Of American Children, The Matsikenga, and Self-Absorption …

Elizabeth Kolbert asks in her New Yorker article, Spoiled Rotten, “Why do kids rule the roost?”

More specifically she poses the question, “Why are American kids so spoiled?”

On spending several months living with and observing the Matsigenka tribe of the Peruvian Amazon, Carolina Izquierdo, a medical anthropologist at UCLA, grew impressed with the helpfulness and responsibility of Yanira, a six-year-old girl, and member of a family within the Matsigenka tribe of 12,000.

Dr. Izquierdo witnesses Yanira’s self-less behavior, what some might call daily altruism, when she and Yanira accompanied a third family of the Matsigenka on an expedition down the Urubamba River for gathering leaves from the kapashi palm tree, leaves the Matsigenka would use to build roofs for their houses.

During the trip, Yanira, not a member of the family she and Dr. Izquierdo had accompanied, assisted others in performing daily chores and tasks without having to be asked.
Yanira made herself useful and all the while, Kolbert writes, “ ... asked for nothing ...”

This ability to give assistance without request, and in so doing, not asking for anything in return left Dr. Izquierdo pondersome about American children and their lack of such behavior.

The Mommy Psychologist states in today’s blog that she fully agrees with Madeline Levine’s assertion, “… never before have parents been so (mistakenly) convinced that their every move has a ripple effect into their child’s future successes. ”

The Mommy Psychologist adds, “We are so afraid of doing anything wrong and somehow permanently damaging our kids in some irrevocable way that we allow our children to guide our actions rather than the other way around.”

This paramount fear has driven us, she adds to, “… parenting from the vantage point of the child … ” a stance that puts the child, she explains in the driver’s seat and not the parent–and if I might add, Mommy Psychologist along with  Dr. Izquierdo and others, that American children are not only spoiled, but also self-centered, if not also self-absorbed.

But from where does this über concern with self arise?

In what way of thinking and perceiving the world does it stand rooted?

During recent weeks The Mommy Psychologist posted a blog discussing the school bus monitor, the grandmother, Karen Klein, whom school children taunted and bullied and another blog on the mega-evangelist, Reverend Creflo Dollar, who was arrested, and charged with simple assault, for allegedly having tried to choke his teen-age daughter after which authorities released him on $5000 bail.

The Mommy Psychologist tackles some most unsettling issues regarding parents, children and the larger process of parenting.

Her essays never leave me apathetic, or yawning.

Along with her thought provoking titles, she offers parents and adults alike who take the time to read her ideas, a new and fresh perspective on this age-old process of nurturing children towards adulthood.

She does this with a grounded sense of interrogation that I suspect all parents who have and will ever live hold.

And yet the stories on which she focuses her essays have a clear message.

Or rather the fact of their occurrence–these happenings, events, incidences in the lives of parents, both celebrated and mundane like me and you–point to an even deeper issue.

That we are even writing about them, their occurrence(s) having claimed our attention, drawn our wrath, embarrassment, or pity, points to a trait of our culture, our society, in which all of us to some degree appear caught up.

We all crave attention.

And if on some latent level we do not long for another to look back at us, we seek to not be forgotten through out prowess and forthright knowledge of those who hold the spotlight.

Let me be clear.

I am not criticizing The Mommy Psychologist for the topics of her blog.

Her headlines and the titles to her posts continually grip my attention.

See there, I said it. They pull me in. I want to read what she has to say so that I might understand and hear myself with greater clarity.

And therein lies the first kernel of truth revealed to me through her posts.

Self-centeredness is but a byproduct of not feeling heard.

The job of parents, along with providing guidance and the establishment of safety through rules, is that of listening.

In its absence, all are left lonely and ignorant.

And where lack of understanding thrives, the weeds of self-absorption engulf and maim all.