So recently, my 10-year-old randomly said, 'I don't think I really find boys attractive. I think I'm just one of those people who doesn't find anyone attractive, like (some YouTuber). There's a name for it.' After mentiually cursing youtube, I said, 'Kid, you're 10, you're not Asexual, 10-year-old children don't usually feel that kind of attraction, it comes later. But you don't need to put a label on yourself.'

In fact, I now believe that labels can be quite insidious (unless the label is 'I'm a bitcoiner' lol).

I find that just by being a parent I have become hyper-sensitive to communication in a way I wasn't before. You realise how quickly a kid can be affected by something they hear, or self-internalize something you say and you worry that you might end up saying something offhand that gets internalized.

When a kid is naughty or does something shitty and a teacher or parents drills into them 'You're a bad kid', that's the message that gets implanted 'I am a bad person'. Not always of course, but over time, like a rouge government subsidy, it can evolve into some other destructive narrative or self-belief.

In reality, we don't need to judge a person's character, we just need to address the shitty thing. Had to do it this morning before school after the youngest destroyed a toy. You are not a shitty person, but you did a shitty thing.

Now when I hear adults describe themselves negatively, I sometimes wonder at what stage they took on a certain belief about themselves and what cemented it. A common one is 'I can't learn languages' just because they sucked at language class in school. In reality, most people can achieve more in 6 months of self-language study than in 5 years of school. Schools suck for a lot of things, maybe most things.

I was traumatized by a maths teacher when I was maybe 8, and she managed to affect the way I think about maths for life. Later as a teen, I had to have a tutor, but I found that with someone who was a true teacher with patience, maybe like @cryotosensei, I started to understand things and realized, hey, I'm not a total retard after all'. Now, I still wasn't amazing and I am still not wonderful with numbers (music and language are generally my things), but I had stopped trying because of a false belief I had about myself.

Have any of you stackers managed to break a limiting belief or label you put on yourself? Or perhaps you created your own positive narrative that helped you ?