Hey Nonprofit Professional, Are You A Hero Child?

Are you a nonprofit professional?

Do you have the Birth Order Blues?

What’s that?

Here’s a funny sort of coincidence: When I was in an elite tiny liberal arts college, I went around the room to all of my friends and I said, “Were you the first child in your family?” And everyone said YES. Were we all kind of overachievers? Hyper-intellectual? A bit over-responsible? Yes.

Birth order theory is the idea that when you are born in your family matters.

In shorthand, Oldest children are responsible “little adults.”

Youngest children are “comedians” and

middle children are “forgotten.”

In The Birth Order Blues, the authors say oldest and youngest children get along because whenever the oldest child gets too serious the youngest one is there to jolly them up. And then the oldest child can be there for the youngest and teach them responsibility. Or so they say. And middle children feel like they never get enough attention, resentful.

Recently Dan Pallotta wrote an article called “Nonprofit Pathology” for the Harvard Business Review where he blew my tiny mind.

Read it, go on, it won’t take long.

Okay, now we’re back.

Now, remember the article that you just read, where Dan Pallotta said,

“Maybe people get into the compassion business full-time not because they’re more compassionate than others but because they’re codependent. Maybe the driving force is really inverted narcissism — an unhealthy and unexamined addiction to care-taking or to self-neglect.”

Then he says,

“I was the oldest son and the oldest grandson in an Italian family. That produced an unhealthy dose of the “hero child” syndrome, as psychologists describe it, where I felt more responsibility for the world’s problems at age nine than maybe a kid ought to. I remember sitting at the family dinner table on Sundays listening to my uncles and grandfather and dad talk about all the world’s woes and quietly adding each one to my list, thinking, “OK, I have to solve that one too.”"

Wow! Talk about something I had no idea about! I was the oldest grandchild and oldest daughter in a large family too. That produced “hero child” syndrome in me, where I felt more responsibility for the world’s problems as well!

So, I didn’t know what a hero child was. I had to look it up. Here’s the definition, maybe you’ll recognize yourself, nonprofit professional?

“The Hero, who is usually the oldest child, is characteristically over-responsible and an over-achiever. The Hero allows the family to be reassured it is doing well, as it can always look to the achievements of the oldest son or daughter as a source of pride and esteem. While the Hero may excel in school, be a leader on the football team or a cheerleader, or obtain well-paying employment, inwardly he or she is suffering from painful feelings of inadequacy and guilt, as nothing he or she does is good enough to heal his family’s pain. The Hero’s compulsive drive to succeed may in turn lead to stress-related illness, and compulsive over-working (Oh, have I been writing about this lately? I think I have). The Hero’s qualities of appeasement, helpfulness and nurturing of his or her parents may cause others outside the family to remark upon the child’s good character, and obtains him or her much positive attention. But inwardly, the Hero feels isolated.” From: George Boyd at the Mudrashram Institute of Spiritual Studies

I told people on twitter about this article and got back a lot of “WOW!” and “OMGs” so, I think this has struck a chord. So if you’re involved in nonprofits AND if your family was dysfunctional, join the club! There seem to be a lot of us.

If you don’t recognize yourself as the hero child, there are other kinds! Maybe you are a Scapegoat? A Lost Child? A Mascot? An Enabler?

From the same article by George Boyd at the Mudrashram Institute of Spiritual Studies:

“The Enabler protects and takes care of the problem spouse, whom Sharon Wegscheider refers to as the Dependent, so that the Dependent is never allowed to experience the negative consequences of his or her actions. While the Enabler feels angry and resentful about the extra burden that is placed upon him or her by the Dependent’s unhealthy, irresponsible and antisocial behavior, he or she may feel powerless to do anything about it. The Enabler feels he or she must act this way, because otherwise, the family might not survive. While the family is afforded survival by the Enabler’s responsibility, the Enabler may pay the cost of stress-related illness, and never have his or her own needs met, in effect, being a martyr for the family. The paradoxical thing about the Enabler’s behavior is that by preventing the Dependent’s crisis, he or she also prevents the painful, corrective experience that crisis brings, which may be the only thing that makes the Dependent stop the downward spiral of addiction.

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