It’s Not All About Giving
By: Nancy Lai
Tags: Childrens Books, Giving, Love, Responsibility

It’s Not All About Giving

Image courtesy of sharonj from Pixabay

Shortly before Christmas, I saw “The Giving Tree” on a list of recommended books to inspire kindness and empathy in young children. It was summarized as “a tender story… an affecting interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another’s capacity to love in return.” I was intrigued by that description, strung together in a pretty but opaque combination, and I read the book with my 8-year-old.

What I read horrified me.

“The Giving Tree” is an unflinching story about a tree and the boy she loved. When the boy was bored, she would play with him. When he was hungry, she would give him apples to eat. When the boy was tired, she would give him shade to rest under. When the boy grew up and wanted money, the tree told him to harvest her apples and sell them. When the boy came back, now wanting a house, she gave him all her branches he could build a house. When the boy came back, now wanting a boat to escape his life, the tree bade him to cut down her trunk to build with. So he did, and she was reduced to a stump.

The boy took and took and took… because the tree gave and gave and gave. He only learned to take, not to give. He never learned to solve his own problems. He never tried to make life better for the tree who loved him so. The boy stayed a boy. He grew old but never grew into a man.

Love can create monsters. By giving too much of ourselves, we can end up teaching our loved ones only to take. By protecting them from suffering and shouldering it on ourselves, they never learn hurt, so they think too lightly of inflicting pain. By sacrificing ourselves too easily and over and over again, we teach others that their own wants and needs are all that matters.

Sometimes I think about the children afflicted with “affluenza”. I pity them. There’s no doubt that rich, powerful people love their children as much as other people do… after all, they are still parents. But many have shortsightedly stunted the character growth of their children. They have gone so much further than shielding their children from want, to shielding them from ever having to give. They have taught their children only how to take, not to give, and they have shielded their children from accountability to others. All this has come at a steep price: existential impotence. By giving this way, they have taken away their children’s chance to build character and grow in courage and compassion.

The older I get, the more I see that what love is, is simple — love is love — but that what it means to love is complex. There are many nuances to how real love is expressed. Loving someone is not about giving them what they want, but about helping them to what they need.

So perhaps “The Giving Tree” is indeed about giving and love, just not in the way that most people think, looking at it shallowly. This stark story can compel us to think more deeply about how to love, and the deep responsibility we bear to those we love.

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Dr. Nancy Lai is a business strategist and technologist with a Ph.D. in Particle Physics. She has brokered dozens of deals and transactions and worked with thousands of people across companies of all sizes and industries. Along the journey, she’s gathered many data points on workplace behavior and business dynamics & motivations. She enjoys reflecting on why things are and how things work, from the micro to the macro, from inter-human psychology in our daily lives to structural dynamics at the societal level. Her shorter observations are at https://twitter.com/gr82live.