Hi, I'm Cynthia Armstrong. I'm a general and a special education teacher. I homeschooled my own children for five years, and I talk about those things that I've studied in the academic world and in the alternative world that really brings that light and joy into my life, and that helps me to bring it to my children and my students. I want to give you two definitions and I want you to think about what is the word that this definition goes to? I'm going to tell you this so a person who has excessive interest in or admiration of themselves.
The second definition is thinking only of oneself without regard for the feelings or the desires of others, self-centered. Now, between those two definitions, which one do you think is narcissistic? It's really hard to tell. This is the thing that I want you to notice. One word is narcissist for a definition and the second one is egocentric. There's a lot of overlap in those definitions, and I'm going to say I am not a psychologist.
I learn a lot and I feel like once we start labeling, like anxious, narcissistic, and we give labels, they have OCD. They have and we get personality disorders, right? We give these definitions and we say that's the problem. But here's the thing, those are not problems, those are symptoms. I want to get down to what is that base reason. What is the real problem? And all those problems related to our brains are right to our new neurological connections that we make, and we can run, connect them and reconnect them in different ways. We call that neuroplasticity.
When we're reading in our news feeds, or we hear other people talk about narcissism, gaslighting, choose any of the popular words out there right now, there is a lot that we don't understand. Actually, we might actually have shown off some of our narcissistic tendencies when we start using those words and labeling other people. I've got all the answers, or at least I've got this answer. You're a narcissist or you're behaving like a narcissist. But when it comes to children, children are natural narcissists, right? But we call it egocentric. Then we call it egocentric because children, they're not able to think about their thinking. They only understand things from inside themselves. But as we get into it, this can cause a lot of difficulties for our children when we're not remembering or being aware or considering that children are egocentric, which when you look at definitions just in the regular dictionary, I mean you can get into the psychological dictionaries and they'll give a lot more in there, but they're very similar in their definition.
If you look at the psychological versions of narcissism, they say there are multiple kinds, but they all come from childhood experiences and beliefs and things like that. Let's dive into our children and some things to consider about that. But as always, please consider it for yourself and also what does that mean towards someone you might be labeling? When children are egocentric, which is a good portion of their childhood, especially in their early years as age 7, that's when they begin thinking about thinking, and I see it a lot in preschool, if we're making Mother's Day gifts in in preschool to send home and we ask which one would your mother like, as far as like color of ribbon or card, the children will often choose their favorite color because they aren't really able to think about what does the other person like. What does that mean for somebody else yet? When we understand this, we look deeper. Children really take on a lot of responsibility and I love to constantly be reading, to be listening to other People's Podcasts with all kinds of information and taking it in so I can see what is in my world and my understanding of what works and what can I add to it?
How can I understand myself better? In understanding myself better, I'm able to see how it might be for others. I do the best I can. Gabor Mate, he had been talking about some of his experiences as a child and as he's aged and studied, what he's come to understand about himself and he related this to narcissism too, which is really what got me thinking about what is my understanding. When I see it in the news, they pop up on your feed. Sometimes I tend to not really look at those because I know that they just want a reaction. They're not really interested in providing me with information to help me.
When I saw him pop up that way, he had said that because children are egocentric, he was using the word narcissism that children just naturally narcissistic and he had taken on in his childhood and as young as `like two months, he said it began that. He was responsible for his mother's unhappiness and that he really began to realize as an adult that he felt deficient that he wasn't enough and because his mother was struggling because of all the things that were going on with the Jewish population during the World War, the concentration camps and he and both of his grandparents had died and his father was in a work camp and his mother even send them off with a stranger for several weeks to keep him safe.
But if we look at that in today's world, if parents are arguing, if there's a divorce or even if you're not married but there's a breakup between boyfriend and girlfriend, who are partners and you've been living together for a while, If there's financial stress, if there's any problem, children naturally kind of take on that energy and they take it as their fault, their responsibility and things like that. So when I look at it, the people around me and I have a family member, not in my immediate family, but my extended family that a lot of people love to label as narcissistic. I just found it interesting that I saw him grow up and I know the difficulties that were in his family, and when we say narcissist, it's like, bad narcissist. He must be a bad guy. They don't care about others. Those were judgments I've had about narcissism as I've grown like we all learn things, take things in and then adjust them. I have labeled people as narcissistic. I have judged, use that as a judgment, not as a description.
It's so funny how we say that they're children, they're egocentric. We're okay with that because that's how children are but if we have experiences in our life where we don't let go of that as children, is that when we start labeling people as narcissistic? Or when you hurt someone’s feelings or you did something against someone, so therefore you're narcissistic. You know how that works there, but with children, When we understand that, we see that they're taking on more than we even realize. They know because they're not thinking about their thinking. This is all their subconscious right? They just take it in and they create these meanings around it without choosing those meanings and that allows us to understand a little bit more so that we can have discussions that we can help them to see and to understand better. We are responsible for only certain things. And if we look at this as a parent, we want our children to behave a certain way because we know better. We want our children to choose certain things because we know better.
We don't want our children to have to suffer like we suffered or we don't want our children to go to certain schools or we want them to go to certain schools. Only these certain schools are good enough and we take on what we can consider under these definitions. Narcissistic tendencies, right? It's about me. I know more. I know better. You're not allowed to think for yourself because I know better. Perhaps, understand how little we know about other people, even about our own children. Even if you consider it sometimes a little bit about ourselves, because it's a discovery for us. I don't know anybody who so thoroughly knows themselves that they don't discover more about themselves, even about their past and their experiences and understanding it in a new way.
If we hear words that excite us, that gets us all riled up, defensive or things like that, is that enough to consider as information to make that judgment on? Is there more that I don't know, that perhaps the people don't know to present to me? To really consider our children's behaviors comes from the idea that they're just naturally narcissistic or egocentric, or use whatever word helps you to understand that better and that as our children grow? Are we enabling them to think, feel and discover who they are? So remember, children are great by their very natures, and we have privilege and responsibility to teach them.
