How to cultivate kindness (w/ Richard Weissbourd) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

BH 509 Richard Weissbourd episode mix

Chris Duffy: You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today on the show, we're talking about what it takes to cultivate kindness and morality, both in yourself and in your children if you have them. Our guest is Rick Weisberg, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and I've known Rick first several years now.

I, I first met Rick when I was living in Boston in the first year after I'd left my job teaching at an elementary school and was transitioning into doing comedy full-time. That year I was taking a bunch of random jobs, part-time gigs, side jobs to supplement my income. 'cause I wasn't making that much doing comedy.

And by far the best side job that I got that year was helping Rick and his team at the Making Caring Common Project out with this video series. Um, they were making these discussion starters that could be used in classrooms to help kids to talk about when you do something that's right or when you do something that's wrong and how it can be hard.

So what we would do is we would bring elementary school students into a room one by one, and then we would ask them, what's a time you did something even though you knew it was wrong? And those videos would then get shown to classrooms and start real conversations about real scenarios that kids had struggled with.

Now of these videos. The best moment by far, in my opinion, was when we got this one kid Pierce in the room. Pierce was a very serious young man, and I asked him, have you ever done something even though you knew it was wrong? And Pierce said, sometimes at night I sneak into my parents' bedroom. I take their cell phone, I put in their password, and then I watch TV on their cell phone.

Now, I was trying my hardest not to laugh, and I said, Pierce, do you ever get caught? And Pierce turned with this look of ultimate sadness like a professional actor, he perfectly hit the camera and he said every single time. That to me, is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in person. It was truly a masterpiece of a moral quandary.

And you know, these kinds of real ethical dilemmas that kids struggle with. And if we're being honest, that grownups struggle with too. These things are Rick's bread and butter. Rick is always trying to figure out new ways to study morality. And here's a clip from Rick talking about just that

Rick Weissbourd: when my daughter was probably five or six years old, she had a couple friends over and whenever you were at our house, you're always in danger of, of being accosted by a moral dilemma by me.

But I gave them a, a question in a popular character education program, and the question was, should you be honest with your teacher if you forget your homework? And one of my daughter's friends, five years old said to me. Do you want me to tell you what you want to hear or do you want me to tell you the truth?

and, and another one of her friends said, I know you want me to say, I'd be honest, but no 6-year-old would be honest about that.

Chris Duffy: Okay, so let's get into today's episode. Today we're gonna be talking about what it means to be a moral person. What does it mean to be a kind person, and how do we learn those lessons? And we're also gonna be talking about what we might be taught by our parents. Or society that maybe they don't necessarily mean to teach us.

Here's Rick.

Rick Weissbourd: Hi, my name is Rick Weissbourd. I'm a psychologist. I'm on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and I'm the director of the Making Caring Common Project.

Chris Duffy: Okay, so the first question that I have for you, Rick, is your book, the Parents, we Mean To Be. It came out in 2009 and in this book you wrote about three really big challenges that you saw facing America when it came to parenting and also to creating moral communities.

One of those challenges was expecting more of America's fathers. Another was creating stronger ties among parents, and the third was finding ways to give each other feedback. I'm wondering now we're 16 years later, where do you think we stand on each of those challenges? Have we made progress? Have we slid backwards?

Are we the same place we were? Where are we?

Rick Weissbourd: I unfortunately don't think we've made much progress. So in terms of parents and community, we got a lot of isolated, disconnected parents right now, and we have high rates of anxiety and depression among parents. So, you know, there's a lot of alarm about the teen mental health crisis, but.

Parents in our data are experiencing anxiety and depression at a around the same rate as as teens are. So we would be just as right to sound the alarm about a parent mental health crisis as a teen mental health crisis. And I think part of that is parental loneliness and disconnection. So I worry about parents and communities, fathers, you know, little bit better news.

I think there more fathers than there were in the past who are taking on caretaking responsibilities, who are taking on domestic responsibilities. I think we've come a significant way. But we still have a really long way to go and there are a lot of non-custodial fathers who continue to have very little contact with their kids after divorce, or if there are fathers from a single parent family.

I think we're still a culture where parents are allergic to feedback and that's really a problem, and that's not true across race, culture, ethnicity. I mean, there are differences by ethnicity here, but, you know, in some countries it's very natural for parents to give each other feedback. They expect to get feedback, and parenting is probably the most important thing we do, or one of the most important things we do.

And we've inoculated ourselves from feedback of any kind. And so one of the things I was just recommending in the, in the book is that I. You, you identify one person who you really respect and trust and say to that person, you know, if I'm, if I'm ever doing something that might be screwing up my kid, please tell me about it, because I wanna know about it.

But I find, you know, when I talk about this, when I'm doing speaking and I talk to parents about this, a lot of parents are really reluctant to do this. They just feel like it will be too threatening to them. But I continue to think it's a really important thing to do.

Chris Duffy: I feel like a lot of people don't want to know

You'd rather just think, well, I never do anything wrong than to hear. That's some really tough feedback. You're doing something that could mess up your child.

Rick Weissbourd: Yeah, no, that, that is really tough feedback. I, you know, I had a friend, a close friend, who gave me some feedback about something he was worried about with my parenting when my kids were young.

and he's not my friend anymore. No, I'm kidding. He's, he's still my friend, but I was ticked off about it. It's really hard to hear, but in some deeper way, I think you also really respect people who trust you enough and are feel close enough to you to give you really tough feedback like that.

Chris Duffy: As we're recording this, I have my first kid who's just a little more than a year old, and it's been

An amazing, beautiful, incredible year. It's also been unquestionably one of the most challenging, both physically and emotionally years of either of our lives. I'm sure I speak for my wife, Molly when I say that. And part of, I think what what is challenging about feedback is I desperately want to get advice and to know that we're making good choices and to get help making better choices, but also

Sometimes it feels like no one knows. And so taking advice from someone else is just taking their style as opposed to taking some sort of objective good advice. And I feel like that's not what you're saying, that that's actually not true. So push back on me on that.

Rick Weissbourd: You know, I'm, I'm probably gonna push back on you less than you would expect.

I, I worry about some of the folks who are giving parent advice, who give it very, you know, forcefully and unequivocally, because I don't, I still think we don't have great data on these things. I mean, there's some things we have good data on. There's some things that we don't have. Good data on. There's good data about, for example, authoritative parenting.

You know, parenting parents who are not too authoritarian, not too permissive, who listen, who are warm, who are responsive. I mean, those things generally are really good for kids, but there's lots of domains where, you know, we don't really, we don't really know a lot, and I think we're using our best judgment.

I think we have to trust the experience of people that we really respect and we also have to pull information from a number of sources and kind of do our best. Hmm.

Chris Duffy: Molly and I kind of identified before our, our kid was even here, we, we identified like who are friends or friends parents or just parents we know who are role models.

Like who, who from the outside seem like, oh, we would like for our relationship with each other and our family and our kid to be like them. You can never exactly know what happens in someone else's home. But that has been really helpful to think of like, Hey, what would these people who are our north stars do?

How do we think they would handle this? And sometimes to literally ask them, but even when we're not asking them to just think like, how do we think they handled it and why does that matter to us?

Rick Weissbourd: Yeah, I think that's a great thing to do. And I think it's also, you know, great thing when your kids get older to.

Increase their opportunities to have contact with these people that you really, that you really trust and respect.

I mean, there's some friends of my kids' parents who I just thought were wonderful parents and I always felt great when my kids were in those families homes around people that could be role models for them, people they could aspire to be in some way.

So I think understanding what those folks do and increasing our interaction with them is super important.

Chris Duffy: You talk about how one of the real challenges of parenting is getting past shame. Shame in yourself and shame about your parenting. And my kid isn't even able to speak yet. He doesn't have sentences that he's saying to strangers.

And I already can feel moments where I have this real shame where he's yelling or where he's not behaving the way that I think that he should be. And it, and. A thing that your book, I think really pointed out in a way that hit home for me is that it's not actually about him. It's about how I want to be perceived as a parent, and that it makes me feel like I look bad.

Rick Weissbourd: One of the differences, the big differences between shame and guilt, guilt is really about a deed. It's really when you do something that violates one of your standards and. Guilt usually insists on and reveals a path to repair itself. Shame sort of festers in the self. It's about defects and particularly the public exposure of defects.

And I think that some of us as parents are more prone to shame than others. And it be, it does become hard to manage our, our kids have their own complicated, powerful inner lives. They're gonna do things that sometimes are gonna feel embarrassing to us. I think if you're a parent who feels shame in that, those moments, it is really important to be able to do some reality testing, to have a partner or close friends or whatever who can help you normalize these experiences that kids are having.

This is what kids do. Your shame probably has much more to do with you than it does. Any action that they have taken, and there just isn't this direct link that your child has problems. It means you're a failed parent. Lots of wonderful parents have kids who are struggling in one way or another. So, you know, on the one hand, I think as a child development matter, we got to send the message to parents that they do have lots of influences on kids' lives, but we can't send the message that there's a simple linear relationship between what they you do as a parent and how your kid feels.

Because kids do have complex in our lives, they're influenced by many types of things. We are not the only

Chris Duffy: influence on them. So much of your work strikes me as relevant to anyone who is a person, whether you have kids or not, right? These questions of how do we have morality? How do we think about doing the right thing?

How do we think about dealing with shame? How do we think about our interactions with other people? Those aren't just. Questions that depend on having a child or a parent child relationship. They're really interpersonal relationships.

Rick Weissbourd: They're interpersonal relationships. They're societal and cultural too.

I mean, you know, at this moment in time, what I find myself sort of obsessed about is how much morality has been demoted or sidelined in our public life. There's a level of meanness, of lying, of polarization, of fragmentation, of demonization, of people. That, you know, has been unprecedented in my lifetime anyway.

I'm sure there are other times in history where we've seen things that are like this in some way, and so I think we're sort of morally off the rails. And so, you know, you're absolutely right. A, a lot of this is about a. How do we restore caring for other people? Caring about justice, caring about the truth, the importance of honesty?

I mean, how do we restore these things in our institutions, in our colleges, our schools, our homes, and in our public life more generally? Hmm.

Chris Duffy: It seems like for a big chunk of your career, these questions would've been regarded as either apolitical or maybe even like a little bit more. Towards the conservative side of politics and now at least in the United States, there's been this huge push, I think, against the idea that we should be teaching students these kinds of things, certainly in schools, right?

The idea of like social and emotional learning became a culture war Flashpoint. You ran a project that's called Making Caring Common, and it's interesting that that has become an increasingly in my lifetime political statement.

Rick Weissbourd: This is tricky territory. So, you know, there are ways in which I feel like our message in making caring common and liberal's message generally does align, is consistent with conservative messages.

There's, I find when I talk to conservative, uh, uh, audiences too, lot of concern about hyper individualism that we have become too individualistic, a country that we need to be raising kids who think about the collective, who think about collective flourishing, who think about we, not just about I. I think there's a lot of agreement, actually a, a, about that across the political spectrum.

I think words like justice have become highly politicized and I. When you use the word justice, a lot of people immediately associate it with woke efforts to promote racial justice or gender justice. So, you know, we use with a lot of, you know, very carefully these days because it's as politically divisive as as it is, you know, I think the SEL movement in, in some ways.

People see as an under the radar, sort of indirect and hidden way to promote a woke agenda, racial and gender justice. I mean, I think that's one of the concerns about the SEL movement.

I think if you were to ask the great majority, I. Of Americans and I, I said this based on our surveys, you know, is it important for kids to be caring?

Is it important for them to be empathic? Is it important for them to be fair? Great majority of Americans would still say yes to those things, I think.

Chris Duffy: Hmm. And when you say SEL movement, just for people who aren't familiar, that's social and emotional learning, can you give a quick definition for people who aren't familiar?

Rick Weissbourd: Yeah. Social emotional learning is around the development of social emotional skills, and those skills are things like self-awareness. Self-regulation, self-control perspective, taking empathy, social awareness, these skills that help us have better relationships day to day, and these skills that can help us be better community members.

Chris Duffy: Putting the political, you know, binary aside for a second of the US political binary. I think that you, you mentioned this idea of a hyper individualistic society and I think that, for me, this seems to transcend politics, but also to transcend our individual country that, you know, there's a, a real global sense that the, the best thing you can do, the smartest thing, the most admirable thing you can do is to amass as much money, as much fame, as much attention for yourself as you can.

That is not in line with the idea of building morality and community and kindness.

Rick Weissbourd: There are a couple things that concern me about it. I mean, one is that it is not about the collective. It's not about the wellbeing of your community, and that means that, you know, most people flourish when their communities flourish.

If we're all acting individualistically, our communities won't flourish, and we won't flourish as much as individuals either. I mean, the irony of this is that individualism in that sense backfires. Hmm. I also worry that. We have completely in, in addition to the kindness issue. You know, and let's just take some practical examples.

You know, if you're a basketball player and you're deciding whether to pass the ball or not, you want kids to feel some sense of collective responsibility. You want kids to still be able to help each other out in preparation for a test and not just think of other kids as threats to them. You want kids to be able to pass the ball.

I mean, in all these day-to-day ways, individualism, individualism hurts us. There's something beyond kindness too, which is that I worry that we have lost any sense of sacrifice in this country. That part of what being a moral person is, is doing things at a to at a cost to yourself. That sometimes standing up for an important cause doesn't make you happy.

You gotta do it. Taking care of a sick relative or somebody with Alzheimer's, you know, doesn't make you happy. You gotta do it. That this combination of being highly individualistic and by happiness, you know, hyper-focused on happiness means that we don't do things that are are right and moral and really important for any healthy society.

Chris Duffy: Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but we will be right back

And we are back.

I've heard you talk before and you've written about the. the difference between happiness and morality. Can you give us a, a, a nugget of, of what you see as the difference between those two as goals?

Rick Weissbourd: I'm gonna make a, a radical proposition, which is, I, I just don't think we should have happiness as a goal.

I think we should teach kids to be caring. We should teach 'em how to have good relationships. We should teach them how to work hard. We should think of teach them how to contribute to their communities. And if we have kids that are caring and have good relationships, they're gonna be happier.

And it's gonna be better for us collectively if we have kids who work hard and are decent and ethical.

They're gonna be more gratified and they're gonna be more productive, and we're gonna have workplaces that are much more functional. So I think happiness is a goal, is, is really problematic. I mean, of course we, I want kids to be happy and they can be happy and moral, but when we make happiness, the explicit goal, we are often abandoning those things that are in fact more important for kids long-term happiness.

Mm. One of the things you see . Uh, you know, on the playground or when you're around parents and, and kids, and I think I, I'm sure I did this when my kids were young. Is this allergy to kids experiencing adversity of any kind? So you're, you know, you're sort of swooping in to resolve minor peer conflicts because you don't want your kids to be unhappy or you're maneuvering them to get on winning teams because you don't want them to be unhappy.

And when you do that, you are in fact robbing them of the coping strategies that are so important for their long-term wellbeing. And so these things we do in the name of protecting kids', immediate happiness can be so detrimental to their long-term wellbeing or happiness. Sometimes in some communities, particularly in middle and upper class communities, there's a lot of mood meteorology going on.

You know, there are parents who are policing their kids' moods every 10 minutes. That must make you frustrated. That must make you sad. That must make you angry. And you know, again, in the name of protecting their kids' happiness. And it is very important to get kids to identify and articulate their feelings, especially boys.

But if parents got kids tuned into other kids' feelings, if they got kids empathizing and caring for other kids and were more focused on other kids' feelings. Their kids would have better relationships their whole lives. They would be better friends, mentors, parents, romantic partners, and those relationships are the most durable and robust sources of happiness that we have.

Chris Duffy: This is, uh, yet another moment where I feel like it's, it's such good advice for parents, but it's also just such good advice for people, right? I know from my own experience, right? If I focus so much on how do I feel today, do I feel fulfilled? Am I happy? Often that sends me into a spiral. Whereas if I think like, what can I do for someone else?

What can I do to be of service, to make myself be of, of any use in any way, even a tiny way? I almost always feel better by doing that, even though you know the idea of being like, I'm gonna go help someone move their stuff. That doesn't sound fun. That doesn't sound like it'll make me happy. But at the end, I almost always feel happier than if I just sat around thinking like, what will make me happy today?

Rick Weissbourd: Yeah, I think you said it beautifully. I, I'm a psychotherapist by training, so I believe in psychotherapy. It's been helpful to me. It's been helpful to millions of people and, you know, there are things about the self-help culture that have been really helpful to a lot of people. But I also worry about it.

I worry, it, it causes us to turn inward to find meaning when, to your point, we often find meaning and real gratification by service, turning outward, being helpful to other people. I worry, it causes us to turn our inner lives into theater. I worry that it makes our feelings too precious. You know, lots of people can benefit from therapy, but lots of people also benefit more by getting particularly men, by getting more involved in other people's experience and actually being useful and mattering to other people.

You know? I think there's also things that religious communities really got right about this. I'm not saying people should become more religious, but. You know, religious communities are places that do engage people in service. They. Are communities of obligation where you have obligations to other people.

You're asked to feel part of a larger human project to take responsibility for your ancestors and to honor your descendants. Uh, and you know, religious communities do get you out of yourself if they, you know, are functioning effectively. And I think we need to think about how to reproduce some of these communal aspects of religion and secular life and some of the traditions in religion, traditions and rituals in religion and secular life.

Chris Duffy: We talked about how you think morality should be the goal instead of happiness. And happiness should not be the goal for our children. The another counter-cultural idea that I know you really have, have pushed hard is that achievement shouldn't be the goal. That we would rather, that we should focus more on building, uh, ethical, moral children, then high achieving children.

I think something that is, is truly like hilarious and perfect as a joke is that you . Did a survey that found that in these, you know, super high achieving high schools where people are really pushed hard to get into the very best, most elite colleges that 50% of the parents, something like 50% of the parents said that they would rather have their kid get into a great college than be a good person.

And that when you showed those results to the teachers, the teacher said, no, those numbers have to be wrong because it has to be higher than 50%.

Rick Weissbourd: Yeah, that was in, uh, one independent school in the Boston area that I, that I got that re result, you know, around achievement. I think there are a few issues. I mean, one is the meaning of achievement for someone.

If you're achieving based on something that really resonates with you in a deep, internal way, that's very gratifying. If you're achieving to contribute to your family or community, that's very. Gratifying if you're achieving because your parents have status concerns in their community and you wanna please your parents, or because you think your parents' love is conditioned on your achieving at high level, that can be really soul destroying.

I mean, I think that's much more what I worry about is. That kids achieving for extrinsic reasons that feel alienate alien to them and achieving in ways that warp their relationships with their parents. I think the third danger is that it can, when a achievement pressure gets too high, and it's super high in a lot of communities these days, kids start to see other kids as threats.

So, you know, it can really also undermine your relationships with, with your friends, with other kids. You know, it's not achievement pressure per se. I think it's the meaning of achievement pressure and the context for achievement pressure and how kids understand it and interpret it, that that's a problem.

Chris Duffy: I, I'm glad that you framed it like that because I think that it's kind of easy to push back on the importance of achievement while you're at Hartford. Like you are literally work at Harvard. You are employed by the, the pinnacle of American achievement

Rick Weissbourd: culture. People ask me that all, all the time. And, and again, achievement is really important.

I feel very lucky that I, you know, am able to be at Harvard. I think going to, to colleges that have, you know, wonderful resources is a tremendous thing. The point is that we are so out of balance. Hmm. That, that, uh, so many kids are achieving for the wrong reasons. So let's just take college for a minute and, and.

This idea that you have to shoehorn your kid into one of 20 or 25 highly selective colleges, and if you don't, their life is gonna be shortchanged in some way, or their life is gonna be depleted in some way. Um, again, you know, I feel very lucky to be at Harvard, but I can tell you like from the bottom of my heart, there are hundreds, if not thousands of great colleges in this country.

You don't have to go to one of these 25 colleges, and this is sort of an epidemic. And, you know, rates of depression, anxiety are so high in affluent communities among teens and. This pressure on selective college is, uh, uh, become a really serious issue. Um, so these are places where I think parents get caught up in, in lots of concerns that, you know, they, they feel like they're gonna be failures as parents, that they're gonna be a loose status in their communities if their kids don't go to one of these colleges.

and you know, my kids did not go to highly selective colleges, but they went to great colleges and they're all doing great. And so I was walking with my oldest son one night when he was like 17 or 18. He was just the beginning of this college path. I said to him, Jake, I just want you to know that I want to go to you to go to college that really works for you, that I don't think status should really matter.

He said to me, you know, dad, that's such bullshit. I mean, this is our, our lovely father son walk that he totally exploded, but, and I was sort of stung at first and he said, you know, I. You teach at Harvard and our cousins are all going to these highly selective colleges. We live in Cambridge. A lot of people in Cambridge are gunning for these highly selective colleges.

He sort of said, you can kind of take the high road on this because there's so many forces doing the musing for you. Hmm. This is so in the water in our community. And again, you know, I was sort of stung by it, but you know, I also realized that he was right, that I could say sort of high-minded things like that because at some level I did know that there's enormous pressure on on him given the community we're in and given the family we're in to go to one of these places.

Rick Weissbourd: You know, it made me really feel like I gotta do some work here and sort out how I feel about this, but also that I gotta be mindful of all the forces that are at play. And if I really believe there's hundreds of great colleges around the country, and I really do that, I, I've gotta learn how to, you know, close the rhetoric, reality gap.

I've gotta learn how to live that and not just espouse it.

Chris Duffy: We're gonna take a moment to mull that over, and then after this quick break, we will be right back into it with Rick.

And we are back. It

Chris Duffy: feels like so much of the challenge of parenting is a lot of the challenges, figuring out how to like, let go and get yourself out of the picture and get your own. . Emotional needs met by yourself rather than by your kid. And that's really hard. I mean, you talk in the book about people who felt like the magic of having a kid was this new unconditional love that maybe they'd never felt before in their family.

Yeah. Maybe they had broken relationships or challenging relationships with their own parents and family. And then all of a sudden there's this pure, perfect love and to, to find ways to, to let go and to let your kid push back or do things that are different than you, that is . An enormous challenge. It's so difficult.

Rick Weissbourd: You know, I think you're right. I mean, I think that we're, I'm quoting from your book, so I'm glad you agree. , I, I realized I was congratulating myself. , we've embarked on this giant social experiment in the last, you know, 30 or 40 years, and, and it's really, as far as I can tell, it's, it's unprecedented. Our history, which

We really wanna be close to our kids. I mean, in a different way. You know, we wanna have reciprocal relationships with our kids. We want them to share with us. We want us, we wanna be able to share more about our lives with them as they get older. We wanna be vulnerable with them at times. We wanna talk honestly about our mistakes.

And I think those are great things. So, you know, I, I'm all for it and I think it has this downside. You know, I think it's got a, the downside that there are, you know, too many parents who would. Treating their kids at young ages as their best friends and looking to get their emotional needs fulfilled by their kids, when sometimes they have to be the parent and do things that are gonna be hard and they're gonna make their kids angry, and that becomes harder for them to do.

I think kids need to idealize their parents too, and so, you know, it's not helpful sometimes to be . Interact with your kid as if you are peers or friends. You have to retain your authority in certain situations, and that can be undermined. So there are just things to be careful of with this, but I think the general trend's a really good one.

I mean, I think particularly for dads, you know, the number of dads who now have close relationships with their kids has increased, super gratifying for the dads as well as for the kids. So

Chris Duffy: in the conclusion of your book, you say there's a, there's a paragraph almost at the very end of, of the book, of the parents, we mean to be, there's a kind of beauty in being a moral person, a beauty that our best novelists and dramatists have evoked since ancient times.

We are moved by kindness, generosity, and integrity. We are moved to because the deepest forms of morality, of knowing and valuing others are also the deepest forms of love. And we are awed by the clarity of new moral awareness and by moral transformation, by the capacity of human beings to reckon with their moral fail.

Links. So you talk about how there's this societal idealization of these qualities of morality, and yet a lot of us struggle with taking what we love to see in others and in history and in fiction, and put it into our actual lives as something that we value in our families and want to, to instill that it's a lot easier to focus on, you know, achievement or happiness or,

Feeling good for the, that, that day than it is to focus on these, these big moral values, these, these principles,

Rick Weissbourd: ear earlier generations throughout most, most of our history understood something crucially important, which is that we have to keep morality front and center in child raising. And that you have to do that intentionally.

You have to do it systematically. Schools in this country, were not . Founded to cultivate academic achievement. They were f founded to cultivate ethical characters. Colleges. Almost all our colleges were founded to cultivate ethical character as well. It used to be mother's responsibility throughout most of our history to prepare children, primary responsibility was to prepare children to be good citizens.

It should have been fathers too. Part of the blame is the self-esteem movement in the last sort of 40 years, 50 years, and this idea that if you feel good about yourself, you're gonna be a better person. And I think that's wrong. I think a lot of people with self-esteem, you know, high school athletes who abuse their girlfriends, I.

Politicians, corporate leaders can have high self-esteem and not be good people.

Chris Duffy: Hmm.

Rick Weissbourd: And I think our other generations understood that if we want kids to be moral, if we want people to be moral, we have to be very deliberate about it. And we have to create institutions that cultivate important virtues, moral qualities.

We have to have moral conversations. That commitment has dissipated, and I feel urgently we gotta find ways to restore it.

Chris Duffy: So for people who are listening. What are three things that people can do to actually put some of these ideas into practice? What can you actually do to, to, to change this?

Rick Weissbourd: Lemme just mention a couple things parents can do.

I mean, maybe that's a good place I. A good place to start. So rather you know the reflex as a parent, as you say to your kid, the only thing that matters to me is that you're happy. What if you said to your kid, the only thing that matters to me is that you're kind Or you know, you could say the only thing that matters is that you're kind and happy.

Henry James evidently said on his death bed, there's three things that are important in life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind. Kids say, when you give 'em the choice, what's most important to you? Achieving happiness. Caring. Kids tend to rank happiness or achievement first and the other second and caring third.

But when you ask parents, what's most important to you in child raising, I. They say that my kids are caring. They don't say that my kids are high achieving. And when you ask kids, how would your parents rank these things for you? Achievement, happiness, caring. They think their parents would rank achievement first, happiness, second, caring third, or they tend to to think that way.

So you know, one of the questions. I encourage parents to ask their kids to Your point is, what do you think is most important to me? Do you think it's most important to me that you're a good person or that you're a happy person or that you're a high achieving person? Do you think it's more important to me that you get good grades or that you're a good person?

Hmm. And I think they're gonna be surprised by what some of their kids say in response to that.

Chris Duffy: It's also an interesting question as an adult to ask your parent.

Rick Weissbourd: Yes, it is. These are really interesting conversations, I think, to, to have. We started initiatives to kind of restore the moral life of colleges.

You know that I think our higher ed institution should be focused on, on moral development, on generosity and grace and fairness and caring and daily interactions, but also in civic responsibility. And, and I think that's true of our schools too, that, you know, we have to put caring for others, caring community, front and center in, in schooling again.

When kids are in caring communities and where they feel connected and they feel anchored to adults, they learn at higher levels too.

Chris Duffy: One other idea. . That really hit me in my gut was the idea that one way that we can influence our, our kids, but also, again, I think this is so true for interpersonal relationships of all kinds, is that the self becomes stronger and more mature less by being praised than by being known.

That it's more important that our interactions with our children or with other people reflect our knowledge of them, of them as a specific, unique person than that we are praising the thing that we, we want them to do.

Rick Weissbourd: There's constructive praise. There's praise that's not constructive, and I think there's a lot of praising going on in ways that.

Kids can experience as as meaningless. You know, the kids know when they've accomplished something and when they've not, and a lot of times we praise them, they can feel patronized when they haven't accomplished anything.

And I think it's based as you said, on a false notion of how the self grows, that people think about the self as a tank, and the more you praise it, the more you're sort of filling up the tank.

But I think the, the self grows when, when we feel known, when we feel like the key people in our lives have listened to us and understand us, and appreciate those qualities in us, that we appreciate in ourselves, that we value in ourselves. I. When they're able to reflect back and distill who we are in ways that are meaningful to us, when they're able to help, in the case of our parents, when they're, they're able to help choreograph our lives in ways that really respect deep knowing and appreciation of who we are.

So I think the listening, knowing, appreciation, are really at the heart

Chris Duffy: of the matter. So how have you thought about that in your own parenting now that you have three adults as your children?

Rick Weissbourd: There's things that I, I, I felt were very important for my kids to embrace and, and I also fully expected 'em and excited when they, I.

Take another road in, in some respects. So there's nothing more important to me than my kids. Were good people, and I think they're all really great people, and I feel super proud about that. I mean, I think they're good friends. I think they're good community members. I think they care about the, about the right things, but if they depart and, you know, do things that are different than what I did or what my wife did, I, I'm mostly

Chris Duffy: super excited about that.

Well, Rick Weissbourd, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been

Rick Weissbourd: wonderful. Thank you, Chris, and it's great to reconnect.

Chris Duffy: That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for kindly listening to our show. Thank you to today's guest, Dr. Rick Weissbourd.

His book is called. The parents we mean to be, and he's the director of Making Caring Common. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other [email protected]. How To Be a Better Human is put together by a team that I regularly receive moral instruction from.

On the TED side, we've got my surrogate parents, Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bojanini, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson. And Matheus Salles,  who both want to make sure that truth in podcasting is standard and commonplace On the PRX side, they're kind and high achieving without any of the toxic pressure.

Morgan Flannery, Noor Gil, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please share this episode with a friend or a family member, someone who you respect their morals, or someone who you think has terrible morals and needs to learn better morals. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human.

Until then, take care.