how connection developsWhen Isaac and Ora Prilleltensky's young son wanted to help his mother after she slipped on ice, being loved was only part of what mattered to him. He also wanted to do something for her. The authors use this family experience to introduce a distinction at the heart of How People Matter. Mattering involves feeling valued and being able to make a meaningful contribution.
The book's introduction and opening pages develop these experiences together. Appreciation can support participation, and participation can bring further experiences of significance. The authors follow that relationship from family life into work, community and social policy. This article explores the framework presented in those opening pages, where mattering becomes both a personal experience and a question about the opportunities people have to take part.
Being cared for and having a part to play
Matan was three when Ora fell on an icy Winnipeg street. He wanted to help her stand, but he was too small. A passing driver stopped and helped. Later, Matan returned to the event in play with his toy cars, imagining himself grown up and able to stop and help his mother.
The authors present this memory as an illustration of the desire to contribute. Matan already had his parents' love. What he wanted in that moment was the ability to make a difference for someone he loved. The episode gives a concrete meaning to their distinction between receiving regard and having something to offer. Both experiences have a place in their account of mattering.
At the beginning of the first chapter, they explain why neither component fully substitutes for the other. Someone can be appreciated while having few opportunities to contribute. Someone else can make substantial contributions while feeling that their effort or presence goes unrecognized. In the authors' framework, a fuller experience of mattering includes both. Recognition acknowledges the person, while participation gives that person a way to affect their own life and the lives of others.
The distinction changes what a response might need to provide. More praise does not, by itself, create a meaningful part to play. More responsibility does not, by itself, communicate appreciation. The authors bring the two experiences together so that one is not mistaken for a replacement for the other.
This distinction also keeps contribution broader than usefulness. The book includes contributing to oneself as well as to other people. Its concern is with meaningful agency and significance across life, alongside the experience of being respected and valued.
How appreciation and contribution work together
The authors describe feeling valued as being appreciated, respected and recognized. Adding value means making a contribution or a difference. They regard these as interdependent experiences. Appreciation can support confidence and a willingness to participate. Participation can then provide further reasons to experience one's actions as significant and to receive recognition from others.
They introduce this relationship through Jane Eyre's experience of finding a place as a teacher in a new community. Her work gives her a contribution to make to pupils and their families. The welcome she receives gives her an experience of regard. The literary example brings the two sides together in everyday social life, where work, recognition and a place among others become connected.
The same account explains why the response to participation matters. When someone is repeatedly excluded or disregarded, opportunities to contribute and receive appreciation can narrow together. The authors describe this as a cycle in which marginalization makes positive participation more difficult. Their explanation locates the experience within a relationship between a person and the surrounding conditions. Contribution needs somewhere to go, and recognition needs to reach the person offering it.
Being noticed, having a role and knowing that one's contribution makes a difference can support one another while remaining distinct experiences. The authors bring them together by attending to both the regard people receive and the opportunities they have to participate.
Mattering across four areas of life
The framework includes the self, relationships, work and community. The authors apply both feeling valued and adding value across these four areas. This makes mattering more expansive than approval from other people. It also includes how people regard themselves and participate in shaping their own lives.
In relation to the self, they connect feeling valued with self-acceptance and adding value with self-determination. The distinction makes room for appreciating who one is while also exercising direction and choice. In relationships, receiving regard and enriching another person's life contribute to love. Both people's experiences belong in the account, including the satisfaction of caring and the experience of receiving care.
At work, the authors connect contribution with mastery and competence. Within a community, contribution can support belonging. These are related experiences with different emphases. Being able to do something well concerns competence, while having a place among others concerns belonging. Mattering connects them through the significance a person experiences in what they do and how they are received.
The authors' opening account of their own marriage follows this same pattern. They describe making one another feel valued and helping one another contribute. Helping someone add value goes beyond appreciating an achievement after it happens. It includes making room for the other person's participation. Their framework therefore attends to opportunities people can provide for each other, alongside the recognition they exchange.
A shared place for recognition and responsibility
Balance is central to the authors' argument. They consider the relationship between feeling valued and contributing, and between contributing to oneself and to others. Personal well-being remains part of the picture. So does responsibility for the conditions in which other people can matter.
They express this through a distinction between a culture centered on individual recognition and a culture organized around everyone's opportunity to matter. Their proposed shared culture combines the right to feel valued with responsibility for adding value to oneself and others. This is an ethical direction for relationships and society, rather than a tested program described in the excerpt. It asks whose significance receives attention and who has room to participate.
In a longer preview of the opening chapter, the authors make the role of power explicit. They describe how people can limit another person’s significance through overt control or quieter forms of exclusion and manipulation. Fairness therefore concerns everyday relationships as well as institutions. The experience of mattering includes whether both people have room for their needs and participation.
The opening chapter also acknowledges that a group can offer acceptance while directing its members toward harm. The authors mention belonging within extremist groups as one response to exclusion. That example gives their wider argument an important boundary. Recognition alone does not establish that a group supports other people's welfare. Their account of a fair society includes the significance of people beyond one's immediate circle.
This is why the balance between self and others matters to the framework. A person's experience of recognition sits within a larger social setting. The authors' proposed direction is for people to experience value while helping create that possibility for others too.
Fair opportunities give contribution somewhere to happen
The introduction develops fairness as part of mattering itself. Discrimination can deny recognition and restrict access to participation at the same time. A person may have skills and a desire to contribute while encountering conditions that limit whether those contributions can be made or acknowledged.
The authors discuss civil rights legislation and the Americans with Disabilities Act as collective responses to exclusion. In their account, these changes communicate that people's lives count while addressing the conditions of participation. Recognition has practical expression in rights, access and treatment. It becomes visible in what people are able to do and in whether institutions take their needs seriously.
This gives a specific role to the authors' discussion of resilience and effort. They acknowledge the value of developing skills and persistence, while arguing that those capacities require fair opportunities. Encouragement directed at individuals cannot by itself provide access that an institution withholds. Their explanation includes both people's capacities and the settings in which those capacities can be exercised.
They bring wellness and fairness together in their vision of society. The argument extends beyond feeling appreciated by a friend or colleague to feeling that one counts as a citizen. Education, employment and public policy shape opportunities to participate, and therefore belong within their account of mattering.
Work provides income and opportunities for meaning
The authors develop this institutional argument through the possibility of employment changing with automation. Their concern includes both how people earn money and where they find meaningful roles. Losing a kind of work can affect material resources and opportunities to contribute, so their discussion considers both.
They propose investment in caring work and environmental work, living wages for care providers and consideration of a universal basic income. These are proposals in the introduction, not interventions evaluated there. Each addresses part of the wider concern with meaningful participation and the resources people need to live. Income and a meaningful role are related but different needs in their argument. A policy that addresses one leaves a further question about how the other will be supported.
Their attention to caring work makes the relationship between recognition and opportunity especially concrete. Childcare providers, home care workers and teachers already make contributions to other people's lives. The authors' proposal concerns how society values and supports that work, including through pay. Mattering takes material form here in the conditions that allow people to sustain contributions that others depend on.
Sources
Prilleltensky, I., & Prilleltensky, O. (2021). How people matter: Why it affects health, happiness, love, work, and society. Cambridge University Press.
Discussion draws on the introduction and opening of Chapter 1 in the publisher’s excerpt, with the discussion of everyday power from page 16 of the longer preview.