I just don’t think “you have to do your part if you want your share” is at all in conflict with “you are a worthwhile person.” Self-esteem and entitlement are not similar, they may be nearly opposite. Thinking you are important is the opposite of thinking that what you do doesn’t matter.
And I think the relationships between our experiences as children and our experiences as adults is very misunderstood. Assuming no revolution our kids are going to need to work to make money to eat when they grow up. But we don’t threaten to withhold food if they don’t clean their rooms to teach them that. Being looked after as a child is what prepares you to look after yourself when you are an adult.
I don’t think there was a single thing that Mr. Rogers ever did on his show to suggest that work ethic was a bad thing or unimportant. Rather, he regularly met with people who did different jobs who seemed quite committed to their work. The adults on that show were all people who tried their best every day and helped other people by doing so.
If you identify people with no work ethic they are going to be people who: feel entitled because nothing has ever been expected of them; are too afraid of failing to try to succeed; have internalized the sense that they are lazy and ungrateful after being told that about themselves over and over and over.
But we’re sold the idea that instead they are all calculating - that they get away with doing as little as they can because they are genetically programmed to be selfish (just like the rest of us) and the only way to motivate them is to dangle the threat of starvation to change their calculus. And when we do that we pile on more of the maladapted fear and/or shame that was keeping them “lazy” in the first place.
The most evil part is the first ten seconds, where he walks in with a suit and tie. Talk about a participation trophy for superficial people who do nothing. No cheap plastic trophy can compare with people putting on a suit and tie and thinking they’re accomplished.
To all who took the time (and whipped up the psychological courage) to watch the FOX video: Thank you, all! Thank you for being the canaries in the coal mine, responding to what you experienced, and saving me the horror of watching… because… I just can’t!
My favourite “misunderstanding” is that when adults say that they are teaching a child “responsibility”, they are usually teaching “duty” or “discipline” instead.
If you tell a 12-year-old to do the dishes, take out the trash, or go to bed because its bedtime and its a school night, you are training them to obey the rules. It’s when they are on a scout camp and they get to decide for themselves whether to stay awake a bit longer or to be better rested for the next exciting and exhausting day, or whether to stay up and deal with the consequences, that they learn to take responsibility for their own bedtime.
I wouldn’t dream of doubting Mr. Rogers. I haven’t heard much about him, but the only negative things I ever heard about him were from that Fox video.
That is true. For some reason, though, people seem to have different instincts on which of the two needs to be said more often, and that seems to correlate with the classic conservative<->prorgressive scale.
“Conservative” and “progressive” theories of raising children differ markedly in their attitude to “competition”. Both think they are instilling self-confidence. But when in doubt, the conservative approach will bestow praise for achievements, and the progressive approach will hand out participation trophies.
I believe a child needs both. I’ve had my own self-confidence as a child boosted by both approaches, and I’ve experienced some toxic perversions of both.
But the search for the “right balance” in a given situation seems to always get that conservative-vs-progressive vibe. I’ve been through a lot of these discussions within other adult volunteers with the scouts in Austria - it’s consistently the more conservative people who want to hand out bigger trophies for the winners, and the more progressive people who would prefer not to recognize the winners at all and hand out participation trophies to everyone.
Either way, if everything goes well, you’ll have a nice competition for the kids, where the winners get to feel proud for their achievement and everyone feels appreciated and has fun participating. But if there are too many idiots around, then the conservative idiots will tell half of the kids that they are losers, and the progressive idiots will tell the other half that their achievement is worth nothing and that they should feel ashamed for being proud.
And of course, it’s not easy to know how this conservative-progressive difference maps to adult outcomes. I do know that the idiot-non-idiot difference maps directly to how much the kids enjoy a particular competition, though, and probably also to how well their self-esteem will develop.
I guess according to these jerks any kind of encouragement or love given to children is a crime. It really irks me when I hear people try to attack Fred Rogers since for me personally he was one of the few people who kept me from killing myself for years when I was a kid. This kind of drivel coming from conservatives who are willing to be hard hearted to children is sad and pathetic. Whatever their own personal issues are I wish they’d just get a therapist and stop bottling it up to inflict on the most vulnerable like kids.
