The Case for Parenting Through Honest Storytelling

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You will not experience a more efficient and beautifully brutal teacher in this lifetime than failure. The result of having briefly tasted, if only for a moment, the sweetness of success so certainly within reach, only to have it ripped from your desperate grasp leaves you feeling less than whole. Success does little more to our psyche than further cement our deep infatuation with our own supreme greatness, making it a less-than-desirable educator by comparison. When you get an acceptance letter to a school, get a boy or girl to say yes to a first date, or sell your company for a billion dollars, a part of your subconscious processes that win as proof that every single decision you made going into that particular battle was absolutely correct.

With that evidence of greatness, you double down on each future action expecting, but rarely ever achieving, the same result. Failure, on the other hand, forces you to fully evaluate yourself and rebuild in light of the new information you have been provided. In many ways, it is a gift to your future self, but only if you know how to process it when failure arrives at your doorstep.

How do we support our children in building a positive relationship with failure? This is a constant challenge for adults of my generation as this was not required learning growing up. One way to do so is by adopting a framework that encourages them to understand the context around what they are facing, and to embrace their failure as a necessary part of the process — a gift ensuring our readiness for when life gives future opportunities to succeed. Several exist out in the academic universe, mostly developed by experts in psychology with focuses in areas including vulnerability, emotional development, and trauma.

On a near-daily basis, I work through reconciling my past experiences with failure with what I feel will be necessary to teach my children as they grow. I actively build and rebuild my core so I can later instill the same fundamentals in my kids (and encourage you to do the same with your children).

My approach to strengthening my relationship with failure involves three steps:

1. GATHER — Recall, mine, document, and analyze stories from my past that represent my most significant dances with loss (personal, professional, other). I specifically look for moments that both represent extreme trauma and more subtle experiences I have long forgotten, but have stuck with me.
2. PACKAGE & TEST — I then package each story into a short, TED talk version (10min or shorter, detailed, emotional, and to the point). I then openly share those stories with friends, family, and (when appropriate) colleagues. The process helps inspire others while allowing me to come to terms with traumatic moments from my personal and professional life (ones that subconsciously hinder my progress). Once they’ve progressed enough, I begin to incorporate them into my professional speaking gigs.
3. STRENGTHEN — Lastly, I continuously seek out general feedback (or, if needed) professional help) to better understand any unresolved feelings I have about particularly difficult life moments. This both helps me put context around each moment while also strengthening the impact of the story.

The finished products are added to a mental bank of stories I have compiled to share with my children, to prepare them for their futures by providing real-life examples and context. I pay particular attention to the themes I wish were shared with me during my life journey, ones that would have helped me better manage through tough moments in my own life.

The time to employ tacts like this is now. Depression rates are skyrocketing with young adults. Teen suicides are at an all-time high. The majority of teens say they go through life with higher-than-normal anxiety levels as a near-constant emotional baseline. Professionals suggest that the leading cause of these rising rates is young adults’ inability to handle various life and social issues. Teens often state that they were never prepared to face these issues.

We rely on storytelling in our professional lives. The TED Conference took vulnerable storytelling for professional inspiration into the mainstream. Thought leaders like Dr. Brené Brown have taught us the importance of embracing our trauma to propel our life towards our dreams.

Then, why is it that we are so resistant to adopting brutally honest storytelling as a parenting technique? The natural evolution for most parents is that, over time, we become considerably more protective, hovering (or droning) to control every aspect of their child’s development while filtering not only their experience but also how they process it. We do this because our default is to model our parenting techniques after those of our parents and grandparents. The result of which is our adoption of self-censorship as a tool to protect our children from future trauma (the types we miraculously survived). In reality, this approach leaves children more exposed, lacking the context necessary to process their own issues when they inevitably face them.

Another effect is this type of parenting eventually leads to a crisis in believability between adults and children when the latter realizes the primary sources of information they rely on are censored and unreliable. This realization drives young adults to feel more isolated as they independently seek out their truths. Their sense of loneliness is exacerbated as they confront more complex themes like sexual orientation, gender identity, addiction, discrimination, and abuse. Incredibly difficult for parents to discuss, these topics and so many more like them are critical for our children’s development. All too often, though, these topics are muted to prevent exposure to perspectives deemed inappropriate or dangerous. This only worsens the issue.

When dialogue around taboo topics becomes unavoidable, parents already uncomfortable with their own source material (stories) resort to employing scare tactics as educational tools. Best encapsulated in the anti-drug ads of the ’80s and ’90s, where a sizzling egg represented a “brain on drugs,” reductive messages were the only forms of education my generation received on drug use. The reality, in this scenario, is that visually dramatic ads increased the likelihood of adolescent drug use. The New York Times reported a full 50% of kids who viewed these ads expressed weaker intentions to stay away from drug use.

On the laundry list of issues we need to normalize for our children, failure is at the top of the list. This is the foundation for how they will approach working through every other social issue that comes their way. It is also the one that we can be the most effective at teaching because we are all experts in failure. Simply by living a basic human existence we fail constantly, in small and big ways. How we handle each failure is what ultimately shapes our future, and will do the same for our children.

Over the next few weeks, I will be focusing more of my social media content on sharing my own experiences of embracing past trauma, fear, failure, etc. I hope you will follow along and share your own as well (using the three-step approach listed above). Experts have proven that this exercise often leads to positive personal results (ask Brené Brown!)

INTERESTING READS

There are a few books that have proven to be assets in my journey, largely through understanding the struggles of others. I hope you will check them out.

• Daring Greatly, Brené Brown
• The highly heralded expert on vulnerability, pain, and trauma dives into, well, vulnerability, pain, and trauma.
• Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement, Albert Woodfox
• A raw look at what extreme trauma looks like (at the hands of the US prison system) and proof you can recover from almost anything.
• Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
• There is no better example of extreme trauma and suffering inflicted on humans (by humans) than the horrors of the Holocaust. Through his classic work describing his time in the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl gives us a reason to always believe in (and strive for) a brighter future.
• Maid, Stephanie Land
• Modern struggles of a single mother climbing out of poverty.
• Educated, Tara Westover
• Tara tells her incredible story about being born into a highly traumatic and tragically isolated existence and her journey out.
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
• Everyone, from all walks of life, should read this immediately. No further explanation is required.

​As always, be good to each other.

- Rehan