One of the Biggest Things Parents Overlook? Making Sure Their Kids Know They Matter
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In Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Matilda Wormwood is a precocious and thoughtful little girl, but her parents don’t seem to notice. They forget her age. They refer to themselves and her brother, not including Matilda, as “us.” The narrator says, “I doubt they would have noticed had she crawled into the house with a broken leg,” and Matilda, after being called “an ignorant little twit” by her father, says of her mother, “She doesn’t really care what I do.”
For years I saw this caricature of a child who feels unseen and undervalued through the lens of psychological concepts like belonging, social support, self-esteem and verbal abuse. But I recently learned about an academic construct that’s distinct from those: mattering. Feeling like you matter is a specific thing that’s not the same as feeling loved, and research shows that whether a kid thinks they matter uniquely predicts outcomes that are important to every parent I’ve ever known (except the Wormwoods).
Adolescents who perceive that they matter are more likely to experience happiness, self-compassion, empathy, self-efficacy, resilience, academic achievement and life satisfaction. Teens who feel like they matter to their family are less likely to binge drink and struggle with addiction. On the flip side, the feeling of not mattering has been linked to higher rates of self-criticism, social anxiety, loneliness, academic stress, truancy, depression, aggression, difficulty regulating emotions and impulses and even carrying a gun. A sense of not mattering is associated with low hope, and it’s pervasive in kids who bully and exhibit other violent behaviors. In other words, kids need to feel they matter.
The good news is, mattering is malleable. Parents can take steps to increase their children’s sense of mattering and in so doing increase their own. The bad news: Feelings of mattering in middle and high school students appear to have taken a hit during the pandemic. Canadian survey data shows a drop in teens feeling like they matter at school from 42% in 2018 to only 21% in 2021. That makes sense, since a 2021 study found that in-person learning conveys to students that they matter more than distance learning does. And kids aren’t the only ones. According to reports from psychologists and the media, I’m not the only American parent who experienced a decrease in how much they feel like they matter to society over the last three years. We have work to do.
It starts with wrapping our heads around the definition of mattering. There are several in the academic literature, but my favorite for kids has just two pieces. Ora Prilleltensky, who co-authored the book How People Matter with her husband Isaac, says: “It’s the experience of feeling valued,” on the one hand, and on the other, “feeling like you add value.” This coupling sounds so simple, she told me, that when people first hear it, they tend to think, “Yes, of course.” But mattering-driven parenting isn’t easy.
What You Didn’t Know You Already Knew About Mattering
In some sense, the “duh” is appropriate. The more studies I’ve read, the more I’ve come to see mattering as the big umbrella under which sits most everything else we know about how to raise children to become fulfilled adults who make positive contributions to society.
Mattering begins with ensuring a secure attachment. It’s why parenting books tell us to offer children choices, Prilleltensky says. It’s why we need to give them a just-right amount of support — enough challenge and independence to ward off boredom but not so much that they give up. It’s why authoritative parenting is in and authoritarian parenting is out. And it’s why we’re told to focus on kids’ strengths and make sure they know they can develop new ones. (Yes, I’m talking about growth mindset.) These are all ways of inculcating autonomy, competence and relatedness, a trio shown to be necessary and highly motivating.
Kids who feel like they matter are less likely to think their worth is contingent; they know they don’t have to be perfect. Mattering is why we emphasize one kind of popularity, likability, over the other, status, and why we teach kids what healthy friendship looks like. It’s behind love languages. At the end of the day, all of these buzz-word concepts aim to make kids feel (1) valued and (2) like they can add value.
Parents also already know about downward spirals and virtuous cycles. Let’s say I ask my 11-year-old to find the stick that he refused to leave outside and stow it under his bed so no one trips on it. He does without me nagging, and I thank him for being considerate and cooperative. He smiles to himself and then, standing a bit taller, asks if he can make the muffins his sisters like. They go on and on about how this batch is even better than the last, with enough tapioca to be squishy but not chewy. Prilleltensky explains: The more a child feels valued, the more they feel like they have something to contribute to others; then the more they seek to add value, the more they do things that invite appreciation and build skills, making them feel more valued and more capable of adding value. Of course, not mattering is self-reinforcing too, and that’s how kids who don’t feel like they matter end up frustrated, isolated, and even destructive.
But there’s more to mattering than just explaining what we already know.
How to Make Kids Feel Valued and Feel Like They Add Value
Caregivers can increase a child’s sense of mattering by paying attention to and demonstrating interest in “their passions and interests and activities,” Prilleltensky says.
Psychologist Sheryl Ziegler has treated thousands of children and families as the founder and managing director of The Child & Family Therapy Center at Lowry in Denver. “To feel noticed … is key,” she says. She often hears from kids, “I feel like when I’m talking in a group, nobody cares, nobody responds, or no one laughs at my jokes, but they laugh at other people’s jokes.” One of her clients was crestfallen when no one realized she’d been absent the day before. “Nothing breaks a kid’s heart more than they are wearing new sneakers, they got a haircut, and nobody noticed.”
Where parents often go wrong, she says, is when kids raise an issue that seems trivial to us. Let’s say my 13-year-old is obsessing about having her headphones look precisely the way they do on Max in Stranger Things. My attempts to redirect her attention to something more fruitful and make her feel better — “They’re just headphones!” and “No one will even see a difference!” — can come off as dismissive, Ziegler says. Eventually, she’ll “just feel like, ‘You don’t even care about the things that I care about.’”
We also tend to assume our kids are doing fine if they have friends and participate in activities, Ziegler says: “I think parents would probably be surprised at how many kids would endorse the feeling of feeling invisible in a crowded room.” Indeed, in his 2018 book The Psychology of Mattering, Gordon Flett summarizes data from before the pandemic suggesting that 35% of adolescents feel like they don’t matter or aren’t sure if they matter. The psychology professor, who studies mattering at York University, says when kids die by suicide, parents often say, “Didn’t they realize how much we cared and how much they mattered?”
That’s why Ziegler has changed her intake questions. She used to ask, “What is your support system like?” But now she’s added, “Do you think you matter?” and “If you’re there, do you think people notice when you leave?”
She says check-ins on perceived mattering are even more important for children of color, who get the message that they are less valued by society, and often by their own peers and educators too. There’s evidence to back her up in a study of 17 kids who were part of The Black Boy Mattering Project. Flett agrees. He says feeling invisible or ignored is worse for those “who have already felt the prolonged stings of marginalization,” whether that’s a member of a religious minority or a child with a disability.
He tells parents to try to “repeatedly show their children they do matter, in big ways and in smaller ways.” Sometimes making a kid feel valued boils down to putting in hours. In a different study, the amount of time a teen’s parent spent with them in eighth and ninth grades predicted changes in how much they felt like they mattered to that parent by tenth grade. The effect was particularly large when it came to fathers. (Yet another study, this one of middle school students in rural areas, confirms the connection between parental involvement and kids feeling valued.)
But Prilleltensky reminds us, “It is also important to give them the message that it is not just all about them…. They matter so much to us, but other people matter too.” Kids today “live in a self-absorbed culture,” Prilleltensky says and need encouragement to focus on that second piece of mattering: feeling like you add value. For years, researchers have known that volunteering boosts happiness. Now, many of them believe mattering is what explains that phenomenon. Volunteering “shifts the focus to others, to seeing themselves as being able to contribute,” Prilleltensky says.
It doesn’t require a major change to a family’s schedule. When storms battered California recently, my kids adopted a drain that we walk by every day. All they do is kick debris covering it into the road for the street sweeper to clear. On Thursday evenings we make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the Food Not Bombs program to distribute to folks experiencing homelessness. Little, doable contributions like these, Prilleltensky says, can expand kids’ perspective beyond themselves.
What’s more, “when we see our parents doing that, that’s a very important message,” she says. Caregivers communicate values to their child that impact their sense of mattering. For example, a 2018 study of sixth graders compared lots of information about kids (grades, depressive symptoms, etc.) against how they said their parents would rank a list of goals. They found “a consistent pattern” of poorer child functioning when the kids thought their parents prioritized achievement over kindness.
You can jump start a child’s sense that they can add value, and will be valued for doing so, by asking them Prilleltensky’s questions: “What gifts do you have that could make a difference to the lives of others? What are you already doing that you can build on?”
Almost all of this research comes from studies of adolescents. Flett says young kids might not be able to put their finger on mattering until they develop “reasoning about the self in relation to others” around 6 or 7. But that doesn’t mean we should wait. Laying the groundwork for kids feeling like they matter can start with toddlers being given tasks that benefit the whole family and getting acknowledgement for their efforts, he says.
Understanding Mattering Can Make You a Better Parent, Too
But there’s another piece to the mattering puzzle for kids: parents’ sense of mattering. Back in 1989, researchers noted that primary caregivers can feel overtaxed, like they matter too much. But these experts see it more as a mattering imbalance. First, “It’s about reciprocity,” Flett says, pointing to a qualitative study showing that parents feel like they matter when they receive appreciation from their children. When you ask for it, “not just ask, but you really need to require appreciation,” Ziegler says, your child’s expression of gratitude can make them feel capable of adding value to someone else’s life: yours.
The second imbalance is about mattering domains. Prilleltensky says parents need to matter across four of them: self, relationships, community and work (not necessarily paid). Feeling too compelled to add value in one of these spheres at the cost of the others can decrease a parent’s overall wellness. (Case in point: the workaholic.) Ziegler says, “If you’re wearing your hat as the parent, sometimes you feel like, ‘Well, I know I matter because I have to get stuff done, like I bring home the groceries, I cook the food,' but even with appreciative kids, mattering in this one realm isn’t enough..’”
That’s why Prilleltensky lands on a counterintuitive idea: that busy caregivers should do more outside their home and parental role, not less: “I have the right to also do things that nurture me,” she says. By exercising that right to find meaning, you make kids feel like they matter, not just because you have more bandwidth for making them feel valued, but also because you’ve emphasized “the common good.”
That said, “increase my own sense of mattering” shouldn’t become one more item on your parenting to-do list! For parents to feel like they matter, society needs to support them more, she says. Hard stop. End of story.
Dahl writes, “[T]he parents looked upon Matilda in particular as nothing more than a scab.” That’s not how almost any of us parents feel, and by focusing on mattering, theirs and ours, we can ensure our kids know that — that they know they are valued and that they can add value.
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