“Being a parent taught me the importance of being unselfish.”
Your child gets attacked by a crocodile and you risk your life to save her. Some would say you were being unselfish: You were acting out of concern for another, and risking great harm, even your life, in doing so.
No.
Unselfishness would be: You save a stranger child from another crocodile and let your child die. That would be unselfish because you’re sacrificing your happiness. Saving your child was good because it was selfish: It was an act of protecting a crucial value to your happiness. Unselfishness, i.e., self-harm, is not something you should practice.
Many people offer as examples of “unselfishness” what are actually examples of selfishness, e.g., protecting what is crucial to their happiness (e.g., their child).
And many people offer as examples of “selfishness” what are actually examples of unselfishness. “So-and-so used to be selfish; she prioritized optics and social approval over her child’s happiness. But eventually she learned the value of unselfishness: She started prioritizing her child over optics, and her life became more joyous.”
No. That is not someone who was selfish and then learned the value of unselfishness. That’s someone who was unselfish, someone who did not pursue their (actual) happiness, and then learned the value of selfishness.
Afternote:
If you’re tempted to think about oxygen masks or “To care for others I have to care for myself; to be unselfish I have to be selfish; it’s not ‘either-or’; it’s ‘both-and’; unselfishness and selfishness can co-exist and that’s the golden ticket,” I say to you:
If you care about your child and yourself, care about your child’s mind and your mind.
If you care about your child’s mind and your mind, care about honest and critical thinking, valuing truth, and truth seeking.
If you care about honest and critical thinking, valuing truth, and truth seeking, restart at paragraph 1.
(If you want to and would enjoy it. I don’t want you to do anything unselfish.)