5 lame-ass pieces of advice your parent (or grandparent) taught you that you should forget right now.
All of us were raised on gems of advice handed down from generation to generation. We were practically spoon-fed (or maybe force-fed) pearls of wisdom that were as sacrosanct as grandma’s trifle recipe. These laws were so inviolable, woven so intricately into the fabric of the family, that they weren’t questioned. Some of them were fairly benign: “Things have a way of working out.” Others so outrageous, so ludicrously outdated that they became discarded sitcom fodder: “Children are meant to be seen and not heard.”
But there are a host of other aphorisms of the far more dangerous ilk that are neither benign nor blatantly absurd and thus they insidiously work their way into our collective unconscious. These are the sayings that have become the background music of our lives, the discordant notes that we march to, without actually listening. Here are five that I think should be taken with a grain of salt.
- “People don’t change.” Um, yes, they do. They do it every day. I see it happen. I help it happen. If people didn’t change, therapists like me would be unemployed. I have witnessed incredible transformations as people recognize unhealthy patterns, uncover self-limiting beliefs and choose to think differently and do differently. Perpetuating the myth that people are incapable of change is dangerous—it’s an evil form of discouragement that takes away not only an individual’s power of self-determination but also our collective capacity to evolve.
- “Live your life without regrets.” This one is sneaky. It means well. Its intention is good, asking us to behave in a way that we can be proud of. A regret, after all, is defined as something we wish never happened. But, what’s lurking behind this sinister little catchphrase, what’s propping it up, is the notion that failures are something shameful and to be avoided. What if, instead, we learned to see our failures not as shameful but rather as stepping stones? What if instead of banning regrets we embraced forgiveness? Then, regrets would be lessons learned. Collect a bunch of them!
- “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” There may have been a time when buttoning it up was the right thing to do. That time is not now. Too many of us have become so timid in the face of confrontation that we have taken ‘turn the other cheek’ to a whole other level. We have a problem in this country with bystander apathy. The solution is not silence. It’s not aggression, either. But, somewhere in the middle lies assertion. Let’s aim for that.
- “Life isn’t fair.” This is one I heard a lot in my childhood home and it’s always confounded me. As someone who is a champion for just causes, I don’t know what to make of this one. Lie down? I’ll say it again: apathy is a problem. If we must have a bumper sticker slogan, a better, more socially interested, one is this: pick your battles.
- “My house, my rules.” I hear this a lot from parents and usually it’s when they just can’t seem to get kids to cooperate. It’s an act of last resort characterized by top-down tyranny. Here’s the problem: we aren’t raising children to live in dictatorships, we are training them to live in democracies, you know, ones in which we respect the rights of all. If we want children to have an appreciation for disparate points of view, for the give and take of social living, we need to model it by respecting their rights and giving them a voice. That starts at home. What’s more, and what’s maybe worse, is the implication that the parents are right-holders and the kids are something akin to squatters. If an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, then “my house my rules” leaves an entire generation homeless.