a full hazmat suit to be the only suitable protection against the sun, it’s shielding their children’s self-esteem.
You may not be able to teach a child math, baseball, or music, but you haven’t really failed unless he or she comes out of childhood without good self-esteem. This overvaluation of self-esteem may be responsible for the ESE epidemic (see above), beginning with kids who actually believe they are the most perfectest special snowflakes who can be presidents of the universe and solve all the problems that exist with one smile from their precious, angel faces that were crafted by Jesus Himself in His heavenly garage/woodshop.
Unfortunately, your ability to control your child’s self-esteem is even worse than your control over your own. You can provide lots of love, good nutrition, a functional parenting partnership, and reasonable schooling and security, and still not be able to protect her from having a rough time academically or socially or from just being a very nervous, perfectionistic, self-hating little weirdo.
It’s scary to have kids, knowing how easily things can go wrong and how little your love can do to protect their self-esteem. We’d much rather watch movies about the redemptive powers of love, be they wielded by a parent or stern inner-city principal, to rescue a kid from misery and self-hate. Measuring your parenting effectiveness by your child’s lack of self-esteem can make you feel like a failure, which will probably make you an ineffective parent, even if you were pretty good to begin with. But at least now you and your kid can bond over feeling like shit.
The domino theory of good self-esteem would lead you to believe that if you can help your child become competent in math, sports, etc., self-confidence will follow, which will help social skills, which will cause success, wealth, happiness, and amazingly good luck, which will make you feel successful after all. On the other hand, if anything gets in the way of one of these dominoes that happens to lie outside of your control, the last domino will never tip into success, leaving your mission as a parent forever unfulfilled.
We know why parents impose this global responsibility on themselves; it hurts to watch your kid feel like a loser and not be able to help. Nevertheless, it’s part of the parenting job description for many unlucky parents. Sometimes, no matter how much you adore your kids, your love just doesn’t get through and they don’t like themselves. So your job, though it may sound heartless, is to do your best to build them up, remember you’ve done your best, and then go do something else. Otherwise, you’ll burn out and do your kid and yourself harm, instead of surviving to help another day.
What makes parents most awesome, however, is not the power of love, as wonderful as that is. It’s the power to love when love is doing no good, not take your kids’ suffering personally, survive, and keep on loving. It’s the loving parents of self-hating kids who are genuinely the most amazing, specialest snowflake parents of all.
Here are signs that you have little power over your kid’s self-esteem:
• Your threats have as little impact as your praise
• Finding a punishment or reward that matters is really hard
• You have trouble getting an answer, a laugh, or even a grunt to any invitation
• You can’t find a topic of common interest besides silence
• You can’t get a good suggestion from the kid’s shrink, who hasn’t heard so much as a grunt, either
Among the wishes people express when they want to protect their kids’ self-esteem are:
• To figure out what’s wrong
• To get through to their kids with their love and admiration
• To help her do better and/or get away from bad friends and drugs
• To find a treatment or therapist that will help
Here are three examples:
I know my fifteen-year-old daughter lies because she never wants to admit she hasn’t done her homework, even though it’s obvious she hasn’t. Still, she lies every goddamned time, even though her lying gets her into tons of trouble, and then she feels awful when teachers who have tried to help her just give up and tell her she’s let them down. I’ve punished her and I’ve been understanding, I go to meetings with the teachers and get her tutoring, but nothing works. My goal is to get her out of this cycle of doing poorly, lying, punishment, and feeling like a total failure.
My son has been a mess since his girlfriend dumped him a year ago when he was a high school sophomore, and we just can’t get him out of it. He’s seen a shrink, tried antidepressants, and nothing works. He stopped going to school for a month but he’s been going now; he just isn’t able to learn very much and he won’t answer the phone. I check with him to make sure he’s not suicidal, but beyond that I don’t know what to do. My goal is to help him recover.
Simply put, my daughter is big. My wife and I have tried everything to help her without making it worse—our house only has healthy food, we have her doing physical activities after school, we’ve talked to our pediatrician a million times—but even at her thinnest, she’s still both heavier and taller than the other girls in her class, and the teasing has been terrible from boys and girls alike. She cries all the time and we’re terrified that she’s going to hit puberty and start cutting or starving herself. My goal, with my wife, is to protect her from bullying by helping her become less bully-able.
The best way to help your kid with his self-esteem is to help him limit his responsibilities, just as you must limit your own. This seems like anathema to many parents, who feel the only way to develop their kids’ strengths and gifts is to load them so full of responsibilities and activities that they have to schedule pee breaks. Limiting responsibilities also seems overly permissive to parents and teachers who are trying to help kids manage inner monsters, outer peer pressure, or just hormones.
The fact is, however, that kids and adults often have limits to their self-control, and pushing responsibility across this limit breaks, not creates, confidence.
If you give yourself unlimited responsibility for your kid’s happiness, you can never be successful, and the same applies to him. If