I was recently in a conversation with a group about the isolation that young parents feel. Even only a generation ago it seems there was more help, more support, more active grandparents, more community. Whether that was true in your family or not, it's clear that the more isolated we're getting the less we are stepping in to offer our help (or just do it) with young families.

I get it... this social experiment has real landmines. I can imagine a mom desperate for rest or to take care of a few tasks uninterrupted. I see her sitting at the playground watching her kid (or playing with them) but thinking of all the things that need to be done but here she is doing this now. I can imagine her trying to plan and organize things in her mind... "when we get home my kid will be satisfied with playtime, I can put them in front of a screen, wash the dishes, start the laundry, and then work on dinner"... but the thought of who can I ask for help probably never crosses her mind. And even if it did, I think most moms would think "nobody." 

Why doesn't she think of someone who could help? Because, in her experience, and amongst her friends, most people are feeling underwater. She looks around and is afraid that she'll ask someone who is every bit as overwhelmed as she is. She thinks of the people she knows and how busy they are too. She doesn't want to impose, to ask. She might also not want to feel like she can't do it, this parenting thing, juggling all the stuff. Aren't we supposed to have everything and be able to do it all? She might be about to bump into the feeling that she's failing. So she doesn't ask. Maybe she's even trained herself not to consider that an option (or maybe she was trained to think asking for help = failure). 

But it's so common to hear people say "parents just need to ASK for help!"  As if it's always been clear who's available to help us out. As if it's just because we didn't ask that we were suffering in overwhelm and silence. Believe me, if moms knew who to ask for help without feeling like they're imposing on someone else's life, they would. This wouldn't be a thing. 

So, it's up to us to offer. Or to simply step in and do when it's clear what's needed. That said, we need to tread this carefully. It can't be an exasperated and judgmental "oh here, I'll do that!" It has to be an offering, support, assistance. It has to be meeting what's happening with generosity and just the basics. No extra advice on how she should be managing herself or her child. Just help. With no judgment. 

Honestly, this is probably why people don't ask. We don't often get help. We get judgment. And when we're overwhelmed that only makes everything worse. 

Let's think of this in a bigger picture. For most of human history we've lived in tribal groups of 100-200 people. Our kids ran around, bouncing from one adult to another. Getting food from whoever had it when they were hungry. Did mom have to go over to the aunties and say, "hey, any chance you could feed my kid for me this afternoon?" I doubt it. The aunties could see when they kid needed something and they just did it. 

We've begun to lose the threads of simply tracking each other... of knowing where our beloveds are, what's going on in their lives, checking in, asking questions, bringing coffee cake over. This is what it takes to help moms these days. The kids don't come asking because they can't. Mom doesn't come asking because she's afraid to, but we can still step in and help. We can do it by checking in, by making offers, and by stepping in when we can and doing it gracefully. 

This is my prayer. It's a world in which we see and know and help one another. Where the one who is struggling does not also have the responsibility for asking. Where there are enough emotionally competent adults who can graciously step in and step back.

​There is so much nuance in this world. And I think we developed language in order to navigate that better. So, yes, ideally, ask if you need help. But if you think someone needs assistance, offer. It goes both ways.

Mothers and babies are inherently connected, so much so that to define either requires referencing the other. To speak of (or perceive) mothers as independent of their babies is difficult. It is a paradox, and in it resides the tension between mothers and their offspring.

The exploration of motherhood is a journey of understanding ourselves as both autonomous and relational beings. 

This is where feminism and motherhood can deeply benefit one another. Feminism has always sought to perceive women as autonomous beings, humans in and of themselves. Motherhood is a relational condition, though, and as such has been a sticking point for feminists.

To bring feminism and motherhood together is to make enough room to encompass the paradox of being one's own person as well as being in an important relationship to one's offspring. 

If we can clearly see the ways that mothers are both autonomous individuals and also fundamentally relational, maybe we can have better conversations about caring for moms AND children, rather than deciding one side should have more consideration than the other.

We can begin with the presumption that both mothers and children are individuals first. And we recognize that their needs are distinct from one another, then in order for each to be cared for someone else must be present.

Mothers do not get this autonomy as things currently stand, because they cannot be separate from their children's needs if they are the only adults in the room, which often happens when mothers are home with their small children.

For moms at home, adult contact and conversation is limited, and most or all of her interactions are centered on the children. 

She has no self-tending time, nor does she have access to co-regulatory adults, down time, or peer conversations. She becomes lonely, exacerbating or making her more prone to postpartum depression and other mental health conditions that are less about her chemistry and more about her environment.

Current public conversations about women and children continue to see mothers through the eyes of the infant. In so doing, they inherently focus on the impact the mother's actions have on the baby, and obfuscate the ability of other adults to contribute to the care of the child.

The mother becomes the context for the child, but ceases to exist in her own right.

Her autonomy is easily undermined when we make her the assumed caregiver. We've erased helpers, support systems, and the mother herself. It's so easy to lay blame on her for her own frustration, depression, and fury.

We were never meant to do this alone. For 99 percent of our evolutionary history there were many individuals that contributed to the raising of each child born. Parenting feels extra hard now because so much of the work of raising children and caring for home and family has fallen to women in isolation from other adults.

Admittedly, parents these days are in a difficult spot. There are few social support systems, so we rely on personal ones; family, friends, other moms, many of whom are also spread pretty thin. We cobble things together, we overwork, defer our self-care, and these are all borrowing energy from tomorrow to function today. This isn't sustainable. And it looks like what gives is usually moms. They return home when caregiving for elder parents or children are necessary (as we saw during COVID).

In my opinion, we can point to the lack of structural support all we want, but getting the government to listen is getting increasingly difficult. Even when there is a popular majority opinion or need, the government is often unresponsive. This doesn't mean political action is not on our bingo card anymore, it certainly is, but it is unlikely to go any length to solve your immediate problem anytime soon.

So what do we do? We focus back on where we have power. What can we do for and with our friends and neighbors and communities? And while it's deeply unfair to be looking for help to other folks looking for help, it's where we are right now. These are the people who understand how important it is to be together, who are willing to figure out how to navigate difference in order to go after something much bigger, community. 

This is the relational landscape we evolved in. We need to relocate it. 

For people who grow up under difficult circumstances having children can feel like a really big choice to make. And part of that choice depends on the confidence we have that we can do parenting differently than our parents did. But we CAN give our children a kind of childhood that feels healthier, with more good relationships and self-confidence than we had. 

(If you'd rather watch the video than read, you can go to the Landscape of Mothers YouTube channel and watch this video).

Once we find ourselves as parents it's likely that we're still struggling with some of the effects of our childhood experiences. We have internalized a lot of what we saw and understood when we were young and we don't know it's there anymore until we're exhausted, overwhelmed, and stretched too thin. And that's when all of our intentions to do things differently implode. We can't parent through our will anymore and we revert to the strategies our parents used because they are the most available in our tired brains.

For some of us this turns into a bad cycle. One where we feel like we've failed, we're not doing a good enough job, and the shame and sense of failure overtake us. When we hear ourselves sounding like our parents, and the disappointment in our ability to parent arises, we might overcompensate. This cycle creates instability, a sense that we can't rely on ourselves to behave as we intend to, and for our children they become uncertain of what to expect from us. 

What we are really looking for is the stable ground in the middle where we are present to our own inner workings and feelings, as well as to the needs of our child in front of us. But how do we get there AND STAY THERE!

Short answer is we don't always. But there is the possibility of being on that stable present parenting ground much of the time (enough of the time that our children can form some expectations around their needs being met). 

The enemy of the solid ground is the shame and urgency that comes when we blow up and do or say something we regret. We've treated our children like we were treated, instead of from what's really important to us. There's a deep discomfort that we want to get away from. So we're likely to try to patch things up as quickly as possible through overcompensating. This tends to feel yucky too, so we try to move on as fast as possible.

But what we all most need in that moment is presence. We need that for ourselves, and our kids need it from us. Our ally here is, paradoxically, slowing down. It helps to drop any pieces of urgency that we can, that are coming from our desire to rush past this discomfort, and to sit with it a moment. When we develop an Inner Mother who is capable of tending to our own disappointment and discomfort we are doubling down on that solid ground we are always trying to cultivate. We are bringing our distressed Inner Child to that landscape, as well as our child in front of us. 

This is growing up with our children. This is why having children can be considered a spiritual practice. This is why it can be healing for those of us with relational wounds from our family of origin to have children. There are other ways to do it, but if you find yourself in this cycle of "up and down" parenting know that this dedication to parenting through presence and relationship is healing to your Inner Child, your family line, and to your ancestors. It is doing repair on many levels.

Parenting from this solid ground with presence is the best way to build a relationship with your children that will last through the developmental stages as they grow, and on into their adult years. Most often when I hear of people who aren't in contact with their parents anymore it's because these relational tasks were left undone. Because they rushed past the difficulties and wounds of parent-child relationships, and the adult children feel like their parents don't see or acknowledge their experience. 

If this feels like a struggle that you see in your friends, please forward this post to them to let them know they're not alone. And if this is you, and you want some structure for this journey you can find my mentoring services on my website. 

While the science suggests that nature is good for us, that it calms our nervous systems, lowers our blood pressure, and makes us healthier, the truth is nature probably doesn’t do that for everyone. 

There is a real thing about fear in nature. Fairy tales tell us to fear the dark forest through which we cannot see. Our minds tell us that what we can’t predict is dangerous. And there’s some truth to that. 

Nature is also an open slate for our projections. Nature won’t resist them. So, it’s possible to spend time in nature and see the things we are most afraid of, things that seem brutal, dominating, and cruel. If that’s what we see in nature we may be deeply afraid of being further brutalized by spending time outdoors.

It’s true that some people will not feel comforted by nature. But there is an opportunity here. That is, no matter how you feel about what you notice in the natural world, how does that reflect what you are thinking? That is, you might see something in nature that makes you feel… yes, good, grounded, relaxed, etc… and/or agitated, worried, vigilant? 

I remember walking in the forest near my house for exercise sometimes with the thought that I would receive this gentleness and blessing of the forest while I walked. But when I was on the trail, I also noticed that I was worried and anxious… less about animals like coyote or mountain lion… and more about people. Men in particular. The fear that I might be attacked around any corner was deeply and persistently present. It gave me the opportunity to feel and understand all of the fears I had in my life that were keeping me in a situation that I didn’t like. My walks in the forest were metaphors for my life at large and allowed me to the opportunity to see and become aware of my own fears. 

There were a few ways I came to find more comfort and blessing in the forest, but the most important part was to be reflective so that I could base my excursions into the forest on something that was true to my current moment, rather than keeping away from the things that could potentially comfort me. That is, once I recognized how I was projecting my fear of the unknown on the forest, I could decide more clearly if I felt it was truly unsafe, or if my visit to the forest with self-awareness was actually going to be therapeutic. 

I wish I could tell you a story of grace and redemption in the forest. I wish I could say that while my early personal and social life was so hard, nature saved me, gave me a sense of belonging, and made me feel that things were going to be OK. But that’s not really what happened. 

I grew up in the suburbs. My dad liked the outdoors, but it always involved an activity or sport like snow skiing, water skiing, or gardening. My parents weren’t the wilderness types. We didn’t camp to immerse ourselves in nature, we did it to be near a lake for skiing, or to go hiking with a goal. It wasn’t about pleasure or relaxation.

So, honestly I didn’t really feel comforted by nature when I was a kid. I was lucky enough to live near the ocean for part of my childhood, and I knew that was compelling and lovely. I fell in love with individual oak trees when I lived in Southern California. I dreamed of coral reefs and ocean animals, but didn’t know a lot about either.

It was that compulsion toward a nature I did not know that lead me to studying the ocean. I didn’t know how to just be with it, in order to have a relationship I thought I had to study it. So I did. And I got a couple of really gorgeous jobs that took me to remote islands for months at a time. Some of that was a struggle. It was good to be away from so many people (usually the island crews were small… 2-5 people). 

And, I had experience living with little, so not having electricity or running water didn’t feel particularly alarming, even though I’d never really lived that particular kind of minimalism before. The hard part was finding out what nature is really like. The hard part was living on an island with seabirds for whom it’s commonplace to lay several eggs, and for the first to hatch to kill the others as they break through their eggs. It isn’t always quick or efficient. It can feel brutal and cruel. I’ve also listened to mother elephant seals cry out for their dead or missing pups, and I’ve seen the carcasses of seabird chicks decay around piles of plastic they were fed unknowingly by their parents. 

It’s hard to be in the world… for sure. And that’s always going to be true. There’s no enlightenment in nature, unless you define transcendence to mean learning to be with things as they are. Sometimes we hear people say “there is only the here and now”, but that’s only kind of true. I mean, it is true that we can only act now… we can’t go back to the past and change things.

We are not only embedded in the right here right now, we bring with us the patterns, biases, and understandings of the past. We are not free from our own histories. 

So, how does nature help us? It doesn’t help us by being perfect and showing us how to “do it right”. It doesn’t help us because it’s inherently good or romantic. It helps because nature is somewhere safe where we can project our stuff. The natural world isn’t going to react to how we see it or what we think of it. Nature is neutral to the workings of the human mind in that regard. What isn’t neutral is what we see back.

​What we see in nature is a reflection of what is already true in us. 

If I think back to my walking in the woods story, the forest reflected back to me that I was afraid of all the ways I couldn’t see how to move forward. I couldn’t see what the real threats were to my safety and well-being. I was afraid of so many things that were unnamed, and those things were keeping me to the path someone else created. That’s fine sometimes, it’s nice to travel in the footsteps of pioneers before us, and it’s not fine when it feels like it’s costing too much of your sense of self. And that’s where I was at the time. I knew I was not on my life path, I knew I wasn’t doing what my heart felt was mine to do in the world, but I was so afraid of all the things I was unsure of, that I couldn’t deviate. I wasn’t brave enough to make my own way. 

The forest was neutral on the whole thing. It turned out that by naming and facing all of the other stuff in my life, I realized the forest wasn’t unsafe. Not where I was walking. That forest loop held me as I transformed my relationship with the unknown. I walked there often. The way I’ve told this story looking back on it may make it seem like I knew what I was doing there… but at the time I really didn’t. It’s only in retrospect that I understand the overarching theme of what I was doing there. 

And even now, this is just my story. This is my experience with nature and the forest and learning to see my own reflection. But maybe this won’t be your story. I’m just making room here for us to be scared, joyful, open, clear, reflective, and true to ourselves. And things can always change in the future. Maybe now it is scary to be in the forest alone, maybe it won’t be later. Or maybe it always will be. It’s OK, however it is.
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At face value that's obvious. But how often do you give up yourself in order to meet someone else's needs? How often does some part of you that has needs, feel abandoned and left behind? 

I'm not saying to only ever consider yourself. I am saying that caregivers and parents are often put in positions where they have to tend to someone else's needs before they take care of their own. I am saying that when we grew up being the one who got into a pattern of letting go of (or ignoring) our own needs so that we could keep someone else (usually parents) to be calm or take care of business, we can get used to not tending to ourselves. 

Not tending ourselves is not sustainable. That's where burnout happens. That's where we revert to the behaviors we are most familiar with. That's why, even when we are trying to hard to parent differently than how we were raised, we end up sounding like our parents. We end up yelling or sulking or manipulating just like they did. 

And, if you're like me, it brings up grief and shame when I hear myself say some of the hurtful things they said. It feels like failure to end up behaving as they did even though I had such strong intentions to not repeat those wounds. 

But it's really not about being a "good parent" or a "bad parent," in most cases it's just about whether or not someone had the skills, tools, and good relationship modeling. It's about being able to be whole humans with good awareness and the desire to learn how to be together even when things are difficult.

So when you find yourself sounding like your parents, and the grief and shame rolls in, know that you are likely over capacity and you are overriding your own needs. Compassion for yourself because you're managing a lot is the first step. It's ok if you mess up sometimes. It's part of being human. And your ability to do the relationship repair with your family members is part of creating strong ties. 

Don't leave yourself out. Taking care of you when you find yourself outside of your current capacity is not shameful, it is human. Tending to your relationships through your shifts in capacity is how you BECOME the person who is the parent you want to be. This is not accomplished through managing your behaviors and suppressing what's happening in you.

Since the 1980's family therapists have recognized four different parenting styles and researched outcomes for children even into adulthood. The styles are authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and neglectful. While other researchers went on to refine this and change the titles of the styles, I want to share what I think is most important about these studies collectively. 

1. The degree to which parents support their children by guiding them through problem solving, being aware of what's going on for kids and involved in daily interactions, and by providing positive reinforcement has been shown to have positive impacts on children's behavior and academic performance. 

2. The more parents tell their kids what to do and think, the more likely the kids will be behave in aggressive and controlling ways with their peers. They are likely to have low awareness of their emotional state or the emotions of others, lack empathy, and resort to control as way to interact with others. This makes sense, right? We treat others as we've been treated because it's the set of strategies we learned to interact with. 

​3. There is an insidious nature of neglect in which without rules or support, the child is seen as a resource for the adults to get their own needs met. The child is left feeling unseen, unvalidated, and has no framework for creating their sense of self. This can lead to co-dependency, and extraction of the energy of the child for the benefit of the parent. So, just because we're not brutalizing our children doesn't mean we don't hurt them. 

4. These are somewhat artificial delineations. While some parents may employ some strategies more than others, know that it's possible, likely even, that a given parent may use all of these strategies at different times depending on their own capacity. The corollary to that is that even "good" parents sometimes punish or don't meet their kids' need for support sometimes. 

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
I am increasingly hearing public conversations about estrangement in which adult children and their parents disagree on the cause of separations. I'm not saying one side is right and the other is wrong, but it strikes me that there is a consistent lack of listening to each other's perceptions that keeps reconciliation off the table. Both sides appear to me to just be screaming to be heard and acknowledged in their perception.

So, why would this be happening? Because there was a lack of empathy, communication skills, and capacity to truly understand and be understood by one another that long predates the estrangement. There is a lot of blame, blatant expectation, and shaming happening. These are the ways humans go about trying to coerce someone to give them the type of attention they want when the direct request is either not made or not met. 

I believe so much strife is rooted in the internal framework we have around our roles, the expectations our parents have of us, and the stories we are told about who we are. We are also limited by the relational skills we may have never learned from our parents. When we examine our past experience, our current desires, and our relational skillset, we can find our way to a way of healthier relating that leaves us feeling like our families are our refuge from the harsh world.
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RESOURCES

• Maccoby, E. E., & Martin, J. A. (1983). Socialization in the context of the family: Parent-child interaction. In P. H. Mussen (Series Ed.) & E. M. Hetheringtono(Vol. Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. IV. Socialization, Personality and Social Development (4th Ed., pp. 1-101). New York: Wilepy.
• ​Kuppens, S. and Ceulemans, E. 2019. Journal of Child and Family Studies. 28(1): 168–181.
• Rekha, S. 2020. Authoritative and authoritarian parenting with respect to emotional and social development in their children; an evidence based analysis. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, Vol. 7, (12): 24-33.

Of course most of us worry about this. It's very normal. 

But I've also been thinking about where this comes from. And, I'm guessing that if you grew up in a family that knew how to communicate and take care of each other, the voices inside your head would be saying "Of course I'm a good parent." The reason you'd have that inner voice is that you had experiences of being parented well, so you have a foundation and a blueprint for how to parent.

But the worry, I wonder if that's especially loud in the heads of those of us who have experienced isolation, distress, and even harm in our family. Maybe it was intentional, maybe it wasn't, and maybe they didn't even know what was happening to us, but the result was the same... we were left alone to deal with things we couldn't handle. 
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​So, without communication skills and a model of care, here we are trying to be parents, but how the heck are we supposed to know how to do that? If it's not in our experience we don't have the tools that make up connected relationship. 

Here's a video I made about asking ourselves about whether we're good parents or not, and the invitation to ask a different question instead.

Just because we had a difficult childhood, doesn't leave us without resources though. As adults we can learn to relate to others, to care for and tend to ourselves, and to create a nourishing and protective household. 

In this video I talk about how nature can provide us with a template for our family that is connective, caring, and responsive. That is, how can we envision this family culture when we don't have a direct experience of it to work from? The answer is, we look to nature systems. We look for how members of an ecosystem work together.

This works well for two reasons. One, nature tends to be soothing to our nervous system. The chemistry that plants put into the air tends to produce a calming response in the human brain and this de-escalation of stress and tension tends to open us up to new possibilities. The second reason is that our wounds often stem from interactions we've had with other humans, and so they can feel dangerous. But nature doesn't have an agenda for us. We can interact without vulnerability to someone's response.

This dance between the calming of our nervous systems, and the safety provided in being able to observe nature, creates the conditions by which we are able to be creative, inspired, and original. We are able to be ourselves when we are not under the watchful eye of other humans, and yet we don't have to sacrifice a sense of belonging in order to to escape them. 

Do you have experiences of being yourself in nature? Where were you? What inspiration did you have? 

Some of our behavior is truly innate. That is, we have behaviors that we will exhibit without being taught. They are coded in our DNA and we do them without thinking very hard about them. 

One of those innate behaviors in social mammals is empathy. We know that a wide array of animals are not only aware of the suffering of their friends, but they will take actions to help them when they are suffering. This has been seen in mice, rats, dogs, and primates. It also seems to come with a sense of justice and equality. In a study with chimpanzees, researchers found that they were very sensitive to being given differential treatment. And better yet, this often worked both ways. 

It went something like this. Chimpanzees were given tokens that they could give back to the researcher in order to get a treat; a chunk of carrot or a grape. Like humans, they preferred the grape to the carrot, but would eat either. Until, they got treats in pairs. They began to refuse carrots when the other chimp in the room got a grape. When the reward for the same task was unfair, the chimps would refuse the lesser treat and often throw a tantrum instead. 

Better yet, when a chimp received a grape and his partner got a carrot, this chimp would refuse the grape! The chimp could see that his friend was being cheated and would refuse to play the researcher's game. It was an act of solidarity to refuse the desired treat when the chimp perceived the unfair reward to a friend, and it indicates a full understanding of fairness and equity. 

I would go a step further and say this also indicates that these types of social animals (which includes humans) are well aware that our lives are inextricably connected. We are in this life experience together, and what effects one of us effects us both, ultimately. It's a recognition that I could be in your shoes.

First, in a larger context, I'd like to say that I think we ignore this at our peril. This is directly related to the world stage at the moment. I see over and over that when the oppressor dehumanizes the people they are attacking, they can justify horrendous acts. We have lost sight of what humanity means.

To bring it closer to home, there are two things these social behaviors offer us in terms of our family dynamic. One is that humans are born with an innate sense of fairness, of what togetherness means and what we can expect from it. This is foundational in our psyche, and so we know that we can build on it. As parents we can look for this sense of fairness in our children and we can prepare ourselves to respond to it in a way that builds the kind of understanding of the world that we hope to instill in them. But we need to be prepared because the perceived unfairness will show up in small ways in their world every day. What do we want them to know?

Growing up I received a lot of messages that "the world doesn't revolve around you" and "stop crying or I'll give you a reason to cry" or "well, the world isn't fair". And while at face value some of that is true, it taught me that it was ok that things were uneven and unfair. It taught me that my disappointment didn't matter. And I spent a lot of my first few decades on earth thinking it was ok that I was ignored, neglected, and treated badly. I wasn't the center of the world, what I felt didn't matter, and it was all ok because the world wasn't set up to meet my needs and wants. 

I'm not saying that will be everyone's experience, or that it's all my parent's fault that I accepted a lot of bad behavior from folks in my early years. But I am saying that I was taught a worldview that was in direct opposition to the innate truth inside me. It was confusing at best, and created a sense of powerlessness that was probably much more damaging.

So again, I come back to the question, what kind of world do we want to tell our children is out there? What nuance do we need, that we do not currently have from our parenting experts, about giving our children a consistent and also true sense of the world they live in? I suspect this requires a little more thought than we usually put into answering such a question. 

Switching gears a little, I also want to cover a common behavior in children that I think is releated. When we perceive something as unfair and we don't know how to say so to the people who hold the power, we throw a tantrum. This too is a natural behavior, an innate response to perceiving that something isn't fair. How we respond as caregivers to this situation determines a lot about how our children learn about what to expect out of life and how to navigate unfair situations.

That means that tantrums are a natural outgrowth of not being able to communicate with the person who has control of your environment. They are, in and of themselves, actually a communication of distress. So, what if we could see them as a natural instinct to communicate distress or displeasure, a need for someone to help us address our internal state of dysregulation? How would you behave if this was the lens you saw their tantrum through? 

Unfairness. It's literally an everyday occurrence. When do we stand up for others? When do we perceive that we have the power to do so? When do we feel solidarity? With whom? And how do we convey this worldview to our children? How do we want them to behave with their peers, with family, with folks they don't know? 

Just to be fair now, there is no right answer to this. It is just getting at being clear about when we are working with innate behaviors and how we want to build on those with our children. In chimpanzees, it turns out that there is a balance they are striking. They are more likely to boycott treats for friends or someone they experience reciprocity with in other social situations. Also, when resources are scarce, they are less likely to reject any food they are offered, even if it goes against their principles of fairness. I'm just inviting all of us to be clear about this balance.
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What kind of world do I want for my children?
What do I want them to do in the face of injustice?
What perspective do they need in order to do that?
What is the developmental path through childhood that supports this perspective? 

• Infancy
• Toddlerhood
• Kindergarten
• Middle school
• High school

What can I share with them now about the world that would maximize their chances of seeing it this way?
If we think of this nuance as a continuum on a line between not empathetic and overly empathetic, is there anything else they need to know about when they're crossing into territory that is leaving someone out? (Remember that kindness includes them. Becoming people pleasers and catering to others is not the goal here. Healthy empathy lies where the needs of all people is being considered.)