Parenting for Purpose
Most of the parenting books on the market today are a backlash against so-called “intensive parenting” techniques, such as helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting, etc. I do agree with the idea that parents should back off and allow children to make mistakes and fail. But I think the focus on helping students develop resiliency, also called “grit,” is misplaced. I think focusing on helping children develop purpose is a better approach.
Victor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and founder of the modern-day purpose movement, disliked America’s enshrined concept of the “pursuit of happiness.” He said “It is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy’. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy.” Frankl argued humans can’t pursue happiness, success, or grit. Rather humans can only pursue purpose, and allow happiness, success, and grit to ensue from purpose.
A child forced to work without meaning year after year will eventually ask: “Grit for what? Why am I working this hard? What is this all for?” These are the questions that students suffering from negative stress and anxiety ask. In the same way, as David Brooks describes in Second Mountain, adults who chase career success without meaning will eventually find the summit of their first mountain unsatisfying — and often go on to pursue what Brooks describes as a second, more meaningful mountain of fulfillment.
Purpose-driven students manage stress differently because they link inner meaning to outer challenges.
Purpose-driven students manage stress differently because they link inner meaning to outer challenges. This is why purpose-driven students can thrive under the same workload that can make other types of children (goal-driven, dreamers, or disengaged) implode. Purpose is a game-changer for students, teachers, and school communities. That’s why I believe the question guiding the future of learning is: “How can K12 schools help students explore, discover, and articulate purpose?”
Stanford University defines purpose as a “stable intention that is meaningful to self and beneficial to the world.” In other words, purpose is a core of meaning on the inside that is linked to a beneficial, larger-than-self action on the outside. Having a sense of purpose does not have to be world-saving. It can be quite simple like “lighting up a room so others can smile” and can be seen in a student who helps others to find humor in all situations. The purpose of a child who helps a sibling learn to read despite a learning difference might be driven by “helping others overcome obstacles and thrive.”
So what would parenting look like if we helped students pursue purpose? Here are the main things I work on myself as a parent.
5 Principles for Purpose Parenting
1) Adults First
“You can’t give away what you don’t own,” says Richard Leider, the best-selling author of The Power of Purpose. In other words, parents and teachers have to do the hard work of exploring and clarifying their own sense of purpose if they are going to coach children to do the same. Modeling a purpose-driven life is the most powerful thing we can do for our children, in my experience.
Living with a sense of purpose means being in touch with who you are in a heartfelt way, and using your gifts to impact the world around us in positive ways. Again, purpose can be quite simple and can emerge in small ways and moments such as the way we parent, manage a team at work, volunteer at a PTO or non-profit, take care of someone in need or contribute to our communities. Purpose is not revealed to us in a “mountaintop” moment, nor is it a luxury. We uncover our purpose through hard work and daily discipline, and purpose is a survival skill for the increasingly busy world we navigate.
We uncover our purpose through hard work and daily discipline, and purpose is a survival skill for the increasingly busy world we navigate.
2) Diverse, Purposeful Communities
Purpose does not happen in a vacuum. Rather research suggests that purpose most often happens in a collective, particularly a diverse collective. “Identity is not the same thing as purpose, but the two are highly correlated,” say’s William Damon, Director of Stanford’s Center on Adolescence. When students are part of a diverse community, they have an easier time understanding how they are different. And when students begin to understand their unique identity, they are one step closer to purpose. Students can be part of a diverse community hopefully at school, church, through sports teams, or other community-based organizations. I live in Boulder, Colorado, which is a homogenous and wealthy community, so breaking out of the bubble of white privilege is a challenge for my family.
Apart from being diverse, kids need purpose-driven communities. In other words, communities that have a higher cause or purpose than just the organization itself. Although our family does not belong to a church or go to church regularly, I have noticed that schools with a religious foundation (Quaker, Episcopal, Catholic) often advance faster on purpose-driven learning because purpose is already baked into the school mission. At our family, we do have the tradition of saying a prayer at dinner together and reading from Daily World, a book of readings from different faith traditions.
3) Learning as Thinking, Feeling, and Doing
Purpose Parenting affirms your choice to send your child to the most innovative school you can find. During my classroom observations, the most important thing I look for is children and teachers who are able to relax, laugh, and feel safe enough to drop into their unique personalities. Brené Brown says “vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation.” I agree. In other words, the best learning happens when children can take off their emotional armor and drop into who they really are.
Schools in the past have focused on thinking, or helping students develop key cognitive skills and content knowledge. Purpose-driven schools approach learning as thinking, feeling, and doing — all at the same time. When we integrate thinking with feeling, we allow students to connect emotionally with learning and bring their best self to learning. When we integrate thinking with doing, we offer students the agency to make, create, and venture off campus to explore real problems with real people. At the center of thinking, feeling, and doing, students have a better chance of exploring meaning.
4) Control Technology
I am not a Luddite. In fact, over the long term, I think technology could save our planet. I believe Artificial Intelligence will force us to be human as never before; that social media might be the one force that unites our planet and helps us transcend national differences; and that solar energy and electric cars are potential solutions to climate change.
Our children are on the bleeding edge of a massive societal shift caused by technology and, as parents, we need to be strategic.
But in the short-term, I am less optimistic. Our children are on the bleeding edge of a massive societal shift caused by technology and, as parents, we need to be strategic. A growing body of neuroscience proves that too much screen time is harmful to child brain development. We all know it’s not healthy for children to spend hours each day playing video games, to experience bullying over social media, or to go to sleep right after using their phones.
In our family, my wife and I have worked hard — and have struggled with our kids — to lock down phones, tablets and laptops with screen time limits, automatic turn off times, and app restrictions. We have watched the documentary Screenagers and had hard conversations. We monitor our kids’ social media accounts, limit gaming time, and discourage technology use in bedrooms. Each parent has to determine where to draw the line with technology but the old teaching adage applies: “It’s easier to lighten up than tighten up.” In other words, start strict and then gradually loosen control as a child shows the ability to manage technology.
5) Brief Interventions Matter
During our 3-day virtual Youth Purpose Summits, we talk about Stanford’s Youth Purpose Survey, which is a 45-minute sit-down interview between a researcher and a student, designed to measure purpose in youth. These researchers have discovered that about 20 percent of high school students are purpose-driven (more on the research here). I also mentioned that many of these questions have been co-opted now as essay prompts by the Common Application as colleges increasingly seek purpose-driven kids, who are in general deep learners and effective stress managers.
What I did not mention is that Stanford researchers noticed a curious phenomenon after administering the YPS to thousands of students: months after being surveyed, many students would get back in touch with Stanford and ask for a copy of the questions or the transcript of their interview. Stanford’s Bill Damon had an idea: he sent researchers to survey a group of students who had already been surveyed and also a control group of students who had not been surveyed. The results were surprising: it turns out that a 45-minute conversation between a researcher and a student was enough to push certain students into the purpose-driven quadrant.
As the founder of World Leadership School, I have noticed time and time again how our travel programs can have a similar transformative influence on certain students. After a student travel program to Peru a decade ago, a parent in Chicago wrote to us, “What did you do with my daughter? Isabelle came home a very expanded version of herself and I like it. I always saw her potential, but during the ten-day trip, she seems to have blossomed into the girl I always knew was there.”
Our travel programs are organized around the paradigm of disconnect, decenter and re-envision: students disconnect from technology and their normal rhythms of life; they are decentered, or pushed off balance, by immersive experiences; and they are paired with local students and inspiring leaders in order to re-envision who they are, and how they connect to the world.
As a parent, think about opportunities when you can help your students disconnect, decenter, and re-envision. Maybe it’s a summer camp experience, a family backpacking trip, a travel experience to somewhere new, a volunteer experience, or a family tradition of having a technology-free Sunday at home. Brief interventions matter.
Parenting for Purpose Strategies
Beyond these five foundational ideas, here are some concrete strategies for helping our children embark on what the late Sir Ken Robinson calls the “two great human journeys:” There is the journey on the inside to ask “Who am I? And there is the journey out into the world to ask “How do I connect and contribute?” This is purpose in a nutshell: meaning on the inside that connects to beneficial actions on the outside.
Parenting Strategies for “Who Am I?”
Be Vulnerable
Like many of his own generation, my own father struggled to express emotions and I only saw him cry a few times. Emotions were not common in my family, nor were they common in my public high school in McLean, Virginia, of 2,000-plus students. If we are to create vulnerable classrooms and deep learning experiences, teachers need to learn how to bring emotion back into school in safe but powerful ways.
The same applies to parenting. When something difficult is happening in my personal life, I know I am going to communicate that to my children unconsciously through my parenting. So I tell my children what I am experiencing and how it makes me feel. I cry when I need to and I definitely show frustration when I feel it, though I try to model breathing, walking away, etc. I’m not perfect. My kids have seen me have the full range of emotions, and I think that’s ok. To create authentic and vulnerable children, we need to be authentic and vulnerable parents.
The health and wellness industry now generates about $5 trillion in revenue each year, and accounts for over 5 percent of global economic output (source: Global Wellness Institute). This industry sells everything from herbal supplements to yoga tights, and the general message is: wellness = happiness. But psychiatrists like Lisa Damour, author of Untangled, disagrees. She defines wellness as “the ability to feel the right emotion, at the right time, and be able to cope with that emotion.” I agree. Who would want to feel a single emotion all the time? That would be boring. Since COVID-19 began, I started meditating for a few minutes each morning in order to see my emotions and better manage them. It’s ok to feel sad or angry right now, in fact that’s the right emotion to be feeling. But we don’t have to be consumed by these emotions. Mindfulness helps us see our emotions, put them in context, and get on with our day. It also allows parents to be vulnerable with their children in ways they can (most of the time) manage.
Observe and Coach
Calling Cards is an activity I learned to do with corporate executives to help them understand their natural gifts — those qualities we can’t remember learning, people observe us doing well, and sometimes caused us to enter a flow state. When I did Calling Cards a few years ago with my 11-year-old son Sebastian, he chose five cards that helped me understand him as a combination of the Enterprising and Artistic domains. He explained his cards by saying “I want to work with people to get things done by writing things and moving around.” I see those five cards more and more every year in him, and I am sure I will see them when he is an adult as well.
Observing kids to see where they turn when they have nothing else to do (and no technology to distract them) is a powerful way for parents to understand children for who they really are (not as who we want them to be). Do they clean things up? Bake? Draw? Wander in the woods? Organize a soccer game? As parents, we need to be more like executive coaches. We need to observe relentlessly. We need to develop the ability to listen deeply and both understand what our children are thinking (perspective taking) and also feeling (empathy). We need to paraphrase and summarize what we hear and play it back to them. We need to resist the temptation to solve problems for them. And we need to find opportunities that align with our children’s gifts and plop them down in front of our children — and hope they stick.
Instill Values
I am always inspired by parents who model “giving back” to children by taking the time to volunteer as a family. All families instill values in children just as organizations instill values in employees, regardless of whether we name the values or not. The more deliberate and intentional we are about creating and instilling positive values, the better. Values can include honest communication, hard work, teamwork, family first, adventure, etc. Some families put inspirational quotes on the fridge or wall that represent cherished values. One way to identify your family’s values is to imagine a conversation where you are talking to a good friend about the best memories you have with your family. What stories would you tell? What values do those stories reflect?
Be Grateful for Struggle
As a toddler, I started speaking a year after most toddlers and I stuttered. That stutter lasted me until I was 22 years old and led my parents to take me to numerous speech therapists. In middle and high school, my stutter mostly prevented me from answering a phone, speaking in class, and engaging in normal group conversation. During middle school, I remember hiding in the library until the first-period bell rang because I feared stuttering in front of my peers. As painful as those experiences were, I am grateful for my stutter because it gave me a unique perspective. I was able to see things from the outside. I realized that social popularity is pretty arbitrary and should determine one’s own self-worth. I developed the ability to see others’ suffering more clearly and sense how people around me are feeling. As Victor Frankl taught us, suffering can lead to tremendous meaning, and even purpose, if we respond in a way that allows us to learn and grow. I have seen, over and over again, how struggle often benefits students in the long term. I actually worry about students who don’t face hardship and for whom things seem too easy. As parents, we certainly don’t want trauma for our students, but we should be grateful for — and help our children respond to — hardships.
Parenting Strategies for “How Do I Connect?”
Sparks and Mentors
One of my favorite (but not well-known) parenting books is Peter Benson’s Sparks: How Parents Can Help Ignite the Hidden Strengths of Teenagers (2008). The parent’s job, Benson says, is to observe sparks of passion and meaning and then help the child attach to a third-party mentor, such as a coach, teacher, rabbi, priest, girl scout leader, etc.. Benson cites compelling research that it is third-party mentors who commonly coach students towards purposeful pursuits, not so much the parents. Benson calls these mentors “Spark Champions” and he says it’s the parent’s job to recruit and manage the mentors and be a “Spark Captain.”
Achievement vs. Meaning
The forces of standardization (SATs, APs, and GPA) and personalization (story, purpose, passions) often come into direct conflict, especially in high school. It’s not a solvable problem. Rather it’s a polarity or a paradox that parents have to balance carefully. If we push our kids to relentlessly achieve, we run the risk of stressing out our kids and having them disengage from learning. If we ignore the demands of the college admissions process, our children may be disappointed by their college experience. But, where possible, parents should try to hold the pressures of standardization at bay, and encourage students to regularly connect to pursuits they find meaningful. My family is constantly trying to do less, where possible, in order to create more space for meaning.
