As a teenager, I was really serious about doing good in the world. I volunteer at my local library and as a tutor for struggling students. When an international charity came to our school and gave a presentation about starving children abroad, I gave them all my lunch money. As a child I was the target audience for dozens of pitches about how I could do good in the world – from fighting climate change to ending global hunger.

Now, as an adult raising my own children, I have deeply mixed feelings about how I was taught all these important moral messages and how I see them imparted to teenagers today. I think when we talk to kids about how to do good in the world.

Here are some things I wish I had been told, that would have been incredible conversations with my parents, and that would have better equipped me to achieve real good in the world as an adult.

Be confused openly and out loud, but treat the confusion as something that can be resolved

Often, I fell between two camps about how to do good in the world from adults.

One camp was full of overwhelming, yet conflicting, certainties: obsessing over ditching plastic bags in favor of reusable cloth bags, or telling me that I should not I could use at least 50 if I lost them. I was told not to use plastic water bottles because of the chemicals, or that Metals were worse for the environment.

Obviously, this can be confusing and ultimately disillusioning. If a situation is complicated, and presented to you without complexity, it’s easy to lose confidence in parts that are really simple when you learn the whole picture.

The other camp (probably made up of disillusioned veterans of the first camp) tended to go too far in the other direction, insisting that nothing really mattered and that it was impossible to know whether any organization had done any good. It was there that I heard that there was no point in giving money to homeless people because they would waste it on drugs, and that there was no point in pushing for political change because no one in Washington was trustworthy, and there was no way to tell whether foreign charities had made a world of recipients. good place Sometimes, people say these things to me and I want to give up completely. Sometimes they just wanted me to “choose with your heart”! Rather than trying to figure out what worked.

Either way, it was also isolated. All I wanted to hear was that my questions were good questions and possible to answer. We can see what people experiencing homelessness do with money (they Don’t spend on all medicines) and which international charities are the best We can research topics that are interesting and important to us. One of the most essential transitions between childhood and adolescence is the transition from being a consumer of advice, knowledge, and wisdom to being a producer of those things. It can be very powerful to say to a young person, “I don’t know the answer, and maybe no one knows the answer, but let’s try to learn it.” Knowledge is not handed down from above; It is produced, and children deserve to see and be a part of that process.

Don’t use your children as a way to relieve your own guilt, frustration, or disappointment—and teach them to recognize when other adults do it.

Especially some adult climate activists Relate to children in ways that can be very harmful. Often, they are disappointed that our society has done so little about climate change. So they write off their own generation as hopeless and say that the only hope is children, putting a huge burden on the shoulders of people who are just beginning to figure out their own priorities.

Sometimes, children receive exaggerated messages about climate change, such as that they will personally die young because of climate change, which is largely untrue. When I see kids holding signs that say “Why should I study for a future I won’t have?”, I don’t feel inspired by their conviction; I feel disappointed that someone, perhaps someone wracked with their own guilt and anxiety about climate change, is telling children that there is no future. It’s not a good way to motivate them to fight for it, or a fair way to enable them to set their own priorities.

Needless to say, education is one of the best ways to take a child’s stand against climate change, not just the future. It is doing grave injustice to discourage children from that path by telling them that there is no world in the world to make a difference.

We all have moments of despair and hopelessness, but children are not equipped to take expressions of despair with an appropriate grain of salt. It doesn’t hold on to them.

Take your children’s moral beliefs seriously

Adolescents felt deeply moral convictions. They may be vegetarians, activists for social causes, passionately angry about issues, exploring religion or proselytizing, wanting to know why your family doesn’t give all its money to charity.

I know this because as a teenager I became a vegetarian, became a committed active philanthropist, became very concerned about artificial intelligence, explored Jewish observance, came out as a lesbian, spent most of my savings to help a friend in a bad situation at home. , and — I’m sure — gave my parents several gray hairs.

But the important thing is, none of these were “phases”, just waiting patiently. I am truly a lesbian, now married to a wonderful wife. We invite all our friends to our weekly Shabbat dinner. I’ve changed the exact details of my diet over the years, but I still avoid factory-farmed meat. I am still an active philanthropist; My wife and I donate 30 percent of our combined income to the best global health charities we can identify. If my parents had seen the radical change in my life and decided to talk me out of them, or assumed that I would outgrow them, they would have missed out on connecting with me, their child trying to understand his moral priorities and a confused Personal identity in the world.

You may worry if your child is changing rapidly and taking on many new priorities that you may not understand. And they can’t stick with all their new ideas. But you want to build a relationship with your real child, the person in front of you, not some extrapolated future version of them.

It means valuing the empathy, curiosity, kindness, and conviction that led your child down whatever path they’re on, and it means truly listening to them and learning alongside and from them. This seriousness and respect will mean the world to your kids — and help them conquer the world.

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