Tom Matlack recently spoke with Megan Rosker of Let Children Achieve about raising boys, balance in life, and the importance of humility. Here’s what they had to say.
MR: In a society where young men are continuously looking for external role models and find very few, what would you say is the best method for young men to employ to begin to look inwards and use their own inner strengths as a compass in life?
TM: My experience with this is there is no need to “begin.” Boys, at least the ones I have been around, intuitively know how to be strong and good in their own special way. It’s the rest of us who tell them to grow up, be different, be like some adult man we put up on a pedestal.
One of the most amazing things is to watch my 6 year-old’s mind as he figures out the world himself. It’s like a flower opening for the first time. He is asking the questions and coming up with the answers in one long breath of air. Sometimes he just lays on my chest while we are watching a game and talks. I try to talk too but really it is his monologue, his manhood ripening before my very eyes.
MR: We dedicate a lot of time in our child rearing culture to building self esteem, but how much time is too much time to spend heaping praise onto a child? In a culture that wants everyone to be a winner and receive a trophy, a star or a pat on the back, how do we teach our children the benefits of working hard and earning praise? Unnecessary praise of kids stunts their emotional development and they transform into adults that can’t clearly understand their actual strengths and weaknesses. Allowing a child to be too much the focus of attention doesn’t allow humility to blossom. How can parents and teachers find balance between praise, fostering a sense of community and an honest picture of personal success for each student? How can we begin this acceptance of our children and how can we teach them to accept their limitations? Read on to hear about Mr. Matlack’s personal experience with fostering humility with his sons.
How does a boy find humility when parent spends too much time building self esteem?
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TM: My own experience of ego is that it is based on fear. All these guys (myself included by the way) going around beating their chests all puffed up is really about fearing that we are not good enough, won’t measure up. Ego is a very fragile shell that is easily cracked. Underneath is terror. I see this in my 15 year old son who is the most upbeat, charismatic boy with plenty of swagger. Just one well placed sentence, often unintentional on my part, can reduce him to tears. So how do you cultivate humility? Through love. And teaching your boys that they are perfect just the way they are.
MR: Balance is something we all have a hard time finding and in a culture that pushes us all to indulge and focus on ourselves, how do we teach our children the careful balance between doing for themselves and doing for others? How do we teach our children to find their identity in these rough waters?
What do believe is the balance between a child’s obligations to himself and the obligation he has to the community to learn, grow and become an active, productive member of society?
I don’t see these obligations as being in competition with one another. As social animals we are all individuals in a community. As boys and men, we need to grow into our own identity but that identity is crafted in large part by how we treat the people around us, ultimately as sons, fathers, husbands and in the work place. A key is to be the same person in each role whether out in the world, with our family at home, or alone. So many men get in trouble by compartmentalizing and in essence living double lives. One definition of being a “good” man is simply to live a life sticking to a single identity, a single core set of values and attributes as a boy and then man.
—Photo Giles Douglas/Flickr