“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” —Seneca

Stoics know that a fulfilling life rests along the distance between our wants and needs. Much of Stoic writing considers man’s endless struggle to narrow the gap. One could argue that the closest we ever get to equilibrium is during the first month or two of life. Unfortunately, we lack the consciousness to make heads or tails of anything and then it is all down-hill from there. That’s where parents come in as the de-facto purveyors of need and I dare you to find a more thankless but influential position.

To your child, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs reads like a list of cough medicine flavors. Not only that, but most children would gladly trade anything above that bottom line for the thing they want most; attention. Attention is also the vehicle through which a baby’s physiological needs are met. It is the want which binds all needs together. In pursuit of this desire, Babies instinctively learn to adjust their levels of intensity, volume, pitch, body language and every other non-verbal method they can muster. And it always works.

Like penguins in the Antarctic, every parent can identify the unique sights and sounds of our child’s distress. Some of these come to haunt us in our dreams. But in real life, and often without realizing it, we struggle to respond accordingly. Overwhelmed parents usually reference a pervasive sense of being pushed or pulled by forces beyond their control. That is essentially what happens each time our baby seeks our attention. These sounds impact us on a biological level (especially mothers) and particularly with that first child, we’ll come running for all of them.

If we could differentiate our reactions we would only rush over to scoop them up in cases of injury, sickness or some other emergency. In every other situation, we would take a beat, consider emotions involved and tailor our response to the facts, treating needs differently from everything else. This creates a dual effect of defining the difference between wants and needs and teaching the child how to seek them accordingly.Subscribed

This type of parenting might seem cold or even robotic, especially held up against the backlight of gentle parenting. But do not be shamed by the mythical, perfect internet parent or fooled into assuming this type of care must come at the expense of your attachment. Quite the opposite, actually, because your consistent, measured response is an unequivocal way to help your child feel emotionally safe and secure. With that essential need addressed, it will be easier to unblur the line between less pressing concerns.

Anyway, most of us may not have even heard of Maslow, but everyone has memorized his bottom row. It’s kind of hard to forget. But by the time we get beyond physical safety on the second row, the path of needs begins to fade. That’s OK. It doesn’t really matter if we know which need belongs to which level. Just remember that all of those non-physiological needs fit into one overarching, lifelong need; to find our place in the world.

Like Marcus Aurelius, we should try to remind ourselves that it is better to want what we need than to need what we want.

Most of humanity’s problems involve a failure to manage this balance and the self-detrimental habits are learned early. We choose what we want to do over what we should. We learn to need what we want. So what we are really after is not just separating the two ideas, but helping our children build their own healthy relationship between them.

Importantly, bringing wants and needs closer together should only be done in one direction. However, the path of least resistance is the one most often chosen. We elevate our needs to match our wants. This happens so easily that we quickly lose sight of which is which, making everything seem like a need. As long as that is the case, life will never be enough, we become more vulnerable to minor disappointment and having will never feel as good as wanting.

“No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.” —Seneca, Letters From a Stoic

The majority of our wants, if we consider them objectively, are unfulfillable. Their limits are either infinite or artificial. Unlike our basic needs, which are governed by natural limitations. Fortunately, this is an unavoidable conclusion for parents, who will find that equally meeting a child’s needs and wants is unsustainable. Inevitably, we must choose one over the other.

Parents are said to be “juggling” responsibilities. As purveyor of needs, our aim should be to bring on the child as our juggling partner. If we don’t start tossing them the tennis balls now, we will never work our way up to the flaming chainsaws.

Sometimes, needs and wants can be partners

The first introduction of a non-physiological need usually comes as a complete surprise to the child. The lesson rarely sticks on the first attempt, which can lead parents into a Groundhog’s Day effect. Amplifying the challenge, our moment of introduction tends to happen after the child has already chosen to follow his or her immediate want. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the unenviable but frustratingly unavoidable position of having to replace what they want with what they need.

Bridging together what a child wants to do with what he or she needs is one way to mitigate the conflict. Understanding the assignment, the best teachers learn to avoid that head-on collision of wants and needs and try to introduce the two as partners. One may lead to the other. “After you do what you need, you’ll have more time to do what you want.” Or “Inside we use a quiet voice, but you can use a loud voice outside.” Of course, this only works if you actually create a reliable space for the child to pursue his or her own wants. In some classrooms, that is not guaranteed.

Obviously, you’ll have a much easier time introducing a new need before your child has set off toward an immediate want. However, more often than not, parents don’t have a chance to react until the toothpaste is out of the tube. In these cases we should focus upon the child’s role in the decision to divert from their previously chosen course.

The need of avoidance

When our children are young, meeting the dominant needs usually results in a noticable productivity or gain. Whether physical, emotional, intellectual or social, parents can usually identify the effect of acting upon these needs. But there are also needs which are designed to result in a deficit. They require the inhibition of action.

Later in life, these manifest in the habits we wish we could stop. We may not know it when we are young, but we all learn to avoid things which detract from our lives. We should also understand that our healthy decisions will be tempered by self-detrimental behaviors. Ideally, when our children accept full responsibility for themselves, they will devote equal time to what they need to find and what they need to avoid.

Give 2 acceptable options

The child wants to run. He needs to walk. Look him in the eye and say “You can walk next to me or you can hold my hand. Which do you choose?” A parent can be happy with either of these options, even if the child is not. If he chooses option C, to run, you make the better choice for him. “Now you have chosen to hold my hand.” If holding your hand results in a boneless flop to the floor, carrying him is the best response. You can try again next time -and there will most certainly be a next time. Consistently approaching recurring moments this way helps the child learn to make the decision before it has been offered.

This is one way we focus upon the skill of decision making, but think through the likely outcomes if you can. It’s good parenting to expose your child to minor disappointment, but only to the extent that the child actually learns something from it. Otherwise, the exchange will not be formative in the way any parent would want it to be. Your effort is wasted.

Is it a Need, a Want or Both?

Although we hope our children learn delayed gratification, life is not all about shunning our desires. Doing more of what you want, especially when it also fulfills a valid need, makes life more rewarding. So needs do not necessarily have to oppose wants.

Parenting is nothing if not dynamic and today’s wants will disappear before you know it. Even some of our basic needs will either adjust to a variation on the theme or be replaced by something completely different. Sometimes, wants and needs can replace each other. Eating is a great example. It begins as a purely functional act, necessary for survival. Twenty five years later, you find yourself traveling around the world for the perfect baguette.

But there are some needs, I call them wild card needs, that every man, woman and child would just as soon avoid. It’s like playing a neverending game of Uno. You don’t know when it will happen, but someone is going to play a Draw Four or change the color and suddenly you’ve picked up more cards than you think you can hold. Struggle, discomfort, sadness, boredom, worry, pain, anger. These are all needs and every one of them is hidden in the deck, so we had better learn how to play them. Mom. Dad. Don’t be afraid to play that card on your child.

Will it help them find their place?

If you consider finding our place in the world as the basket into which all of these needs fit, you’ll never go wrong. We access our expanding world through a developing sense of self and an understanding of others. A connected social life requires simultaneous effort in both. Therefore, anything which affects our perspective should be treated as a need.

By age three, we may begin to grasp social, moral and ethical obligations to others. Parents should treat these ideas as developmental needs, not because we need them to survive, but because they determine our quality of life. People need people. It is as plain as that.

Our social nature and desire for independent, free thought creates a need for mutual understanding. Yes, we must develop our own beliefs, moral code and more, but we also must be able to ascertain what is situationally expected of us. This helps us to more effectively choose whether to comply, ignore or exceed these expectations and in turn refine our own.

I’ll be the first to agree that what others think of you should not be the standard by which all behaviors are measured. But we all need to find our tribe. Or maybe we just need to find the right person. Like all social needs, this one is reciprocal. Our success is not solely defined by the search. We should also ask ourselves what we are doing to ensure the right people find us.

You may not want to connect with others for plenty of perfectly valid reasons. If you want to live your days alone in a cave, more power to you, so long as it is by choice. On the other hand, if you live in a cave because it is your only option, you probably failed to address your own fundamental social/emotional needs somewhere along the line. Perhaps no one showed you the way.

Obviously, if you are picking out which animal pelt to use as your front door, it may be too late. But this post is entitled “WHEN wants exceed needs” because it is uncanny how quickly children may move from a point of relative want/need equilibrium to one of imbalance. So in spite of (and because of) our efforts to introduce needs all along, parents may still find themselves struggling to undo some of what has been done.

There are very few things in a parent’s life that are impossible to fix down the road, but this is one of them. That may not be what parents want to hear and I might be subjecting myself to claims of fear mongering, but when it comes to introducing needs, how we start largely determines how things will end. The good news is that the closer we are to the beginning, the more easily we can change course.

Seneca always ended his letters to his friend Lucilius with an Easter egg of wisdom. “The day’s small find,” as he once called it. My words pale in comparison to his, but I offer the following as my parting gift to you:

There is a step in the juggling parent analogy which can be performed at any time and almost always yields a positive result. You would never throw your child a ball without giving a heads up first. So let your new juggling partner see more of what you are keeping in the air, even if you have no plans yet to pass anything along.

We all want to shield our children from the stresses that come with adulthood and parenting. Sometimes we hide it all so well that our children take us for granted. If they have no idea how all of the little wants and needs we meet make the whole family work, how could they ever understand the value of their contribution or the consequences of a lack thereof? How will they ever learn to catch what life throws at them unless they learn to see it coming?