Our world focuses on competition and success, leaving parents and children feeling overwhelmed to keep up. It’s a tricky balance between encouraging our kids to achieve their best and eventually finding their identity in their performance. It’s an even harder pressure to talk about amongst other parents, out of fear of being alone in that belief. Parents often feel “caught” in the middle of creating a good, stable childhood for their children and helping them stay caught up in the ever-changing, success-focused world. 

We tend to ask, “How do I create a balance between a good childhood for my kids and helping them keep up with the competitive nature of our society?” Instead of trying to find the balance, what if we strive to ensure that our children feel loved and important regardless of what they achieve? What if we focused on ensuring our children felt their sense of mattering was not correlated with their performance in school, as an athlete, in their fine arts activities., etc.? 

An individual’s sense of mattering is directly correlated to their ability to thrive. To our culture, “mattering” equals thriving in performance/achievements. As parents, we must encourage our children that although it is important to do our best, their sense of “mattering” comes from simply being. 

The approach to increasing our children’s sense of mattering can look like:

• Make thinking about mattering tangible. 
  • Use examples to show your kids that they matter. One way to do this would be to take a twenty-dollar bill and ask, “Is this valuable to you?” Most likely, your child will say yes. Then, take the same dollar bill and dunk it into a cup of water, ask “Is this valuable to you?” They are still going to say yes because the dollar's value never changed, regardless of what it has been through. Explain this to your child. 

• Encourage your children on how we can add value back to others.
  • Often, children have a hard time grasping the fact that they can impact others. Reminding our children that they have the power to encourage and help others feel like they matter is important. 

• Find your resilience through close relationships.
  • As parents, one of the most impactful things we can do is make sure we can help our children learn resilience. This can be found in relationships outside of our home. Find a small group, girls/guys night group, or a small number of your closest friends and create space to become your most resilient self. 

As Christians, this idea resembles our relationship with our loving Father. In Ephesians 5:2, Paul wrote, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” We matter to God not because of what we do, but because we are His creation. The good works we are meant to do are an overflow of our sense of mattering to God and walking in relationship with Him. Like our Perfect Father, we want to instill a similar encouragement in our children so they can thrive without pressure to be perfect.

This blog is inspired by GAC’s Parent Partnership Series session from March 2024. Jennifer Breheny Wallace, author of Never Enough: When Achievement Becomes Toxic - and What We Can Do About It, spoke to GAC parents regarding her book and ways we encourage the sense of mattering in our children. Wallace is an award-winning journalist who contributes to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. She is the founder of The Mattering Institute, a group that focuses on increasing the idea of mattering in homes, and co-founder of The Mattering Movement, an initiative to increase mattering in schools.