Gordon Flett

When look at these people over here, it could even be a sibling, you know, where there's a favorite child amongst them and everybody knows it, although nobody will acknowledge it.

And you can say that you're not getting the attention even within your own family.

But the reason why it hurts is because people, when you go back to what mattering is, it was used as a guide for self-evaluation, reflected appraisal on the self.

So ultimately you can come up with the sense that, you know, you are just not somebody that is of interest.

or worth being pursued.

And I always mentioned in terms of past theorists that Gregory Brown, who was a student of Morris Rosenberg and his book, he talks about the abject feeling of feeling that you don't matter because it's a sense of profound social rejection.

And if you're not getting a sense of mattering through your relationships or through organizations, you can feel profoundly

rejected and he talks about this in the concept of the work by williams on being ostracized where you feel that you're so far removed and it's not just through lack of attention that people are actually keeping you at a distance but of course it's also the case that people who feel that way often keep themselves at a distance because they're expecting negative responses from others when in fact they might be getting positive i just want to underscore again though that

Mattering is a subjective appraisal.

And to underscore that people can be so inaccurate in terms of this, one thing that we studied through our school board project was we asked the young people whether they felt they mattered and about 35% of them either said, I don't matter, or I don't know if I matter.

Then we asked parents, is it possible that your child feels like he, she doesn't matter?

And only 8% of parents

said that they felt like it could be that their child has a sense of not mattering.

So I'm saying, well, there's about one out of five kids are walking around with a feeling of I don't matter, yet their parents think they do matter.

Whenever I mention this in an audience of parents, they're horrified looks because now they're thinking, is this my kid?

So what I tell them is just make it so that they know they matter.

You know, whether it's small things you do or big things or just tell them.

But the best is just to show through little considerations.

If somebody's been away, just say you were thinking about them, miss them.

There's so many different ways of doing it.