Hellobee

Earlier in the pandemic, we had an incident with our kids. They had agreed to not do something, but then we found them doing it.

It wasn’t terrible (they were playing Minecraft in the evening without permission), but it really affected me.  It was the first time they had really broken a big promise to us.

We’re really close to our kids and for a long time we’ve been able to count on them to always keep their word. We have never restricted their access to their tablets, but had set guidelines around when they could use them. Now the agreed-upon guidelines had been broken, and it was a defining moment.

I thought long and hard about how to handle it, and then I summoned the kids.

I sat them down and told them how I felt.

“When I promise to you that I will do something, then I will always do it. That’s called trust. It means you can always trust me, and rely on what I say. If I promise you something, then my word will always be good.”

They agreed. Of course in a moment like that, kids will agree to anything.  I continued.

“Do you feel like you can trust me? That if I promise something, then you can rely on me to do what I say?”

Feverish nodding continued.

“It goes both ways,” I told them. “I want our family to be a high-trust family. That means that if I promise you something, then I will always come through. If I promise you something and I can’t deliver, then I will let you know as soon as possible. Keeping the trust between us is really important to me, and I will do anything to keep that.”

I explained what our family would look like if we didn’t trust each other.

“In a low-trust family, I won’t believe you when you tell me something. And if you promise me something, I have to assume that you’re not going to keep that promise. I don’t want to live like that, but it’s really up to you. It’s your decision whether or not you want to keep your promises, and build trust with us.”

I opened up a little to them. I told them about how my mom had trusted me for a long time. But then when I was 18, one of my siblings did something that broke that trust, and my parents never trusted any of the kids again. The experience really shattered our family, and affected all of us. Through that experience, I learned to be a realist about trust. Addiction and narcissism are curveballs in the world of trust, and sometimes you need to adjust and be realistic about what’s possible.

The whole experience made me think a lot about trust, and so I immediately bought Francis Fukuyama’s Trust when it came out.

In the book, he analyzes entire nations based on how much they trust each other.

• In countries that are low trust, you are more likely to see family-based businesses – since it’s always easier to trust family than it is to trust strangers. Organized crime is also much more common in low-trust countries.
• In countries that are high trust, you are more likely to see companies formed between strangers – and great economic success. There is less crime and more of a rule of law.

The US was a high-trust country after WW2, but now that trust is disappearing and people are wondering if another Civil War is possible. It just goes to show that trust is the lifeblood of any relationship.

If you trust someone, then who knows how far you can go together.  If you don’t, then it is hard to make a lot of progress.  I’ve found this to be true at home, at work and was amazed to see that it applies even to nations as well.

I didn’t explain all this Francis Fukuyama stuff to the kids. But we talk about trust all the time now, and it’s a part of our daily conversations. I am sure that we will encounter this issue many times in the years to come. And now we have more of a vocabulary for talking about this stuff when it comes up.

The flip side of this is that we as parents have to be willing to listen to the kids. We can’t set up rules that the kids don’t agree with, or think are unfair. But if we reach a consensus on what’s fair and everyone agrees to it, then that seems to work better.

I want to give the kids tools to think about trust in their daily lives. It’s not really practical to think about trust in terms of moral terms, like, “You have to keep your word because doing so is just wrong. I read that it’s better to think about it as a day-to-day practical choice.

So I told them to ask themselves this question:

“If I do this thing I know I’m not supposed to do, it will affect the trust I have with my family. Is this one thing worth sacrificing that trust for?”

So far, the answer has been, “no”. Fingers crossed that we can continue to build our trust over the years to come!