The Truth About Raising Changemakers

Disclaimer: We, as parents, have a huge task in raising our kids within this global tech culture and within the current geopolitical state of the world. This article is in no way meant to add stress or shame to a parent’s choices. It is an opportunity to look at your choices and make changes or adjustments if you see fit.  Take this as a way of understanding childhood and how to raise changemakers.
 
The world can be described in many ways depending on who you ask.

The world offers us examples of goodness, beauty and truth, and at the same time, it shows us horror, terror and injustice.

As adults, we do our best to manage all this contradictory information. However, we must admit that it takes its toll on us.  Some of us have insomnia, some of us have anxiety, some of us are depressed…and the list goes on. As much as we strive to keep a positive outlook, the fears and concerns about the world are playing out at a conscious and subconscious level all the time.

We must work twice as hard to stay positive and maintain a healthy optimism and hope

​How long have we been living like this?

Can we think back to when we were little? Was the news playing on the car radio as you drove to grandma’s house? Was the TV on during dinner, while the death count of the current war was being announced? 

As much as we know that the world is not all about fear and horror, we know that the news media of the day prey on our fears. The stories of fear are what sell.

How many people were killed in this earthquake? How many people are sick with this disease? How many people are homeless? How many people are overdosing? How many people are losing their jobs?

We know that today, we are receiving more information per minute than someone would receive in their entire lifetime.  We are doing our best to manage it. Many of us feel that, as good citizens, we need to be on top of all the current events in the world. We need to be able to speak about them with thoughtful opinions and reflections. We want to be educated citizens about what is going on in the world around us.

But what about our children?

As parents, we have a strong desire to ensure that our children become educated citizens of the world. We dream of them making a difference in the world. Sometimes parents assume that for their children to become these types of citizens, they need to start sharing the world’s events with them early on.  They want to support their children to have opinions, know the “facts”, and be able to speak to situations that are way beyond their years.  The deep desire to raise a critically thinking, informed, and educated citizen of the world is noble; however, the way to go about it is completely opposite to what you may think.

For a child to become an inspired adult who wants to make a positive impact in the world, they first need to have a clear vision of what is possible. They need to have a feeling for the goodness, beauty, and truth of humanity. They need to believe in this vision. For a child to believe in this vision, they need to possess hope and faith that there are enough humans out there who desire the same thing.

When a child hears about the horrors and tragedies of the world on a regular basis before their rational thinking mind is developing, this information is not serving the child, but rather hindering them.  Children begin to develop their critical thinking around age 14. This is when the world’s issues can and should be revealed to them in more and more age-appropriate detail.  

Taking in a lot of fearful information on a regular basis is very challenging for any of us to process, so as a young child and tween, the way to deal with the information is to disconnect and create unconscious stories. Instead of raising a child to be engaged with the world, walls go up, fears get lodged in the body, and choices are constantly made to ensure safety, and anxiety can develop.

As the child grows up, they can become the jaded adult who “doesn’t feel anything is possible, and we’re all just doomed”.  

If you know the story of Siddhartha, you know that his parents, the king and queen, tried their best to shelter him from the knowledge of pain and death, and this did not serve their child. I am not suggesting this. Pain and death are part of life. Life does bring tragic situations closer to home, and we, as parents, are not trying to shelter our children in the form of denial, trying to hide painful truths about life. When tragedy strikes closer to home, and it is information that your child needs to have, or you feel should have, then you can share it in an age-appropriate way. There is a big difference between appropriately sharing tragic events with your child and allowing them to be privy to all the tragic events occurring around the world.

If we truly want to raise children to become informed, optimistic citizens of the world, we must nurture them in an environment that fosters reverence for humanity, instills a sense of wonder at being human on planet Earth, reinforces the belief that goodness far surpasses evil, reveals that beauty is everywhere when we look for it, and affirms that truth ultimately prevails. The only way to ensure this is to replace the daily news with the richness of stories, myths, and original fairytales that highlight the classic war between good and evil and show that goodness always wins in the end. We need to protect our children in a nourishing bubble of love, with visions of beauty and safety.  We need them to know that the light does overpower the dark.

In this way, we are creating the foundation that informs our children into adulthood. It gives them a feeling for what is possible for humanity, a feeling for wanting to support this evolution of humanity, and a feeling that they want others to know about this as well.

Faith, hope and love are the antidote to fear, doubt and hate.  We are not coddling our children or doing them a disservice by protecting them from the harsh realities of living on planet Earth today.  On the contrary, we are supporting their well-being, so they have time to fall in love with being human and to feel proud to be a human being on the planet. Being human is an incredible gift of free will, with the opportunity to serve the planet. Our highest endeavour as humans is to be in service to all the beings on earth.

We as humans have such a gift, such an opportunity. However, if we raise children to be surrounded by the negative aspects of humanity, they will lack the capacity to believe that it is truly possible to rise, evolve, and reclaim our rightful roles on earth as stewards, protectors, lovers, and dreamers.

Turn the radio off when your kids are in the car.

Turn the news off when your kids are around.

Avoid the adult discussions about the state of the world when your kids are still at the dinner table.

Shelter them for the right reasons. They will have the rest of their life to think about these real-world current issues, but for today, let them wonder, let them love and let them dream.
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Our world depends on it.

Written by Jennifer Eve