Gordon Flett

And a big factor with parents is their feeling of efficacy as a parent.

Parents need to matter too, and expressing this and finding ways to nurture the mutual need will keep these relationships

going, but it's so hardwired.

And I do believe that, you know, they talk about psychological needs.

The three that people talk about are the need for communion, people like at University of Rochester, the need for connection and the need for autonomy.

And I've always said the fourth need is the need to matter.

And we've seen in the anti-mattering work that if you feel like you don't matter, that people are treating you like you're invisible and unwanted and not even

insignificant, but unsignificant.

If you're actually feeling this way, it impacts those other needs where you don't feel as confident anymore.

You don't feel that you can go out and do something where you can make things happen in terms of autonomy.

So it's a core need, but it also relates to other needs and other needs as well.

Like in terms of the need for attention and the need to need just for somebody to be checking in on you.

But I see that sort of thing.

It's great if it's satisfied, but you need to keep having it satisfied.

And sadly, there's so many people out there who don't have their need for mattering to be satisfied.

And I'm actually doing some work with a colleague in Italy, Silvia Cassell, where we've created a measure of the unmet need to matter.

And it's robustly correlated with antimattering and a hypersensitivity to being hurt when somebody treats you like you don't matter.

We need to get more people addressing that core need.

What I recognize there is that there are different pathways to that sense of not mattering.

And sometimes it's neglect and non-involvement.