21st Century Family

It can be so difficult to teach someone to understand another person’s perspective. If you take a bright young child that is really confident in his/her intellectual ability, it can be even more challenging. In any family relationship, you can take a random event and often find two very different perspectives. This can happen for many reasons: what is heard, what is seen, what their current paradigm is filled with, etc. The old analogy involving zebras (are they white with black stripes or black with white stripes) is a great illustration of this concept. If you ask the question to 10 different people, you’ll get all kinds of answers with some very different perspectives. Where families often run into trouble is when there is not enough humility to understand that their perspective is not the only perspective on that particular issue. Intellectual arrogance can be very damaging because the person who has a very detailed line of reasoning (ex: as to why the zebra is actually white with black stripes) will argue it into the ground because they have “proof” in their highly detailed mind, they are willing to defend. In fact, they know they are “right” because they know what they see in their mind is true. The only problem is that another person equally capable of observing the situation “sees” a few different elements and blends these elements with a different paradigm and boom…..an argument/disagreement is born and some real damage may occur if things aren’t resolved. I will have to re-visit this subject over and over because there is just waaay too much to cover in one post and it overlaps into so many areas. One absolute key for parents is to show humility in trying to really “get into” the other person’s shoes to understand where they are coming from (no matter how much you “know” you are right). The lack of humility from a parent can simply cause a child’s heart to grow hardened and distant, because a child can see if there is an effort to understand or arrogance!!!

Obviously as a parent there are many times that a child simply has to respect and obey no matter what. In this post I’m going to assume that is a given for obvious safety reasons and such. However, what I’m trying to point out is that the WAY we approach these situations (humility or arrogance) can and will shape our ability to influence our children, as they grow older.