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In the last twenty years, business has become the dominant institution in American society, in many respects usurping the role once played by religion. As such, business has infiltrated every aspect of our livesincluding the hearts and minds of children. For many, it is an unsettling force. The wild competitiveness of business today compels managers to be constantly available for customers and colleagues, inevitably reducing the time and energy executives devote to their kids. Although stories of the impact of business life on children rarely appear in business magazines, debate rages in the broader community, and many parents fear that their children may be paying the price for their success.
Is that price too high? To get an insider's view, HBR senior editor Diane L. Coutu visited writer and child psychoanalyst Robert Coles at his home in Concord, Massachusetts. Coles is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard Medical School and the James Agree Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. His work won him a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981 and the President's Medal of Freedom in 1998.
From the beginning of his career, when he first studied how black children handled the stress of desegregating white schools in Mississippi, Coles has focused special attention on children. Over the years, he has invited children to talk, draw, and communicate their thoughts on everything from inflation to God. The result of one such effortthe monumental five-volume series Children of Crisiswon him the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. The final volume, a book on children of the well off and rich, depicted the inner lives of privileged children.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the fashion for criticizing the way children are being raised today, Coles is optimistic about the next generation. He rejects our stereotype of hopelessly spoiled brats, emphasizing instead children's extraordinary adaptability and ingenuity.
Coutu: Your series, Children of Crisis, has become a classic. Can you tell us what you have learned over the years about privileged children?
Coles: My research has shown that children from very well-to-do backgroundsmany of whose parents are business executives, by the wayexpress an unmistakable sense of entitlement. They take a lot for granteda second home, a bright future, sailing lessons. They also feel entitled to be invited here and there, to feel part of a carefully limited and self-important social scene. There is a certain narcissism here that we all struggle with and that is by no means evidence of any psychiatric disorder. On the other hand, some children come from homes where there are so many possessions and so much wealth that all the prerogatives and privileges and power end up stifling kids' capacity for engaging with the world around them. At that point, these children lose the sense of responsibility that needs to accompany entitlement, and entitlement swings to narcissistic entitlement. This is an awfully sad development because then children become trapped inside themselves. Even noblesse oblige, after all, is based an acknowledgement that there is another person out there. So, you see, wealth can weaken some children in certain ways, unless their parents know how to ask of them as well as give to them.
Q: Do you find that privileged children have unique problems?
A: Privileged kids have problems that look unique but often are not. Take upper-class uprootedness. I've noticed that rich children who were moved around for corporate reasons were especially hard hit by loss. Losing a familiar and supportive environment and going to a new one that you know nothing about can be very traumaticeven though parents try to prepare children for a new world as best they can. Over time, I came to think of some rich children as corporate migrants, and I actually saw a similarity with the migrant farm children I'd worked with over the yearsalthough on a different level, obviously. Whatever class they hail from, uprooted children learn quickly how easy it is to lose something they own. This sense of insecurity and vulnerabilitythe confusion about where they belong or where they would like to liveaffects both rich kids and poor kids.
Q: Does your research tell us anything about the effect of working mothers on children?
A: This is a vexing question, and I don't pretend to have the answers to it. My first reaction is that we have to be careful to ask which woman and which child we are talking aboutand, equally important, to ask who is the particular mate. So the real question is not "What impact are working women having on children?" but rather "What do you personally want to offer your individual childpsychologically and morallyand how best can you achieve that?"
That said, it's true that my interviews with women from different classes have revealed different things. Many working-class women kept telling me that they work because they mustto stay afloat financiallybut that they would very much prefer to stay at home and be with their children. This was not so with upper-middle-class women, for whom work outside the home has become almost a social obligation. Yet I must quickly add one thing here that is too often ignored: Working is a way that women can learn how to be good mothers. A working mother learns about the world in a way that augments her motherly life, because in working she is expanding her life, her being, for her children. This takes place even as she is creating certain risks by not being constantly there for her children. Obviously this risk creates a tension for many women, but it is a tension that must be weighed and balanced with the adventure and growth and achievement of working.
Q: So where do fathersand important othersfit into the picture?
A: Obviously, absenteeism was a problem for men long before it was a problem for women. A father who leaves home every day and doesn't see his children for long stretches of time is sorely missed. Indeed, children whose fathers are physicallyand often emotionallyunavailable tend to spend a lot of time daydreaming about their dads, trying to imagine where they are and what they're doing. I've heard children become quite melancholy when talking about their very busy and unavailable dadsa sad story, no matter how much wealth these same children enjoy. The repercussions can be grim: confused children aching for their fathers. So I do think that some of us very busy and successful dads owe it to our children to make them more a part of our personal and work lives. I'm thinking of office visits, discussions about work, and telephone calls from the office as a way of "visiting" during the day.
As for other people in a child's life, my experience shows that they are crucial. Indeed, in my research, I have found that children desperately need adults but that they do not exclusively need mothers and fathers. An endless array of people matter enormously to young people and can become very important in their lives: cooks, gardeners, teachers, coaches, grandparents, and so on. These people can impress and stir children and become alternative role models to kids. So enormous possibility exists in children's lives that has little to do with their parents. In fact, I would go so far as to say that exclusive parental life can cut children off from other valuable relationships with adults.
Q: Do you have any specific concerns about privileged parents?
A: I do believe some upper-middle-class parents are putting so much faith in their children that they are placing enormous demands on their kids. This is especially true in highly motivated families where the thinking is "I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in God or country. But by God I do believe in my children, and they are going to have the best that life can offer." This is a debilitating proposition for kids. It places a terrible burden on children when their parents make them the be-all and end-all of their life's purpose. By contrast, parents can most help their children by being genuinely humble about their children's accomplishments and by encouraging them to feel more comfortable with life's inevitable disappointments and failures. But again, it takes a certain kind of parentsomeone who has achieved a kind of moral self-awareness and a sense of direction in lifeto bring up children in this way.
Incidentally, I don't think that such personal awarenessa mixture of kindness and thoughtfulness and sensitivityis a gift of any particular social or economic class. After all, humble and affluent parents alike can do well by their childrenor be selfishly indifferent to them. As I see it, the issue is not with class but with individuals.
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Cultivating Your Inner Child
by Robert Coles
Mentoring in businessor in any walk of lifeis dearly important, and I believe in some ways it draws its strength from a remembered parent-child relationship. After all, the folks who run corporations are parental figures, too; they are people responsible for the fate of their childrenfor their customers, their employees, and their stockholders. I've heard young businesspeople complain about the lack of mentoring in corporations. But if I were going into the business world today, I would search very hard for role models whose ideas and deeds I could try to emulatewonderful people like the psychoanalysts Erik Erikson and Anna Freud, and the poet William Carlos Williams, who inspired me very much in my life.
It's a very difficult thing to know why people want to mentor you. To find a mentor, I think you have to be willing to seek out certain teachers or people of moral and psychological significance to you and to let them inspire you and give you direction. Looking back on such figures in my life, I think perhaps they all saw in me a kind of a childlike quality that both prompted and provoked them, and perhaps touched or even challenged them, if those are the right words. Finally, there is something in me that has never grown upand has never wanted to!and I think my mentors probably reacted to that. This doesn't mean that to find a mentor you should be childish and self-centered. But you may need to retain the wonder and vulnerability of childhood with respect to those you uphold as your guides in life. Robert Coles