Giving Versus Taking
On raising girls — and boys — to balance their own needs with everyone else's.
Over the past few months, I have been thinking a lot about the tension between raising my kids to treat others well and raising my kids to treat themselves well. I struggle with this as a parent in large part because I struggle with this as a human being — I’ve never been sure how to balance being kind to myself while also being kind to others. I’ve never known how to set and enforce self-protective boundaries; my inclination, like that of so many other women, is to accommodate and to take up as little space as possible.
My 9-year-old daughter already shows the same inclinations. Last week, she and two friends volunteered to make a flyer together for a school club. The deadline was Wednesday of this week. Over the weekend, my daughter reached out to her friends via text, asking for help and input, but they didn’t reply. (To be fair, I think they had busy weekends.) She waited and waited and I advised her to set a deadline for their input, after which she could just make the flyer herself. Having to complete the entire project herself when she thought it would be a team effort is not great, but I figured it was better than waiting and waiting and then having to do it all by herself at the very last minute.
They didn’t get back to her by her deadline, so she made the flyer herself and brought it into school on Monday. Her friends didn’t like it and asked her to revise it. She did. They rejected that version, too.
She asked me what to do, and I told her that perhaps she should stop offering to accommodate them.
“But Mom, they might get mad at me,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “You can’t control their feelings. But you can control what you put yourself through. You’ve already done so much work on this, and you’ve been more than fair to them. I think you should think about being fair to you.”
As I said this to her, I recognized that I would have done the exact same thing she did up until a few years ago — to keep trying to make others happy even if it required putting myself through hell. If I’m honest, I still sometimes do this today. I’m slowly getting better at setting boundaries and advocating for myself, but I am still very much a work in progress.
Part of the problem, for me, is that I’ve struggled for a long time to recognize what was going on in situations like this — to recognize that I had the opportunity and the ability to self-advocate. Another big problem was that I had internalized that setting boundaries around others was somehow unkind or unfair to them — which, of course, is a fallacy, a product of how women and girls have been socialized. And I have always been so afraid of other people’s anger and disappointment that I have done everything possible to avoid it.
I’m trying my best to challenge these notions with my daughter — to highlight situations in which she can (and should) enforce boundaries, to help her understand that self-advocacy is not the same thing as selfishness, and to help her recognize that it is not her job to make other people happy. Especially boys and men.
I had an opportunity to address the last part with my daughter recently. And the experience opened my eyes to the fact that I’d actually been completely overlooking the other half of the equation.