Tapestries-65 | Raising Ava

The why and how of building a sense of self.

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Late last year I wrote a piece that explored how Ava’s arrival had given me a greater sense of having skin in the game of the shape of the future. I finished the piece by stating I’d learned that “my opinions [about the world] are not just ideas, but also calls to action, to either try and change the conditions that Ava will confront as she gets older, and/or to figure out how to effectively prepare her for them.”

Ava is about 10 months old as I write this piece. In the first few months of her life, our primary responsibility as parents was to keep her alive and healthy. And now, as she grows and we collectively settle into a clearer routine as a family, I’ve found myself focusing more on the environment we’re cultivating in which she’ll develop. I think we’re doing the right thing by her, through providing enough love, security, sustenance and stimulation for her developing brain. But the feedback loop for answering the question am I doing a good job? is pretty long. So in parallel to the books, walks, toys, playgrounds and other kids that feature in Ava’s life today, I’ve been thinking about what it is we’re giving her, or endowing her with, to most effectively prepare her for the unknown future.

I’m sure there are many things we want to give our kids, and I’m very early in the journey of articulating and providing those things. But at this stage, if I could only pick one thing to give Ava, I would give her the gift of knowing who she is, or said another way, a strong sense of self. This is a piece about why, and how.

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The importance of a strong sense of self

One reason I’ve decided to prioritize a strong sense of self, is because it forms the foundation of good self-esteem, which I believe provides the most direct route to a life filled with security, balance, equanimity, and quality relationships. But it’s a hard quality to develop, especially in a culture that incentivizes behaviors that undermine our ability to build a strong sense of who we are. In addition to its link to self esteem, I also believe a strong sense of self is central to the ability to think for yourself, which is critically important in a world in which thinking for yourself, or challenging orthodoxy, is considered heretical, and where freedom of thought is really just the “freedom” to choose from a small set of pre-approved labels.

When we talk today about who we are, we’re pushed towards defining ourselves in reference to prevailing descriptors of identity. As I’ve written on many occasions over the years, I have issues with the identity labels we’re asked to use, but in this piece, I’m less focused on their substance, and more on how we’re asked to use them. Markers of identity are easily shareable through memes, emojis and membership of different groups. In contrast, a sense of self is difficult to articulate, and even more difficult to project. It’s a personal, nebulous, internal feeling upon which we build the rest of our psychology, ideas and worldviews. A sense of self is something quiet and considered, but unfortunately we live in a culture that prioritizes the loud and reactive.

If you ask a young person today who they are, they’re likely to rattle off a list of identity markers or political positions derived from our current social movements. Social movements can have worthy goals, but they’re often targeted at enlivening certain virtues (justice, equality etc.) that sit a layer above the bedrock of a person’s being, which is one way I’d describe a sense of self. While it’s important to define and pursue our own set of virtues over the course of our lives, my concept of a sense of self is more tied to character than virtue. Character is unchanging and timeless, and lives in the realm of the personal and individual, while values and virtues are more typically universal, and are prone shift in emphasis in reference to the prevailing cultural moment.

John Wooden (a legendary UCLA basketball coach) famously said “[t]he true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching.” Unfortunately, Ava will grow up in a world where everyone is watching each other, all of the time, and part of my responsibility is to impress upon her the importance of pursuing the humble character built in private, instead of the righteous virtue projected externally. I want her sense of self to be constant and durable, because the only other constant she’ll confront in her life is change — both in the world around her, and her ideas about it. In a booked called Consilience, E.O. Wilson describes the process of fitting together our personal principles into something “we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true.”

I want Ava to move through a changing and challenging world with with a strong sense of herself, so that she lives a life where her personal decisions feel good and true.

How to help Ava cultivate a strong sense of self

At this point, it’s important to remember I’m talking about a 10-month old girl. So for this to be a useful piece, it needs to come down from the abstract why, to the practical how. It’s also important to keep in mind that the concept of actual parenting remains relatively academic to me at this point, and as a result, I want to assure you I’m proceeding with a healthy dose of humility about my ability to direct my daughter’s path. Before we jump into the next section, I also want to be clear that this is less a piece about the details of our experience as parents or time with Ava, and more about ideas (in this case, a sense of self) we can build our parenting style around as we (and Ava) grow.

Now, with these qualifiers in mind, here are three things I’m going to try and cultivate, together with Tali, to help Ava develop a strong sense of self.

#1 Help her live her life without an audience

I believe many of the challenges of growing up (or living as an adult) today can be explained by looking at the way we project our lives, and how we consume the lives of others. By on the one hand posting and sharing, and on the other consuming and scrolling, we are simultaneously performer and audience in the unfolding of our own lives, and the lives of those around us. I call this the performer-audience construct.¹

One theory of the self suggests that we build our self-images upon the version of ourselves we see reflected back to us by those around us. By projecting an idealized version of ourselves online, and then watching it reflected back to us in the vast array of fun-house mirrors that is social media, we create a powerful and perverse feedback loop for developing our self-image. By living in this performer-audience construct, we are submitting ourselves to living in conditions that make it very difficult to establish a stable sense of self. Bo Burnham, in Make Happy, finishes with the following: “I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”

I don’t know what social media will mean for Ava in a few years. I don’t even know if young people would call it that today, as it presupposes there’s a type of media that isn’t social, which may be foreign to them. But I do know that we’ve collectively failed to honestly ask ourselves why it is that we feel compelled to share everything about our lives, and why we’re willing to submit to a life of endless performance. And I think we’re poorer for it. I don’t want Ava to grow up with the presumption that she has to live in front of an audience, and our parenting choices should reflect that aspiration to the extent possible.

#2 Maintain a positive “image of the child”

If a strong sense of self is what we ultimately want to give her, why not give it to her now? My mother and my sister are kindergarten teachers. One of the core principles they carry as educators, and one that informs my ideas about Ava, is that of the “image of the child” as a competent agent, capable of constructing their own understanding and knowledge through their experiences, as active and valued participants in their own learning (note this is my paraphrasing, not theirs, which itself is partially based upon the philosophy of Reggio Emilia).

Implicit in this description is that the only limitations on a child’s development and agency are the ones we project onto them. I believe that Ava, at even 10 month’s old, is an individual capable of giving effect to her ideas about the world. This is not to say that she is an adult, or is not capable of absolutely hilarious meltdowns. It is simply to state that I believe Ava is already her own person, and that my responsibility is not to treat her as a sponge — whose method of learning is to absorb the mountain of interests and activities we throw at her in the hope that something sticks — but to instead listen to her, and to scaffold her curiosity wherever it leads.

I believe Ava will develop a strong sense of self if we let her, as early as possible. Again, this is not to suggest that she will get to decide how to live her life as a toddler. We are still her parents, and while we don’t plan on running a democracy at home for some time, Ava (and our future children) should have a voice in how we build our lives. My hope is that viewing Ava (and young people in general) as someone with agency, with valid ideas about the world, will fast-track her on the path to developing a strong sense of self. Good habits and behaviors are all about getting in enough reps. I want to give Ava as many reps as I can to help her to build the muscle of developing and testing her own ideas, and seeing them come to life through exercising appropriate agency.

#3 Be clear on who we are

My sense, having grown up with them, is that the existence of clear boundaries and traditions, is more important than the nature of those boundaries and traditions. If we want Ava to have a clear sense of who she is, we need to give her some stable reference points around which she can build her own sense of self, or equally, clear reference points that she can reject as she develops her own ideas (if she so chooses). My fear as a parent is less that Ava won’t be like me, and more that she won’t have the tools to decide who she wants to be herself. For her to make those choices, we need to give her a stable image of who we collectively are as a family, and I think boundaries and traditions are important for that.

There are certain types of behaviors that we will or won’t accept as parents, and while there should be lots of freedom up until the boundary, the consequences for crossing behavioral boundaries should be clear (aka discipline). And when I refer to traditions, I’m referring to things that we do that Ava can point to as things that are ours, and therefore hers. These are things like acknowledging the Sabbath and Jewish festivals, following our Australian football team (St Kilda), enjoying long summers on the beach or at the pool, and other traditions I hope to add now that we’re a family. As I said above, the nature of our traditions (i.e. through being Jewish or Australian) is not important, but adhering to them is. Consistency and attachment are important, as I believe they can help young people develop a sense of self by giving them another stable pillar to build their identity around.

It’s essential to give young people space to decide who they are (as alluded to above), but we’re setting them up for failure if we don’t provide them clear boundaries in which to conduct their exploration. At a young age, security and predictability are much more important than fluidity and choice.²

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Bringing it together

This is clearly a piece with two halves. And while it’s about raising Ava, we remain early in our parenting journey, so this piece lives more in the conceptual — and in particular, ideas about identity — than the practical.

But I hope that by covering the abstract importance of a strong sense of self, I was able to set the scene for some of the practical things we could do to give Ava the tools she needs to thrive as a young person. There are many other things I’d like to give her in addition to a strong sense of self. One is courage, as I think she’ll grow up in a world that requires more of it in her than it’s asked of me. Another is positivity, as it’s a quality that will energize her in a world where young people sadly maintain gloomy images about the future. But the last few Tapestries have been quite long, so rather than covering those here, I might write about them in subsequent pieces.

I was lucky to grow up in a home where I regularly heard the three most important words a young child needs to hear, namely “I love you”. But there was another set of three words I came to hear as I grew up (often in different forms), namely “you are enough”. It’s an objectively true statement, as the love we give or receive has little to do with who or what we ultimately become. But it’s another thing entirely for the recipient of those three words to believe them. When we tell Ava “you are enough”, I deeply and truly want her to believe it. And for her to be a person who does believe it, she needs to arrive at the destinations on her journey as someone with a strong sense of who she is. It’s our job to help get her there.

1. I’ve devoted a chapter to this in the draft of the book I’m writing (or wrote before Ava arrived). Maybe it’s worth sharing this chapter as its own piece as a follow-up to this piece.

2. This point may appear to contradict the earlier point about allowing children to drive their own development and helping them develop agency. The earlier point is in reference to infants and toddlers’ sensory exploration, whereas this point is in reference to older children and the way they build their identities.