Here is the full transcript of Ranbir Puar’s talk titled “Building Strong Children” at TEDxRenfrewCollingwood conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Moment of Change
Close your eyes just for a moment and take yourself back to the time when you stopped feeling like a child, when your innocence was lost and you were challenged to act adult. On that day, you knew in your heart for the very first time that you were absolutely alone and that you could count on no one really but yourself. And how did that feel? How did that feel for you?
In the twinkling of an eye, your world changed; just in a moment, your course was set. And from that time forward, you would devote your energy to proving yourself worthy and to justifying your existence. You went into hiding, and you built an armor for your protection. You started to speak negatively to yourself, putting yourself down. You may have even told yourself that you are nothing. Does any of this speak to you? Please feel free to open your eyes if you haven’t already. Well, here’s how it started for me.
A Personal Story
I have four older sisters, beautiful older sisters, and for each one of those pregnancies, my folks and extended family, I’m Indian after all, we go big. They were all hoping for a boy. And so, what they decided to do was go for a child number five, surprise, surprise, daughter number five. So, you know, they weren’t so pleased, to say the least. I was told explicitly and repeatedly, probably well before I could understand.
But certainly by the time my baby brother was born two years later, that I was not what they were hoping for.
So, growing up with that start, I really, I began to believe that I was less than. It didn’t matter what anyone else said. I really, really believed that. So, I was a good kid. I achieved excellent in academics, athletics, service. I made my teachers proud. I even made it into the local papers, go Nanaimo, many times. But it was as though I lived two separate lives, one at home, this mental prison I created for myself, and one at school, my escape.
Even though I was a good kid, I found myself making up stories to tell the other kids at school about my home life because I didn’t want them to know that maybe I wasn’t considered so valuable at home. The external appearance and the internal condition of my life were at war. And I tried to outrun my low self-image by achieving. But I can assure you that trying to outrun your self-image is like trying to outrun your shadow.
Reflection on Self-Image
And what about you? Do you ever feel compelled to fake it like I did, hide what you truly felt about yourself? Did you ever try to outrun your self-image? I believe the self-image is the greatest barometer of the quality of a person’s inner life. Simply put, it encompasses how you feel about yourself when you look into the mirror, but more importantly, how you speak to yourself when you are alone with your thoughts.
A strong self-image is the key to being in control of your life. It acts as the interpreter, filters everything that your five senses are picking up. And guess what? It forms by default. It has to, because something needs to run the show. We hear from therapists that most people in midlife are still working through issues that they encountered well before the age of 10. You know the phrase, the dreaded inner child.
Well, that inner child reappears as your adult crises look around. We are driven because of our low self-images to constantly prove ourselves over and over again. The breakdown of families today is widespread, and we must have more money, bigger house, a faster car, the perfect body, and ultimately, the perfect children.
Because of our desires, our children’s self-images are starting to suffer because we’re asking them to live with an external focus just like us, to care more about how others view them, to bring home the trophies, to make us proud. Well, how do you think they’re managing? Maybe they’re not. Self-harm, that is willful self-mutilation, is growing at what some experts say are epidemic rates. And this trend is starting as early as middle school. And as we all know, children tend to follow into the behavior patterns of their parents. But today’s parents are going through different types of struggles than my folks did.
And we are tending to numb our feelings with some form of addiction. And our children are following suit. Today’s medicine cabinets tend to be well-stocked with approved meds, or others would say drugs. A survey conducted by the American Psychology Association called The Stress in America 2013 found that 35% of teens reported that stress caused them to lie awake at night in the past month. In the same survey, 67% of teens reported skipping meals due to lack of appetite, and 25% say it was because they didn’t have time to eat. No time to eat.
Are we becoming conditioned to believe that that’s okay for our kids? The self-help industry, though, is continuing to rise. So maybe we know it’s wrong. We’re trying to fix ourselves. And when we’re focusing on parenting more than ever, I think the last time I checked, there were well over 100,000 parenting books on Amazon.com. But in parallel, the emotional well-being of our children continues to fall. So would you agree that maybe we’re missing the root cause of this despair?
Empowering the Next Generation
And just maybe there’s another way, a way that we can help our children manage the rough waters of life without letting them default into becoming one of these stats, or going to the other extreme and creating the so-called entitled kids, because we disempowered them. A way to create real value, real change, and real impact.
I met Kevin when I went to teach his grade four class about self-image. Kevin had moved to a new school because he was being bullied at his old school. Even though Kevin had changed schools, he said that he was still carrying the hurt and the weight of those insults with him. When teaching children about self-image, I talked to them about how their brain works. So in that moment, I asked him to make a choice. Is this how he wanted to define himself?
Of course, his answer was no. But prior to this self-image class, Kevin had never considered that perhaps this person who was acting like a bully might have had a weak self-image, and that just maybe he was expressing externally what he felt internally, which was futility and weakness. And Kevin also never considered that maybe this bully wasn’t receiving the emotional nourishment he needed at home. And it’s this emotional nourishment that feeds our ability to fundamentally connect with others.
So if this child isn’t receiving it at home, he’s going to search for it. He’s going to search for connection and significance, because that’s what we need in other ways. Well, when Kevin started to see things from this new perspective, his personal power shifted back to him. And he realized that he didn’t have to accept these words of this bully as a truth.
When I was leaving the class that day, Kevin’s teacher asked the children to share their thoughts on the day’s lesson. Well, he immediately raised his hand, and he said, “I feel like I have hope.” It is absolutely possible for us to repair our self-image as adults. Many of us are living proof of that. But as Frederick Douglass said so beautifully, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. I have spent the past five years repairing broken adults. Some of them were considered broken beyond repair.
So I know it’s possible. Miracles are happening all around us. But in many of these cases, much of this adult agony could have been avoided if they had learned to care for their self-image when they were kids. Megan is an 11-year-old that I know, and she is the keeper of family secrets. Megan witnesses her father cope through alcohol, and she watches her mom struggle to keep it all together. Megan doesn’t want to burden her mom with her own inner turmoil.
Megan is the embodiment of a conflict between her parents. I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I have a feeling that many people here today can relate to that. But Megan has a loving mother who noticed the subtle changes in her daughter’s behavior, and she gave me a call and asked me to help out. So through coaching, Megan learned the tools to redefine her self-image. When I’m teaching children about something like self-image, which is, to me, it’s absolutely everything, and it is very abstract, though, to explain to kids, so I use language and analogies that they can connect to.
For example, I describe the self-image being in the form of a trampoline. And I’ll ask you guys, what happens when you jump on a trampoline? You bounce back, absolutely. So essentially we’re saying, if somebody jumps on you, we’re saying, bounce them back and say, “That belongs to you, not to me,” and let them manage their own issues, even if the person jumping on you is your parent.
Well, by learning these tools to fortify her self-image, Megan began to see herself with clarity, and she was emboldened to see her world with more clarity. She knew her peers were going through similar situations, so she asked if it would be okay to share what I taught her with her whole class, and she wanted to do it. And to me, it was amazing, because this was a child who had put up a facade of perfection for so long, so this was an extraordinary act of courage.
And I’m not exaggerating when I say a fire was lit within this girl’s soul. Megan had her aha moment, not at 41, but at 11 years old. So I ask you, why break something and then try to fix it later? Why not? Why not build strong children now? What excuses can we keep making for not empowering our young ones to live their unique lives? Enough is enough, and the time for change is now.
But how do we get it done? Well, I have an idea. I think we need to come together, and we need to create that village to raise these kids, because let’s face it, we all know they’re not getting this emotional nourishment in their homes, homes with parents that may be very loving, but are still struggling to keep it together for themselves. They don’t have the ability to do it right now, so we need to help in some form or another.
For example, educators, mentors, coaches, they can be trained to teach this methodology to kids, but as we saw in the case of Megan and many of my other kids that I’ve taught, you’re not going to need to teach it for long, because they’re taking ownership of it. They’re compelled to share it. So before you know it, before I know it, they’re going to be lighting the path for all of us.
And so as we’re doing our self-help work, they’re coming from here, we meet together, and I think we can have fireworks. But for the collective, what does this mean? Well, a child that has a strong self-image will contribute, produce, and create. This type of person will not use his perceived shortfalls as excuses for why he can’t participate. This type of person will strengthen the core of our society, but more importantly, the core of our families, because he’ll be better at relationships.
Think about it. What is life? Life is about connections, your ability to give and receive love, and the quality of your life depends on the quality of your relationships. And the quality of those relationships, guess what? It’s defined by how you define yourself, your self-image. If you had known this secret when you were a child, wouldn’t you have picked different colors to paint your story?
Close your eyes just for a moment and imagine if you had learned as a child that the neglect or maybe even the beatings that you suffered were not a reflection of your being. What if you could have told yourself, “I am bigger than this.” Now imagine yourself helping a child just like you, one that may be on the brink of giving up or giving in. You give that child a hand. You help build strong children — children that one day may have ideas worth spreading. Thank you.
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