We . . . need to protect, guide, and encourage our young people, helping them to build a society worthy of their great spiritual and cultural heritage. Specifically, we need to see each child as a gift to be welcomed, cherished, and protected. And we need to care for our young people, not allowing them to be robbed of hope and condemned to life on the streets. — Pope Francis
This heartfelt statement delivered by the recently deceased leader of the Roman Catholic church provides us with insights into an important source of Personal and Collective Worth. We provide care so that our children might remain hopeful and healthy. This deep caring enables us to feel worthy. We can contribute to the sustained welfare of our society—for this welfare resides ultimately in the life led by our children. In a comparable manner, we benefit our society by conducting successful projects that provide goods and services to members of our community. In caring about projects that are close to our heart, the opportunity opens up to feel better about ourselves and for members of our community to feel better about the community in which they live, given the availability of the goods and services we provide.
There is probably no source of Personal Worth that is more immediate and lingering than that related to the pride we take in our children and the accompanying sense of personal pride. Our chest swells up a bit and our heart beats a little faster when we witness our child receiving a certificate of completion from grammar school or a doctoral diploma from a university. Our daughter’s first hit at the Little League baseball game or our son’s first made basket at the high school basketball game fills us with a warm feeling of having done something “right” as a parent. We are “worthy” as parent because we not only encourage our child but also because we are there in-person to see them take on a challenging task and are there to acknowledge their accomplishments.
We also find gratification in starting a new business or working on a weekend project. While it is challenging to run a business, the sense of Personal Worth is there immediately with the first sales or first compliment from the customer being served pie, pizza or pickled herring. We manage a shoe store or a hair salon. There are difficult and even discouraging times, but also the opportunity to feel just as proud of our store or salon “parenting” as our parenting of the child running to first base. We might instead make our living working in a corporate office but find our Personal Worth in the canoe we built by hand during the summer or the women’s support group we created last winter.
Sometimes we are blessed with the opportunity to combine both kinds of parenting. Our child joins us in running the new business or we partner with them in setting up a family counselling center. Joint creation of Personal Worth and a sense of joint Collective Worth is hard to beat—and might even be considered a “gift from the gods” or at least a very special opportunity for achieving worth within a family setting.
