Understanding the Impact of a Stable Upbringing
For most of my life, I moved through the world with a basic assumption that I didn’t even know I had: that the world was, by and large, happy that I existed. My parents loved me. It’s not complicated to say. They were married. They remained married. They would come to school plays and applaud at the right time. They told me I could do anything, and they meant it. My father worked, my mother worked, and the house was warm, reasonably noisy, and full of brothers.
For most of my life, I treated it as an opportunity and left it there. The chance to have a stable home is real and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.
But in my mid-30s, I began to notice that this kind of foundation, this quiet luck, had created a particular blind spot in me.
The Confidence I Didn’t Know I Had
The first thing it gave me was a kind of casual confidence that I thought was just a characteristic of being a person.
Enter a room. Apply for a job. Ask a girl out. Present an idea. Disagree with someone older than you. None of these things seemed to me to require any particular courage. They looked like ordinary movements. The cost of failure, in my body, was minimal. If it didn’t work, I tried again somewhere else. There was a basic assumption underlying all of this, that the world was, on the whole, happy that I existed.
I honestly thought everyone had this baseline.
Meeting People with Different Experiences
Living in Saigon helped me understand how bad it was.
My wife’s family lived through a war. Then they experienced what happened after the war, which in some ways was more difficult. My mother-in-law grew up hungry. My father-in-law spent years doing work that was unworthy of him because the alternative was not working. They built their lives on prudence and frugality and refusing to assume that good things would last.
When I first met them, I considered their attentiveness to be a personality trait. I thought they were nervous people, or modest people, or mostly Vietnamese. It took me a long time to understand that this caution was deserved. It came from a foundation where one could not assume the ground would hold.
I also started to notice this in some of my colleagues and friends. People I had quietly judged for their shyness, their hesitance, or their unwillingness to take risks. I had measured them against a starting line that had never been given to them.
The Lessons Encouragement Doesn’t Teach
Constant encouragement is a kind and generous thing to give a child. I want to give it to my daughter. I think most of us should give more, not less.
But this has a side effect. If you are told growing up that your efforts matter, that your voice matters, and that your dreams are worth pursuing, and if the people around you keep coming to confirm it, you may come to believe that the world is essentially designed to recognize effort. That if you do the work, the work will be seen. That honest people get decent results.
It’s a beautiful belief and it’s not entirely true.
I only learned very late that some people work very hard and are still not seen. Talented people are overlooked for reasons that have nothing to do with talent. Sometimes the room just doesn’t want you in, and there’s nothing you can do that will change that.
A child with incessant encouragement interprets these moments as personal failures. He thinks: I must not have worked hard enough. Little does he know that the structure itself may be the problem. His foundation did not include this information.
The Story I Told Myself
For a long time, my personal story was that I made my life on my own. I worked hard. I started a business with my brothers. I made my own choices.
All of this is true and none of this is the whole truth.
What I see now, at this point in my life, is how much of what I call my motivation was actually a sense of security. I could take risks because the soft net was still there. If the business failed, I had a family who wouldn’t let me starve. If I made a mistake, the world would not abandon me, definitively. The space inside me where the worst-case scenarios live is small, and most of that smallness was given to me, not earned.
It’s not nothing. It is perhaps the most useful legacy a person can have. But to take it for a personal virtue is to misinterpret one’s own life.
What I’m Trying to Do with It
I’m trying to do two things, neither of them are clean.
The first is to give my daughter the foundation I had, while also finding ways to gently make her understand that the world will not always reflect her parents’ belief in her. I don’t know how to do this well. I suspect no one does.
The second is to be more careful in how I read others. The hesitations of someone who grew up without a net are not character flaws. These are precise responses to a world they understood earlier than I did. When I think a co-worker is being too cautious, or a friend is too anxious, or my wife is worrying about something I wouldn’t worry about, I now try to ask myself a different question.
What did they learn that I didn’t have to do?
This usually changes the way I sit in the conversation.
About this article
This article is intended for general information and reflection. It is not intended as medical, mental health, or professional advice. The models described are based on published research and editorial observations, not clinical evaluation. If you experience a serious situation, speak to a qualified professional or local helpline. Editorial policy →
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