Beauty Parenting Can Change the World
This week and next we'll have two posts on parenting back-to-back in part because parenting decisions seem more fraught than usual right now and because we ourselves are facing some tough parenting decisions that we've been thinking a lot about lately.
But one thing that has struck me over my 9 years of being a parent is that we keep hearing the message over and over again that parenting now is uniquely complicated and that parents and their kids are struggling. We have high rates of anxiety and overwhelm culminating in heated debates over college admissions scandals, social media for teens, anti-vaxxers and/or vaccines, racial justice and/or critical race theory, and all sorts of other bogeymen who threaten to jump out at us in the dark.
As an academic and part-time career coach I've started to wonder how true all this is. Is parenting actually more complicated now or are we just making it much more complicated than it needs to be? A lot of the anxiety we face as parents is more or less rooted in fiction, which is good news, as much as it may not help in the moment. But it's hard to wipe away all that anxiety when we get competing messages multiple times a day from every direction about the importance of academic success, of grit and resilience, of empathy, of letting kids play, of letting kids excel, and on and on and on. Raising thoughtful and kind human beings seems harder than ever in a world of Facebook and Instagram and 24 hour news.
It wasn't until I was reflecting on our own parenting journey the other day that I realized there is, sort of, a magic bullet that we've stumbled on over the years, a way of approaching parenting that solves 99% of the big existential questions and may even help with some of the day-to-day questions too. I'm calling it "beauty parenting" right now for lack of a better term, but we could go all ancient Greek and fancy and call it "kalos parenting" or any number of other fun Greek or Latin phrases. But all it really entails is teaching kids to recognize and appreciate beauty in other people and in the world around them. Simple, right?
I first noticed the power of beauty parenting when my Radically Moderate better half was away during a mobilization and I was parenting three small children. I could barely hold life together and was struggling with extreme stress and a deep sense of failure. One morning my then-four year old, a particularly intense child, stopped at the living room window early in the morning and called me over saying "mama, you have to come see this sunrise!" I shook off the stress of the approaching day and the coming chaos of breakfast and school dropoffs and my own failing work schedule and joined her at the window. The sunrise wasn't particularly inspiring as sunrises go, but it was indeed beautiful and I spent a glorious minute of an otherwise stressful day holding my daughter's tiny hand and enjoying the beauty together. In that moment, beauty bound us together, which was much needed since the rest of the day would, in a variety of ways, try to push us apart.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was beauty parenting and that I was in fact solving a lot of my own parenting problems while doing so, without even knowing it. Here's why beauty parenting matters and why, in my experience, it works:
It's free and almost effortless, once your brain takes this turn. We go on walks and look at bugs, noting their iridescent backs. We note beautiful trees or clouds on our way to school in the morning or we share music we love and art we think is great. This kind of parenting can be squeezed into any spare moment of your day, unlike violin lessons or reading out loud. You can share a little slice of beauty with your kid while you're waiting in line at the DMV, if you're particularly creative.
It makes us more grateful and therefore more generous people. I personally think gratitude is underrated, but the way it's discussed in media and blogs sometimes makes it sound like a kind of toxic positivity, where we're all just sitting around a burning room being grateful things aren't worse. That's not really what gratitude is about. But I myself have found myself in this trap, being grateful for the same four things over and over again and feeling less grateful and even a bit resentful each time. So I switched things up and starting just looking for one beautiful thing in each day and jotting that down in my planner. Sometimes that beautiful thing was a child's tiny hand in mine or a quick cuddle before breakfast. Other times it was a cardinal outside or frost on a field on my commute or the way the sunlight hit my desk in my office or the look in a student's face when they get excited about a new idea. And in those tiny moments, I was deeply grateful and could find the strength to be more generous with myself for those who needed me most. I can say for sure that beauty saved my mental health during that long year when I was parenting alone and continues to save me on tough parenting days today.
It makes us better people. I don't know a lot about parenting, but I do know that teaching kids to recognize beauty in other people, other living things, and the world around them, makes them more thoughtful and kinder human beings. People rarely want to destroy things that are beautiful. Watching my nine year old carefully shield a lady bug at the park yesterday from another child's shoe is just one example of how kids can become more aware of the consequences of their actions just by looking for beauty in the world and interacting with it.
It makes us bigger, more expansive people. The nice thing about beauty parenting is that you can adapt it to whatever kind of person you are. Are you the nature sort? Great! Lots of beauty there. The high art sort? Awesome. Looking at art with kids in museums or libraries or even on the internet is great. The literature sort? Perfect! Sharing the beauty of language with kids by reading out loud is one of the classic joys of parenting. The humanitarian sort? Wonderful! Showing kids the beauty in the people around us builds empathy. The engineering sort? Great! Showing kids the beauty of human engineering from the pyramids to a steel deck bridge helps them appreciate the achievements of those who worked hard to build them the world they inhabit. The music sort? Amazing! Sharing the beauty of music connects mind, body, and soul. The science sort? Excellent! Explaining the mind-boggling beauty of math and physics and the way the world is held together with deceptively simple rules is one of the coolest ways to spend an afternoon. The athletic type? Amazing! Sharing the beauty of human physical movement connects kids to their own bodies too. And once your kids are a little older, you can play around with connecting all these dots in fun and exciting ways.
It brings us together. I don't know much about the psychology at play here, but there's something about sharing a beautiful experience that bonds people together. Sharing a sunset or a great movie or a beautifully illustrated book pulls you and your kids together in powerful ways. In my kids' case, it even seems to reset their brains. We can be stressed and yelling and they can be actively trying to murder each other, but if we see a deer run by or the sun crests a cloud off our porch, they'll (sometimes) stop and just stand together watching. And that togetherness is a crucial part of what we're trying to do as parents and families.
It brings us out of ourselves and instills a sense of awe. The nice thing about beauty is that it's usually outward facing and an appreciation of beauty helps place kids in a world where billions of people have come before them and made incremental changes to their existence in ways they will never fully understand. Explaining the beauty of architecture links kids to ancient human roots and helps them appreciate the many many other people on whom they depend for their comfort and existence. Whether it's the beauty of nature or the beauty of math or the beauty of physical accomplishment, an appreciation of beauty will inspire kids with a sense of awe and of their own positionality in the world as both the center of their own universe but absolutely not the center of anyone else's.
It gives us something to strive for. Beauty, almost by definition, is linked to excellence, either in form or function, and an appreciation of beauty instills in kids a helpful kind of ambition, ambition to be a beauty creator or collector or curator, which of course also means a creator or collector or curator of excellence. The beauty of an incredible physical performance in gymnastics will have my kids doing somersaults on the carpet for an hour after. Great art inspires my oldest to draw daily. Great literature inspired me to write. Beauty motivates us to do and be better people.
It gives us hope. We get a lot of really negative messaging about the world, American culture and politics, parenting, the future, and on and on. In a lot of ways, those messages are actually fundamentally wrongheaded, because we're actually living in a pretty incredible time, but as humans we rarely let reality interfere with our behavior. But noticing beauty takes us out of that pessimism. The more beauty we notice, the more we realize maybe the world is salvageable after all. And maybe, crucially, we can work to make it even a little more beautiful by simple actions of our own. Beauty not only gives us hope, but it also provides the motivation that gives that hope wings.
There are, of course, some hazards to beauty parenting in an immoderate world, and we'll talk about some of those this coming week. But for now, we'll leave this on a positive note, focused on the many ways an appreciation of beauty in other people and things can be a radically moderate solution to the immoderate overwhelm of modern parenting.
As always, what do you think? Do you incorporate beauty into your parenting? How? Did we miss a benefit of sharing beauty with kids? Tell us in the comments!