Eleanor Roosevelt had a rough childhood. Her mother was always difficult and judgmental, but she was still her mother, and Eleanor was devastated when she died at age twenty-nine . . . and then devastated again just months later when her father died. She was sent to live with her grandmother, a woman who, it quickly became clear, was the source of Eleanor’s mother’s emotional issues and judgmentalness.
It was a dreary, painful existence that didn’t change until Eleanor was sent to school in London. There, at a special school for girls, she met her teacher Marie Souvestre, who finally saw in Eleanor not a plain, shy girl but someone special, with talent, with ambitions, with the ability to make a difference in the world. “Attention and admiration were the things throughout all my childhood that I most wanted,” Eleanor later reflected, “because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing about me would attract attention or would bring me admiration!”
Don’t we ourselves want attention and admiration? In our jobs? In our communities? In our marriages? Why wouldn’t our kids want the same things in their young, fragile lives? And who could it possibly be more meaningful to come from than us? It’s hard to be a kid. They’re overwhelmed. They doubt themselves. They wonder where they fit in, whether they matter. It’s our job to help them with this. To let them know that they are loved, that they are special, that they are enough. To give them the attention and admiration they deserve.