Children will listen
Parents can inspire their kids to take active role in world
Clive Owen is best known for playing a humble hero in Children of Men, an anti-hero in Sin City, and the hero of fantasies for women of a certain age in real life, or so we’re told. At home, things are much less scandalous and a lot more hopeful.
The British actor’s two daughters, Hannah and Eve, insisted he attend the first We Day in London, England, earlier this month. In the narrow corridor backstage at We Day, Owen squeezed past Prince Harry’s entourage of suits to meet 16-year-old activist Malala Yousafzai, who survived a Taliban assassination attempt. Prince Harry, Malala and Owen, at the behest of his kids, spoke onstage to 12,000 young volunteers.
Being a parent is a bit like negotiating a hostage situation. There are protocols, but no guarantees. Every move can seem delicate, crucial, with a life on the line. There are also strict warnings: absentee parents allegedly raise delinquents; aggressive punishments make your kid a bully. No wonder parents are easily terrified of raising apathetic kids.
To compensate, many parents foist responsibility on their offspring for all the wrong reasons. Too often, social pressures drive parents to coerce children into good deeds moms and dads never performed themselves.
But a parent’s own actions, as the Owen family shows, are much more effective at shaping social awareness in children. When Owen travelled to Rwanda in 2010, Hannah, then 13, begged to go. “It’s not a holiday, sweetheart,” he told her.
One million people were killed in the country over the course of 100 days in 1994; the trip was to visit development projects with the Aegis Trust and to witness the lingering effects of genocide. But Hannah was “very mature for her age,” he told us. And she was an unrelenting teenager.
Father and daughter visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, where some 250,000 victims are buried. They met survivors. Owen says the trip “set her alight.”
Their ... passion and will is an extraordinary thing
CLIVE OWEN
Hannah has since helped build a school in Kenya, and when she returned home, begged the whole family to return with her. All she wanted for Christmas was a service trip with her family — so she returned again with sister Eve, now 14, mom SarahJane Fenton and Owen. While the offspring of many celebrities have, um, other priorities, Hannah and Eve started a school fundraising group and have developed some clever tactics. Hannah and a friend collected donations as they raced across London, one dressed up as a chicken, the other as an egg, to determine “Who came first?”
Fenton and Eve filmed the race, and acted as judges.
Owen believes kids are very powerful, if given the right opportunity. “Their commitment and passion and will is an extraordinary thing. I’ve seen how powerful it can be. (But) they need a door to be opened to them.”
We’d add it’s easier to follow mom and dad through that door.
Having a child actually decreases a person’s likelihood to volunteer and the hours spent in volunteer work, according to one 2012 study — not surprising, as spare hours become scarce. But later in life, parental behaviour wields more influence over charitable tendencies and volunteer habits than religion, politics, race or household income, according to a 2012 survey of 2,000 American adults commissioned by a U.S.-based charity. Among the parental habits tested, even talking with children about giving or volunteering correlated to their future behaviour.
Not every parent is willing or able to take his child to Rwanda. Not every parent has to. Parents can open up the world in smaller ways by doing things such as discussing a newspaper headline with their children.
In that hallway, in early March, crammed with icons and activists, it wasn’t hard to make a link to a parent. When Prince Harry was a boy he visited homeless shelters and AIDS clinics with his mother, Princess Diana. Malala stood with her father, the family’s first activist. The Taliban threatened his unsanctioned school, which Malala was returning home from on the day she was shot. He remains her biggest inspiration.
With the overwhelming warnings parents encounter, it’s easy to forget kids copy the good stuff too.