Nature and Nurture

Dutch is a very compliant kid. She's always been pretty easy to manage. She's cautious. She never threw stuff. She rarely ran away from us. In classes, she watches the teacher raptly, and clearly wants to do things The Right Way. (She does throw a mean tantrum, though - the compliance only goes so far until it runs up against a great wall of stubbornness.)

This looks to me and Cook like... us. This worries us (because, remember, her life is all about us) - we're afraid she's going to end up suffering from our shared fear of failure. Wanting to do things The Right Way is conducive to success in school, and makes the teacher like you, but it doesn't really translate into success in the open field of life, where taking risks and embracing mistakes is a pretty important part of happiness and progress.

We don't know what to do about this. She inherited our genes, and she lives with us. We can talk all we want about how it's okay to fall down and okay to make mistakes... in the end, she'll learn more from our behavior than what we say to her, and we're too old to effectively change ourselves. SHE may be too old to effectively change herself, for that matter.

So she's pretty much screwed.

I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm trying to change myself at my job. I want to be more assertive, less paralyzed by fear of making mistakes, and better able to put my mistakes in perspective. My boss (who apparently has never suffered from fear of failure) exhorts me to be less self-deprecating and to take more confident action. It's really really hard, and I'm not making much progress. What I can do is identify when I'm wallowing in my failures, and identify how other people deal with failure (which is usually much more healthy than what I do, though I do some people going too far the opposite way and deluding themselves into thinking they did nothing wrong at all). I'm working on changing my behavior, but I suspect that I will never be able to really change, and that I will always FEEL the same, regardless of what I do.

How do I bring this into Dutch's life? I don't even know if it's appropriate - maybe she will take her innate desire for doing a good job and fly with it. Maybe it'll make her happy. Who knows.

At the moment, she's lying in bed with a bellyful of strawberries, probably dreaming about this book. She's afraid that owls are going to fly into her room and eat her, as she reported during last night's bedtime-stalling campaign, but she's not afraid of her life. My job is to try to help her stay unafraid, if I can. Anyway, she's too big for owls to eat, so she has it pretty good.