In “Enchiridion”, Epictetus wrote “Everything has two handles, the one by which it may be carried, the other by which it cannot.” Some of us seem conditioned to grab the wrong handle.

Think of that friend of yours. Or maybe it’s a family member. They’ll find the negative even if it’s a needle in the haystack. And once they do, it becomes their focus. From there, they can link just a few tiny setbacks into one sweeping travesty.

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In life, they usually make their own weather and it is rarely sunny skies. Even neutral phrases sound pejorative to them. Little struggles always seem to escalate or linger longer than they should. They are eager to share their victim stories but have little to talk about when they might have played the hero.

Where did that personality trait come from? Some of it must be natural temperament, coded in our DNA. But a 2024 study revealed another important influence, parents.

I doubt this comes as a surprise. Apple, tree and so forth. And plenty of therapists live in hillside mansions purely from treating clients with daddy or mommy issues. The plain fact is that our influence over our children is unavoidable, so we should wield it with caution.

The 2024 study involved a group of 49 mother-child pairs. Children were 5-6 years old. First, each pair was given four emotion cards (angry/sad/scared/happy) and asked to discuss a past experience where the child felt these emotions. Then the children were each told four ambiguous stories and asked to imagine the ending such as:

“Today is your birthday. You are having a birthday party in your backyard and wonder how many of your friends are coming. When you go out to your backyard, none of your friends are there. Why are none of your friends there?”

Language was recorded verbatim and analyzed to reveal patterns. They found that when mothers used more negative phrasing during the initial emotion conversations, in the next tasks, children wer more likely to interpret ambiguous stories negatively; “My friends are mad at me.”

An interesting takeaway from this little study is how readily a parent’s interpretation can be reflected in a child’s own thinking. It isn’t just that children begin to see things in a negative way. They begin to see it your way. And the force of your influence may crowd out alternative perceptions, amplifying what is left. When your child begins to express these negative views back to you, she gets more traction. Misery loves company and eventually that feedback loop may become an echo chamber.

Every interaction with your child helps them to organize, categorize and understand their world. Your interpretations help to build the child’s permanent database of classifications and associations. All of it, intentionally or not, passing through your own filter first.

For example: You make an offhand remark that you were annoyed by the slow-moving customer at the grocery store. Your child now must reconcile whether the annoying bit was the customer, the waiting or both. Not only that, but since it came from you, these things must be unquestionably annoying and you’ve shown that it’s perfectly acceptable to complain about them.

This kind of negative bias does not form immediately. But the category box of “annoying things” does fill quickly. Before long, it may contain enough concrete data to crowd out the other boxes.

That tendency to find the negative doesn’t just arise from our own complaining. Sometimes, we are just trying to sympathize. So we casually label our child’s experiences with our own opinion: “Having a rough day?” Probably not until you suggested it.

That throwaway statement carries weight that only your child can feel. It gathers a few moments of difficulty into a single thought: a rough day. The rest of the morning’s unremarkable moments deserve consideration if we’re going to judge the entire day. But the gravity you’ve just applied draws your child’s attention toward the struggles and away from everything else.

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.” —Epictetus Enchiridion 5

My youngest son often asks “Is that bad?” He might be referring to a curious looking scab, a broken toaster or something similarly innocuous. The phrasing is important because he rarely asks “Is that good?” He seems to be confident in his grasp on that side of the line.

Like most kids, he looks to his mother and me to shade in the gray. But rather than simply give him our opinion, we respond to his instinct to assign a value judgment. Our hope is that one day he will learn to ask more useful questions of himself. Such as “What happened and what, if anything can be done about it?”

The Stoics saw virtue as “good” and vice as “bad”. Beyond that, very few things in this world are inherently one or the other. Epictetus’ handle metaphor may suggest that everything has two sides. But if we habitually divide our impressions into either good or bad, we may miss the larger lesson.

How do you divide your world: good, bad, indifferent? Which one do you usually find first? Your answers to these questions reveal something about what you are teaching your child.

Perhaps the first lesson is one you need to learn yourself. You can recognize both handles without feeling compelled to grab either one. That may make it easier to teach your children to do the same. Maybe then both of you will come to recognize that just because something can be picked up doesn’t mean it should be.