The Gift of Identity: Pass It On
Kids deserve the gift of a stable identity. It’s up to us to give it to them.
First things first…
Wishing you a heartfelt Happy Thanksgiving!
Truly. 🧡
Ah, the Thanksgiving Feast, which ushers in the manic, glorious festival of December.
Indeed, it’s Holiday Time. 🥂
How lucky we are to live lives filled with such blessing and abundance.
Let’s remember to be still and take in the incandescent sparkle of the season,
to rest and remember good things,
to savor long, frothy sips from the warm cup of goodness,
to watch wistfully out of windows at the magic of falling snow…
to feast, to drink, to pray and be changed,
to reach out and touch God,
and even if we don’t dance, to dance at least a little,
to Ho Ho Ho and give and receive gifts…
What a gift is this life. Don’t you think?
I invite you to think with me about this capacity for joy; to consider that true, blessed contentment within is itself a gift; that to carry happiness in spite of life’s sorrows is a skill that was taught to us; that we in turn must give its secrets to the rising generations after us.
This is the Kids First way.
Truly, good instruction about what it means to be human is helpful, and providing our children with a vital awareness of our shared, basic humanity is essential.
Let’s teach them to look up, and to look outward.
To God, and our brothers.
These two seeds of wisdom, once sewn, will shoot up into a life that is soundly other-centered and bursting with meaning — and this is what we want for our kids, and their kids, and theirs, and theirs.
Out of all the gifts we can give the young ones in our care, these two principles are the best gifts… not only because they benefit our kids, but because they ripple outward and benefit everyone around them — wives and husbands, children and grandmas and grandpas, families and friends and neighbors and even whole communities of people, even nations.
The gifts of looking up and looking outward miraculously seed and sprout even more gifts: A mustard seed of faith in a child blooms into God-honoring humility in a grown man or woman, opening up deep wells of joy…. And service to others flourishes into a purposeful generosity of spirit, which, like a mighty oak sending stabilizing roots down deep into the earth, provides strength which lasts for generations.
We want our kids to declare firmly: I know who I am. My life has meaning. I can bless others.
They deserve the gift of such a solid, resilient identity. It’s up to us to gift it.
The cultural custom of passing the baton of identity and how to be in the world is violently disrupted. Today, kids are impoverished in spirit, starving for essential soul nourishment, stunted. Many suffer with debilitating anxiety, unforgiving rigidity, depression, and a sense of self that can only be described as… unmoored and fragmented.
For generations Z and Alpha, true lasting joy is seldom, if ever, felt. Contentment seems out of their reach. The practices of thanksgiving and happiness are never exercised. They don’t know that these practices are the key to fulfillment, and even if they did, they don’t know how to practice them.
This is because somewhere along the way, our cultural understanding of identity took on higher-rung, superficial and political meanings. We discarded the foundational essentials, and our kids are suffering.
Certainly, the kinds of entertainment youth consume play a large role in their hyperfocus on surface identity markers, but our cultural abandonment of our faith traditions and spiritually bankrupt lessons in our schools are just as culpable.
More and more, K-12 school lessons present our children and youth with what psychologist Steven Stosny calls “constricted” perceptions of identity — namely, those aspects of identity at the top of the identity pyramid:
Classroom lessons that create “constricted” perceptions of identity in youth lead to tragic suffering in these individuals, according to Dr. Stosny, suffering which only can be ameliorated by the child learning to expand his or her sense of identity to include the more foundational aspects.
Dr. Stosny’s understanding of the role of identity in developing a stable, happy sense of self puts schools — both our K12 schools and our universities — to shame, as they are actively harming our kids with instruction that disrupts healthy identity formation.
When children are taught to identify with their basic, shared humanity — the bottom rung — this is shown to alleviate anxiety. On the other hand, teaching kids to hyperfocus on superficial, high-rung identifying characteristics that set them apart from others fosters resentment.
In lieu of the healthy, foundational practices of faith, gratitude and serving others (looking upward and outward), today’s kids instead spend a lot of time ruminating on their feelings of discontentment and the anxiousness that accompanies that. Unequipped with the skills to process these bad feelings, they employ blame and obsess over higher-rung aspects of their identity — those aspects which foster a cycle of self-absorption that is difficult to escape.
Healthy people base their identity on the solid, foundational aspects of being: basic humanity and character.
Dr. Stosny’s bottom foundation block, Basic Humanity, is a sense of connection with all humans. It increases respect, appreciation, compassion, and kindness. Identifying with basic humanity alleviates the feelings of isolation that are integral to most psychological distress. It humanizes perceptions of others and culls the negative judgments of self and others that produce so much anxiety and resentment. When in touch with our basic, shared humanity, we automatically like ourselves better and treat others humanely.
Character, the next rung, is also foundational to a stable identity. Character consists of mental and moral qualities (e.g.: honesty, flexibility, humility, resilience, generosity, accountability), in addition to personality and temperament. In short, character is how we tend to think, feel, and behave. It’s who the soul is inside the body, the person who possesses the surface traits. It’s the individual who has the mind, the spirit in the flesh, the ghost in the machine.
Basic humanity, and character. Focusing on the things which are most important about who we are promotes the development of a broader, richer, and more resilient sense of self. On the other hand, a narrow identity causes heartache. Dr. Stosny even writes that people with narrow or constricted identities suffer anxiety, rigidity, depression, and, in extreme cases, a fragmented sense of self.
Identifying with any of the upper rungs of the pyramid, at the expense of the foundational aspects, causes prolonged stress or dysphoria. Most of the ideological and cultural strife in the world stems from hyperfocus on any of the upper rungs while violating the foundation.
Dr. Stosny writes, “The same culture wars that have devolved public discourse into name-calling and pejorative adjectives can destabilize individual identity by making it reactive and narrow. They make us behave uncharacteristically and violate our basic humanity.”
Anxiousness, depression, and resentment are ameliorated in invoking in ourselves a sense of our basic humanity and in exercising our capacity for compassion, kindness, and appreciation. This is the recipe for achieving tolerance and respect for others, and for feeling sure about our selves and our valuable contribution to the world.
As you can imagine, kids who are taught these foundational psychological principles about identity enjoy an enhanced sense of self, and even become invulnerable to harsh self-judgments and any disrespectful regard by others. In other words, with good instruction about identity, kids can become anti-fragile.
Unfortunately, schools don’t teach this. Instead, children are taught that their identity is an ever-changing spot on a “gender spectrum,” sexuality, sexual orientation, race, or other surface-level group affiliation — those small aspects at the top rungs of the identity pyramid. This disrupts stable identity formation and creates youth who are distressed, self-focused, and emotionally needy.
Starved. Stunted. Spiritually anemic. Fragile.
The holiday season serves as a welcome timeout to express gratitude for the gift of this life. My capacity for joy, gratitude and contentment — and yours— is a gift. Let us not neglect to pay it forward, to our kids.
Looking up, and looking outward.
To God, and my neighbor.
Happy Holidays.
— Katy
#KIDSFIRST
Read Identity Resilience, by Steven Stosny, PhD here.
Check out Let Kids Be Kids’ Substack here:
Watch this crucial presentation on identity disruption here:
Wow. Great stuff. What I find is that there is a total lack of passing on values to children. It’s the “love is love” crowd. It wreaks of “everything is subjective.” Within this guise, they attempt to allow a child to “come to their own conclusions about their values” (and sexuality, and political view) at age SEVEN! Children don’t just find identity. We instill it in them. It’s the nurture part of the great “nature vs nurture” existence. While the “everyone gets a trophy” parents are well meaning in their insistence on autonomy, it just doesn’t work.
Very thoughtful - and wise - piece. Thank you!