We want children to thrive. We wish for happy, healthy, and successful children who flourish as adults. But how we instil values and character strength in children often seems mysterious. Is it through discipline, living our own values, treating children with respect, or a combination of the many ways we interact with our children?
Our family values are a reflection of who we are and how we parent. When we articulate and live those values, our children learn life lessons. They learn to express themselves, solve problems, grow from mistakes, and develop other skills and abilities that lead to fulfilling lives. Parents learn, too.
Research shows that parents, grandparents, teachers, and other mentors help children become their own heroes when they walk alongside them as helpers. When they share stories of their own lives that focus on internal struggle, they help children understand the importance of the journey within.
Social scientists who have studied how adults influence the next generation in positive ways found intriguing themes in their stories. Their stories shared:
- how they learned through overcoming obstacles.
- how they became aware of themselves through suffering.
- how adversity paved a path to a better life.
- how success was embedded in the journey, not in the outcome.
In many ways, these stories mirror the stages in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, a template on which most hero stories are based. In mythological stories, heroes are called upon to face difficult challenges. Their adventures are filled with obstacles to overcome. They feel distraught. Fearful. Emotionally paralyzed.
What happens next? Heroes always encounter helpers during the journey. These helpers show up as wise people, role models, and mentors that support the hero. Helpers ease the hero’s suffering, walking alongside as they dig deeply for internal answers. They encourage the hero to struggle, to learn from failure and temptation.
Myth stories always end with transformation and deep learning for the hero—the kind of learning that is carried forward to life’s next adventure. These heroic stories have been used to inspire, motivate, and transfer cultural values to children.
The key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward. With the understanding, here’s how we can make it more likely we raise heroes than bystanders:
1. Foster their heroic imaginations. We need to get children to consider how it is that heroes see the world. For starters, heroes have a strong awareness of things that aren’t right. They pick up on the cues that suggest someone might be in trouble—or headed that way.
2. Teach children that they have the power to resolve a conflict. Conflict is not a bad thing unless we don’t have the skills we need to resolve it. In order to act heroically, children need to have enough confidence in their interpersonal skills that they can stand up for what they believe in. Teaching positive conflict resolution, grit and the growth mind-set can really help with this.
3. Model care and empathy towards others, while downplaying the importance of achievement outcomes.
4. Express the expectation that children will act heroically. Research shows that children report they are more likely to intervene when a schoolmate is being bullied if they believe that their parents and friends expect them to act to support victims.
Every one of us can be a hero. We are all born with this tremendous capacity to be anything, and we get shaped by our circumstances—by the family or the culture or the time period in which we happen to grow up.
Essentially, we’re trying to build the social habits of heroes, to build a focus on the other, shifting away from the “me” and toward the “we.” As the poet John Donne wrote, “No man [or woman] is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Source: https://www.rootsofaction.com/role-of-heroes-for-children/; https://www.rootsofaction.com/family-values/; https://www.rootsofaction.com/developing-character-strengths-a-vital-goal-of-education-part-2/; https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_raise_a_hero; https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_makes_a_hero
Writer: Aulia Nurdini
Editor: Todd Cordy
