Scarcity

Wow, thank you Lynne Twist for giving us a lens through which to view the current culture in many schools.  In her book, The Soul of Money, Ms. Twist writes about the culture of scarcity. “No matter who we are or what our circumstances, we swim in conversations about what there isn’t enough of.”  Parents devote great amounts of time to avoiding scarcity by filling their children with extracurricular activities and tutoring, worried that their children are not getting enough education at school.  Parents are working so hard to make sure their children are at the top of the pack in academic subjects.  They are also driving hither and yon to make sure that their children are well rounded and skilled in many areas.  Will the extras be enough for my child to get into a good college they wonder?  Perhaps we could do a little more.  So they push and sign up for one more activity, all at the expense of family time, friend time, and play time.

What if we didn’t need to do all of this?  What if we just said, “This is enough.”

Angelique, a good friend of mine, with children the same age as mine once said, “They don’t need that much, Alison, they really don’t.”  In so many ways she is right.  Our children don’t need five winter jackets.  One will do.  They don’t need birthday parties with 30 friends who each bring a present resulting in a mountain of new toys they won’t have time to play with.  They don’t need special activities every day of summer.  Time spent reading books, digging in the dirt with friends or sorting collections of coins can be just as fun as a big trip to a museum. 

Lynne Twist writes, “Scarcity is a lie.  Independent of any actual amount of resources, it is an unexamined and false system of assumption, opinions, and beliefs from which we view the world as a place where we are in constant danger of having our needs unmet.”  Let us think more deeply about what we want for our children.  Parents of school age children voice great concern about getting their children into the “right” college.  Is that our end goal?  Will life be glorious if our children get one of the coveted spots?  Perhaps our energies would be better spent teaching our children how to build and sustain relationships with others. 

Dan Buettner has studied people who live 100+ years.  He went to “blue zones” around the earth.  His goal was to figure out what lifestyle habits the people followed.  Sure, there were the expected habits of eating healthy food and exercising but he also found that putting family first, celebrating elders, and laughing with friends were key to a long life.   Today’s family time has been so chopped up by our focus on extracurricular activities and academics.  We would develop healthier habits and save money if we dropped some of the extracurriculars and spent more time with our families.

We need to move from a you OR me culture to a you AND me culture as suggested by Buckminster Fuller.   In this kind of environment children would be supporting each other and looking out for one another rather than competing with each other for coveted spots at Stanford and Harvard.  In a you AND me culture people will use their time, energy, wisdom to work towards common goals.  In every classroom we teach that two heads are better than one. People working together create something greater than one person can working alone. We need to carry this through to a life view that people working together are better than people competing with one another.  We all will be better off if we can make this change.  There is enough for everyone.