Wired for Scarcity
When children act like bald eagle chicks.
An adult female bald eagle lays two or three eggs. Only one bald eagle chick survives. The stronger sibling eats all of the food and eventually knocks the weaker chick out of the nest. I didn’t know this until watching a nature special with my children.
Children, and adult humans, are wired for scarcity.
Scarcity vs. Abundance.
If you have children, you know the drill. You compliment one child, and the other ones, if they overhear, feel left out. You have to be sure to say something nice about all of your present children. Which is good to do, anyway.
They fight over food, despite there being more than enough. (This very moment I had to get up and remove my kids from the room, as they were “bickering over nothing.” In this case it may have been a bag of frozen cherries.)
If you’ve done mindset work, you immediately see what’s playing out. Scarcity is a virus of the mind that convinces humans to kill each other over scarce resources, even though we currently live in a world of abundance.
Who here has had a business going well, and then one partner (or maybe it was you) starts looking for ways to rip the other parnter off?
Why do this? It makes no sense. There’s more than enough to go around. You eventually have a falling out, get lawyers involved, and a huge shared pie shrinks or disappears entirely. You’ve nuked yourself. Congratulations.
Such disputes are utterly predictable during times of abundance. It’s often in good times that people fight the most, because bad times create shared problems and thus shared enemies.
If you follow the political world, you’ll notice there’s been non-stop fighting over nonsense. I warned this would happen, back in December.
Seeing this scarcity mindset in children is somewhat reassuring to us as adults. It means we were born that way, we can’t really hate ourselves for feeling this way.
We can improve it.
Here’s how I do it.
Abundance mindset in children.
My parenting style is Socratic. Why do you feel this way? I don’t use judgmental language, or try not to. (I am not perfect.)
An example of non-judgement: When my kid is crying, I don’t ask what is wrong. Instead I ask them what they are experiencing. Maybe there is nothing wrong. Why bias their subjective experience with your loaded language?
Hey kid, what’s going on here?
Do you remember what you thought or felt before you started crying?
It’s OK if you want to keep crying.
You might also find that you’re choosing to cry, and that you can end these feelings whenever you want.
When my kids are fighting over nonsense, I ask them, “Why?” Usually they don’t have an answer, because it’s a completely pointless dispute.
Then I explain:
My love for your sister / brother does not limit my love for you, because each new child expands my heart and increases the amount of love in the family.
Complimenting your sister / brother doesn’t diminish you. We are saying something nice to her, but we also say nice stuff to you.
[When they fight over food.] Have we ever not had enough food to go around?
Does it always work? No. Of course not. Sometimes I do have to speak more directly and let them know they are fighting over nonsense, and that this thinking is why there is suffering in the world. “People fight over bullshit, that’s why we have wars.”
They are also little kids, and we can’t expect them to have a greater degree of emotional control than we do as adults.
You can see scarcity playing out in adult life daily. Why did Putin invade Ukraine? That’s either a complicated geopolitical question, or a simple mindset one. He wanted more land, more legacy, more of something. Even though he has more than enough.
When you see resources as being scarce, you can never have enough.
When you dive deeper into your own feelings and spirit, you find that you don’t want as much worldly stuff, because you are infinite, and your connection with God is beyond human understanding of limits.
We as adults have to fight feelings of scarcity daily. The nagging sense that we aren’t enough, don’t have enough, or won’t have enough.
Hello! I’m a middle-aged man. Even I sometimes get a bit despondent thinking about what would happen if my finances took a nosedive, I got into a serious car crash, got cancer, and etc.
These fears arise from a lack of faith in my own wits and resource (not trusting yourself = scarcity), and an inability to trust that those who would be left behind. Abundance starts with you and flows through to those you love. You must live abundance and teach it.
When you see your children arguing about nothing, you don’t need to intervene every time. It’s good for them to establish a conflict resolution style.
As the spiritual leader of your family, recognize these negative feelings and their origins, and talk them out with your children and yourself.
Parenting always starts with you.
Will be taking your line of questioning for the kids. Love the idea and now they are getting of age where they are able to understand and convey their point.
One thing I've found from working with hundreds of men is that abundance and scarcity have NOTHING to do with how much "stuff" is actually around. It has EVERYTHING to do with how much "stuff" that person feels (or believes) is actually available to them.
If they feel they can't get what they need, or that it's a zero sum game in some way, they'll do all kinds of illogical shit to get their "fair share" of a limited pie.