The Trouble with “Not My Problem”

My friend Sarah is an educational counselor at an elementary school in another city. Her work brings her into contact with all sorts of interesting situations, which she tells me about while carefully leaving out identifying details. Even so, I’m not accustomed to receiving WhatsApp messages from her saying, “Listen, I can’t breathe. You will not believe what just happened here.”

I was in the middle of an urgent task, so I told her I would call her later. When I did, Sarah had already left school and was driving home. She still sounded so shaken that I asked whether she was driving safely. She assured me that she was. It had simply been an extraordinarily unusual day.

The day before, she explained, one of the teachers at her school had asked to move her class to a room on a lower floor. A temporary knee problem had made climbing stairs difficult, and the administration readily approved the request. The teacher then went to her classroom to explain the arrangement to the girls and ask for their consent. Everyone was happy to agree. Why not make things easier for their teacher?

Everyone, that is, except one student, who objected vehemently. Why should the class have to move? If the teacher was suffering, that was her problem.

“What if one of the students in the class needed the same consideration?” the teacher asked.

The girl shrugged. Other people’s problems, as far as she was concerned, were not her problems.

“That very same afternoon, that girl broke her leg,” Sarah told me, her voice still filled with disbelief. “This morning, her parents came in to ask if the class could be moved to a lower floor until her leg healed.”

Life does not often deliver its lessons with such startling precision. But what stayed with me about Sarah’s story was not so much its extraordinary ending as the girl’s response to her teacher. What makes an eleven-year-old so resistant to extending even a little consideration to someone else? And to what extent is this an individual failing, rather than a reflection of how children learn to think about their obligations to others?

These questions matter to parents and educators. We invest considerable effort in teaching children mathematics, reading, and the skills they will need to succeed in life. But how much attention do we give to helping them recognize another person’s needs, accept a little inconvenience for someone else’s benefit, or understand that their own preferences are not the only ones that count?

Children can learn to speak fluently about kindness without necessarily learning to practice it. Knowing what is right and being willing to do it are two different things. The second requires not only moral understanding but also the ability to set aside one’s immediate interests, at least occasionally, in response to someone else’s needs.

Jewish tradition has long recognized this distinction. The Torah does not merely instruct us to perform acts of kindness; it also addresses the attitudes that can keep us from doing so. In its discussion of the obligation to help the poor, Deuteronomy commands: “Do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kin” (Deuteronomy 15:7).

The wording is significant. A person can refuse to help by closing a hand, but the Torah also identifies a hardened heart as part of the problem. The reluctance to respond to another person’s suffering is not merely an obstacle to generosity; it is itself a moral concern. The verses that follow call for an open hand and a willing spirit, without resentment (Deuteronomy 15:8–10).

A similar idea appears in Hillel’s famous formulation: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow” (Shabbat 31a). The principle asks us to look beyond our immediate perspective and consider what another person might be experiencing. We know what it means to struggle, to be inconvenienced, and to need someone else’s consideration. The challenge is to recognize those needs when they belong to someone else, especially when meeting them offers us no obvious benefit.

Making Consideration into a Habit

Yet even when children understand these ideas, they may still resist putting them into practice. Empathy does not automatically translate into a willingness to sacrifice comfort. That willingness, too, has to be learned. In his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides explains that character is shaped through habit. Virtues are not simply qualities we possess by nature; they develop through repeated actions. By practicing a particular way of behaving, a person gradually makes it part of his character.

The same process works in reverse. A child who repeatedly encounters the message that personal convenience must take precedence over other people’s needs may come to regard any inconvenience as an unreasonable demand. If consideration is offered only when it costs nothing, there is little opportunity to develop the habits of generosity and self-restraint that communal life requires.

The girl in Sarah’s story was not necessarily cruel. She had not set out to hurt her teacher, nor had she insulted her. She simply could not see why another person’s difficulty should require anything of her. The teacher’s predicament was not beyond her comprehension. It simply seemed irrelevant to her own interests.

Her broken leg, of course, gave her a new clarity. Suddenly, a difficulty that had seemed to belong entirely to someone else became her own, and the consideration she had rejected became something she needed.

There is something unsettling about the symmetry of the story, but its significance extends beyond the irony of what happened next. Most of us will not encounter such a neatly matched reversal, and we do not need to. We all have to learn how to make room for someone else’s needs without knowing whether we will ever need the same in return.

For children, these moments may be as small as agreeing to change classrooms or sharing a toy they would rather keep for themselves. We should not expect dramatic gestures of selflessness; what matters is that such small acts are repeated often enough to become habits. The alternative—learning to put one’s own interests first, even in the face of another person’s distress—can have consequences far more serious than a broken leg.