Parenting for Character: Humility and Gratitude
This series of blogs is taken from articles by Charles Debelak in the Birchwood School of Hawken's Clipboard during the 2017-18 school year. The purpose of Mr. Debelak's Clipboard articles is to provide parents with information about sound educational principles and child development issues gleaned from history, contemporary research, and Mr. Debelak's 40+ years educating, coaching, and counseling children, young adults, and parents.
You might find it surprising, but humility and gratitude are the cornerstones of lifelong learning. Of course I could also cite hard work, passion, interest, persistence, and grit as necessary components of lifelong learning. But without humility and gratitude, even these characteristics may fail us not only in lifelong learning, but also lifelong growing, developing, thriving, and becoming.
The reason? Our ego. On the one hand, ego is a good thing. It represents our drive to succeed in life and to achieve. It is necessary to establish our own sense of competency and self-worth. It is our natural energy to find meaning in our lives, to build positive relationships with others, and to forge a pathway toward realizing a fulfilled life. At the same time, however, our ego is prone to become arrogant, smug, self-satisfied, narrow minded, judgmental, and dismissive of anyone or anything that does not comport with our definition of the world. The same ego that empowers us for success and achievement, can easily become the small-minded ego that undermines our aspirations for growth and development, and ruins our chances for harmonious relationships with others.
Humility and gratitude are virtue’s answer to an ego that can drive us toward a cliff. They restrain. They temper. They balance. Humility and gratitude corral and redirect an ego that can become self-destructive. They adjust the ego, pointing it toward what is good, productive, and beneficial.
Since I am explaining how we teach virtue to our children, it is important to know that teaching these two virtues is different than teaching courage, self-control, justice, or compassion. Only life experiences can teach humility and gratitude at their deepest level. And only if we learn from life experiences will they become helpful to us.
Nevertheless, if we just look at these two virtues from the perspective of being ego-balancers, humility and gratitude can and should be taught to children in order to protect them from themselves (an errant ego) and establish a foundation for learning these virtues at their most profound levels.
In the next few blogs we will look take a deeper look at these two virtues and how they can be taught to children.
From the 2018 April Birchwood School of Hawken Clipboard
