What a child needs to know for a fulfilling life

So much of the vast array of self-help literature boils down to this:

If the story you’re telling yourself is making you unhappy, tell yourself a different story.

Our stories come from many places: Family, church, school, and that all-purpose scapegoat, society. Some stories seem to be our own creations. Believe it or not, even very young children already have a narrative that is helping them (or perhaps not helping them) to make sense of the world.

As each generation progressively recovers from awful stories like, “If you comfort a crying baby, you’ll spoil it,” and “There are people worse off than you,” we have begun to learn to improve our own stories, and we do help kids to tweak theirs. However, it doesn’t seem to be common practice to teach kids about the idea that these stories are actually stories to begin with. We’re not explicitly teaching them the notion that, as Benjamin and Roz Zander put it, it’s all invented.

I suggest that we start doing exactly this. Just as we teach kids about the world around them, we can be teaching them how they can shape their own inner world. We can share with them the positive benefits of the stories we carry — the power of placebos and the impact of believing in ourselves. We can enlighten them as to the dark side of these stories as well, where cults and negative self-fulfilling prophecies threaten to pull us away from our true selves.

Further, we can guide them — by example and by direct instruction — to identify and shift narratives that are not helping them to find joy and connection. This is not easy. It takes a lot of practice, which is why we shouldn’t wait until they’re racking up therapy bills and digging through r/selfhelp on Reddit. We can make it part of kids’ lives from the start to identify their beliefs, question them, and shift to a new, expanded perspective.

This practice conveys a ton of academic and social benefits — and makes for a joyful life. It’s what your child deserves — and you, too.