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What affect does War and Violence have on our ability to parent? January 28, 2009

Posted by Megan in Beware the Baby Trainers, History: Cultural Beliefs and Society Pressures, Human Development/Mental Health.
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In starting this post I know this area of thought is huge, well studied and well documented.

My own Mother has spent years in this area teaching many people about this subject from the police, victim support, mental health personal…the list goes on.

My own Father has also helped to pick up the pieces of other people’s lives who try to dull down what has happened to them with drugs and alcohol or their own expression of violence against others.

But for my own views in this post I want to look at War, and mostly the larger wars that have affected many people and their families. If we visit any of the War memorial museums we can see the hundreds of stories from both the people at the front but also thoughts left at home.

The peoples at the front who have seen unimaginable horrors who have had to move through their lives at the time, the best that they can would/will often involve blocking out emotions. With dulled emotions, with minds that have seen what they have seen, often these people have placed themselves out of their lives – to become distant and unfeeling – so that they can live.

The peoples at home are often forgotten and that they also had to have a part of this emotional blocking. Whole families were lost with the Mother, the Wife or the Sisters left wondering if their loved ones where ok…minds making pictures which might or might not be true.

Families living in environments which could have been in the middle of these Wars. Houses gone, lives gone…everything. The stress the hunger and the confusion of what will happen next as well as the confusion of weather their loved ones would come home.

Most of us do not have to deal with this kind of War today though we do still have Wars and we do still have problems with our emotions. Often when people come home from War they are unable to switch on their emotions or what they have seen is so bad that nothing else they see or hear can equate to what they have been through.

What seems to happen many times is that families do not know how to be families they just go through the motions of survival with a dullness of caring or an unsureness of what to do when something really does happen.

How does this affect us today? Why do I want to talk about this horrible time in many of our families lives which we have been trying to leave in the past?

It is true the time for many of these Wars have past and the time that it is affecting us has gone….right?

For many of us it might have been our Grandparents who were in the War – for some – as now days we are more generations removed it might have been our Great Grandparent. But there are also Wars today as well

How does that affect us now?

Most of us listen to our Parents and often our Grandparents advice especially when it comes to an unknown subject or new venture like raising children.

As I often do in this blog is link back to the emotional health, style and methods we use to raise our children, treat our children…or train our children to sleep.

Much of the information we are using today in the forms of “Baby manuals” comes from a time where emotions were not ‘in use’ so to say. The books that a written today can and often will be written by people who have been raised by parents from the war times.

People living through the war had to block their hearts off to any feelings which often meant their own children’s suffering. Possibly not suffering as in physical injury but emotional injury….they in turn past this on to our parents (for some their grandparents) who in turn past it on…..

The idea of “It didn’t kill me” is termed and the idea of emotional harm is puzzling to many…as they themselves have actually suffered from emotional harm.

Today we do not live in that type of life.

Today we know what emotional harm can do to a person.

Today we can move on and learn a new way of treating the people we love with love…it’s ok to show that we care and it is ok to give a child (or anyone we are close to) who is in need to give them their need, so as to grow up and move on emotionally strong. We do not need to switch off our caring heart as our child goes to sleep and if they cry for us we have moved on enough in time and education to know that going holding and comforting that child, it will be better than leaving that child to its own demons.

My child behavior is more like a Monkey or a Caveman. December 28, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Good Books, Human Development/Mental Health.
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I begin this post with some quotes from Meredith F. Small’s book “Our Babies, Ourselves – How biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent”
“…about 98 percent of our genetic material is identical to that of chimpanzees. We are, in fact, more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas. I state this fact to underscore a point: Human babies, and human adults for that matter, are animals. We are primates, a kind of mammal, and our babies are animal babies. Although humans like to think of themselves as unique, we share much of our physiology and behavior with others of our kind, with other primates. For example, the shape of our head follows a continuum with other primates that shows a reduced snout and an enlarged brain case with a full forehead and forward-facing eyes. Our teeth are primate teeth, rather than dog teeth or alligator teeth. Our eyes see the way monkeys’ eyes see, with color vision and good depth perception to facilitate swinging through the trees. And our flexible hands-the hands that can pick ripe fruit off a tree, type these words or tie a shoe, hold a flower or build a model plane-distinguish us, and all primates, from other mammals that have paws. Our whole upper skeleton reflects an even closer relationship to other primates, apes in particular. Using a human anatomy book, one can dissect a chimpanzee or a gorilla and find everything in the right place. We have the upper bodies of long-armed apes. The only difference, in a broad anatomical sense, is the fact that the human pelvis, legs, and feet have been adapted to upright walking. So much of our physiology is simply that of an upright-walking primate….”

“…I begin the tale of human infants at the beginning of our species and look at the human infant as an evolutionary organism that evolved over generations into its modern form. We are born naked, with only a fraction of our brain complete. We cannot stand up, defend ourselves, or find food. And we grow very slowly; the human infant is the most dependent infant on earth. Why is that?
For some reason, millions of years ago, our species evolved away from an ape-like ancestor and stood up. The anatomical change in the pelvic region necessary for bipedalism placed architectural constraints on the shape of the human pelvis. As brain size increased during our evolutionary history, the dictates of the bipedal pelvis required that human infants finish their neural growth outside the womb. Because human infants are so dependent, their parents must invest heavily in raising each infant; and they must form an intimate relationship with an infant who has few ways to communicate his or her needs. Nature has set up an entwined, symbiotic relationship between parents and offspring, and from this grows the infant-parent bond, a necessary feature of human biology and growth. Chapter One describes this evolutionary path of the human infant and explains the special characteristics of the youngest members of our species and their necessary relationship with adults….”

Many people do not like the idea that we have developed from something to become humans and many people don’t like or even understand how we developed from cave dwelling or grass huts to our current nuclear family which live in many roomed buildings aka houses.
Some of us also forget how short a time it was since ‘we’ were more primitive in our ways compared to how long ‘we’ have actually been human.

I started writing a post on “Who has time to parent today?” and then really began to think about this in more depth and begun to think about how humans have developed over time/history.

Surrogate mother experiment December 13, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Bond: Behaviour/Discipline, History: Cultural Beliefs and Society Pressures, Human Development/Mental Health.
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This post is directly from Wiki on Harry Frederick Harlow an American psychologist …and is leading up to another post which I am still writing.

“In a well-known series of experiments conducted between 1957 and 1963, Harlow removed baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers, and offered them a choice between two surrogate mothers, one made of terrycloth, the other of wire.
The studies were motivated by John Bowlby’s World Health Organization-sponsored study and report, “Maternal Care and Mental Health” in 1950, in which Bowlby reviewed previous studies on the effects of institutionalization on child development such as René Spitz’s[2] and his own surveys on children raised in a variety of settings. In 1953, his colleague, James Robertson, produced a short and controversial documentary film titled A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital demonstrating the almost immediate effects of maternal separation. Bowlby’s report, coupled with Robertson’s film, demonstrated the importance of the primary caregiver in human and non-human primate development. Bowlby emphasized the mother’s role in feeding as a basis for the development of a strong mother-child relationship. However, his conclusions, based on psychoanalytic theory, generated much debate. It was this debate about the reasons behind the demonstrated and acknowledged need for maternal care, that was addressed by Harlow in his studies with the cloth and wire surrogates.
In Harlow’s classic experiment, two groups of baby rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers. In the first group, a terrycloth mother provided no food, while a wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk. In the second group, a terrycloth mother provided food; the wire mother did not. It was found that the young monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother whether or not it provided them with food, and that the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only when it provided food.
Whenever a frightening stimulus was brought into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth mother for protection and comfort, no matter which mother provided them with food. This response decreased as the monkeys grew older.
When the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogate, they clung to it until they felt secure enough to explore. Once they began to explore, they occasionally returned to the cloth mother for comfort. Monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room without their cloth mothers acted very differently. They froze in fear and cried, crouched down, or sucked their thumbs. Some even ran from object to object, apparently searching for the cloth mother, as they cried and screamed. Monkeys placed in this situation with their wire mothers exhibited the same behavior as the monkeys with no mother.
Once the monkeys reached an age where they could eat solid foods, they were separated from their cloth mothers for three days. When they were reunited with their mothers, they clung to them and did not venture off to explore as they had in previous situations. Harlow concluded from this that the need for contact comfort was stronger than the need to explore.
The study found that monkeys who were raised with either a wire mother or a cloth mother gained weight at the same rate. However, the monkeys that had only a wire mother had trouble digesting the milk and suffered from diarrhea more frequently. Harlow’s interpretation of this behavior, which is still widely accepted, was that lack of contact comfort was psychologically stressful to the monkeys.
The importance of these findings is that they contradicted both the then common pedagogic advice of limiting or avoiding bodily contact in an attempt to avoid spoiling children and the insistence of the then dominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. Feeding was thought to be the most important factor in the formation of a mother-child bond. Harlow concluded, however, that nursing strengthened the mother-child bond because of the intimate body contact that it provided. He described his experiments as a study of love. He also believed that contact comfort could be provided by either mother or father. Though widely accepted now, this idea was revolutionary at the time.
Critics of Harlow’s research have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing. [3]…”

 

For another intresting look at Harry see this blog as well New found land news it also shows the wire monkey ‘mothers’

Disciplinary measures of old…or still around? October 18, 2008

Posted by Megan in History: Cultural Beliefs and Society Pressures, Human Development/Mental Health.
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I’m still reading through Alice Millers book and I’ve got lots of points that I’m now looking back on. This I’ve taken from page 201

“…A patient’s father, who himself had had a very difficult childhood that he never talked about, often treated his son, in whom he kept seeing himself, in an extremely cruel way. Neither he nor his son was conscious of this cruelty; they both regarded it as a “disciplinary measure.” When the son, who had severe symptoms, began his analysis, he was, as he said, “very grateful” to his father for the strict upbringing and “severe punishment” he had received. While in analysis, my patient, who had at one point been studying education at the university, discovered Ekkehard von Braunmühl and his antipedagogical writings and was strongly impressed by them. During this period he went home for a visit and for the first time experienced with great clarity the way his father continually hurt his feelings, either by not listening at all to what he was saying or by ridiculing everything he said. When his son pointed this out to him, the father, who was a professor of education, said in all seriousness: “You ought to thank me for that. You’ll have to put up with people all your life who won’t pay any attention to you or won’t take what you say seriously. This way you’re already used to it, having learned it from me. What you learn when you’re young, you know for the rest of your life.” The twenty-four-year-old son was taken aback by this reply at first. How often he had heard his father make similar statements without ever questioning their validity! This time, however, he became indignant, and on the basis of something he had read in Braunmühl, he said: “If you intend to continue treating me according to these principles, to be consistent you would then actually have to kill me, for someday I will have to die too. That would be the best way you could prepare me for it.” His father accused him of being impertinent and acting as though he knew all the answers, but this was a very decisive experience for the son. From that point on, his studies took an entirely different direction…”

This really struck a cord for me as many parents use this as a ‘reason’ for;
cry it out – learning to fall asleep by them selves
or
not comforting when a child is hurt or asking for help – teaching them independence.

Controlled Parenting…oh um Crying September 16, 2008

Posted by Megan in Belief in Baby’s Crys: Cry It Out/Controlled Cry, Beware the Baby Trainers, Human Development/Mental Health.
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 “…Why did these ideas of controlled parenting develop? One imagines mainly to increase the hours of sleep parents wanted or felt they needed. Ask any group of women who are well into the third trimester, ‘How many of you slept through the night last night?’ and you will find that nine out of ten have needed to get up at least once during the night. How many books have been written about Bladder Taming in Pregnancy and even if they were would the reader feel a failure and not tell her friends that she was still getting up for her bladder because they might think she was not in control? …” for more click here to read

I can really see the Bladder Taming going down well…I mean how many times would the poor husband get woken up as one stumbles to the bathroom. How many hours do we get robbed of sleep.
It brings back the days when our bathroom was outside and I was 8 months pregnant…I really didn’t want to go…oh man that damp grass the cold wind and yes sometimes the rain…but I had the company of my cat every time and the candle was quite lovely in the night.

But I suppose when its not apart of you and you don’t “feel” the pain then it can be ignored. People can say it’s for their own good and they need to learn how to self soothe and turn over and go back to sleep.
But if its morning sickness (all day sickness) or needing to pee they hey you’ve got to go….is it a different story?

If the baby is crying answer the call as the consequence’s of not answering are just like not answering the Nature Calls…you may not have troubles now but you will have later on in life.

Where should my baby sleep? September 1, 2008

Posted by Megan in Bedding Close to Baby: Cosleep, Human Development/Mental Health.
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Baby in a cot…tradition? But is it really tradition?

Some quotes and excerpts:

“…Co sleeping- or sleep sharing has been the norm in most cultures for thousands of years, in fact prior to the late 1700s co sleeping was the norm in all societies. It is only in the last 200 years that western society has decreed a baby should sleep alone….” for more of this article

“…Co-sleeping, also called the family bed, is a practice in which babies and young children sleep with one or both parents. It is standard practice in many parts of the world outside of North America, Europe and Australia, although even in these countries children a significant minority of children have shared a bed with their parents at some point in childhood. One 2006 study of children age 3-10 in India reported 93% of children co-sleeping. Co-sleeping was widely practiced in all areas up until the 19th century, until the advent of giving the child his or her own room and the crib. In many parts of the world, co-sleeping simply has the practical benefit of keeping the child warm at night. Co-sleeping has been relatively recently re-introduced into Western culture by practitioners of attachment parenting. A 2006 study of children in Kentucky in the United States reported 15% of infants and toddlers 2 weeks to 2 years engage in co-sleeping….” to see all of wiki’s page

“…Why do we not abandon cribs (cots), where many babies have died and many more have been injured? When babies die in cribs (cots), parents are never told to avoid them; we here only pleas for safer products. But when a baby dies in a bed, it draws calls for an end to co-sleeping, with little attention paid to the actual cause of that death (usually the result of an intoxicated parent, a water bed, or a gap between the mattress and the frame)….” an excerpt from Jan Hunts book “The natural child”.

In Australia and New Zealand one of the major causes of infant death is “Cot Death” or SIDS…see this video documentary.

A cultural view:

Why have we moved away from sleep sharing?

To start with we need to look back at our recent history of sleeping. It was thought that it was dangerous to share the same space as another (even your own partner) for fear of sharing our expelled air – which was thought to be poisonous. That’s why when we see the old romantic movies and read of old times we see the well to do in different rooms and the less well to do in different beds.

But these ideas really did hamper the “romance” of marriage and that “tradition” was soon lost for the convenience of sex.

But as sex became more of an importance and has been added to by flavors by books then movies it became more important to leave the children in another room (for their safety…?) for adults to share the romantic dream of the climax – as per advertised by our trashy romantic novels/movies.

We also have another part of history to look at too which added to our “modern ideas” back in the famine days of Catholic Ireland (and other countries) where we had many many children being born to already overflowing and stretched families with no contraception available/aloud….we had too many mouths to feed….we had starving families sleep sharing with their children (as there was nowhere else for them to sleep)….we have cases of desperation….and reports of new infants being “overlaid” and suffocated by accident…..

We had the Church ban sleep sharing.

So in looking at our recent history of 100-200 years we can see the influence of people born of this era of fear like Dr E. Holt (some other posts which mention Holt) or J. Sulzer who are then closely followed by our “modern” baby trainers who encourage parents to let their children cry it out and that children must sleep alone and in their own bed.

These people have based their parenting information on the “modern scientific idea” which came about back when scientific ideas were new exciting and the way of the future. Shaky times when scientists made bold statements which now days would not stand up to our modern terms (yes abet at times not strict enough) but still more so than back 100-200 years ago with the lack of research, studies and lets not forget our now current technology available which they didn’t have back then.

But do we think of this when we are encouraged as parents to sleep separately from our children? Who are we encouraged by? Are their reasons good and strong based on evidence?

Most information will be used and shared in fear not in informed decisions.

This post is written while thinking of the History or the Tradition of cot sleeping alone. It has not even looked at the human needs, the developmental side and even the safety side of infants sleeping alone…that is for another post.

To read more on this issue please visit the University of Notre Dame Mother Baby Sleep Laboratory

From a personal view:

It was not until we abandoned the “traditional” use of the cot altogether did we start getting some sleep. We are safe co-sleepers who have actually shared a bed with our baby daughter. We still co-sleep today with her at 2 years with her migrating to a co-sleeper cot beside our bed (her choice)….and right at this moment she is asleep in her own room in her own bed (her choice) though I’m sure I’ll have a little lump beside me in the cot in a few hours ;-)

Good night all and sleep well however YOU feel safe.

History, genetics and treatment of children August 23, 2008

Posted by Megan in Attachment parenting and other styles, Belief in Baby’s Crys: Cry It Out/Controlled Cry, Beware the Baby Trainers, History: Cultural Beliefs and Society Pressures, Human Development/Mental Health.
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There have been some great atrocities against human beings at many stages through our history – anyone’s history be it English, German, Spanish, Japanese, and on and on back to cave man times. There is no perfect culture there is no clan with out faults…there is always someone who wants more and will try to get more and in doing so could shape another persons life with their endeavors.

But this does not give us (the modern adult human) the right to treat others with disrespect and it also does not mean that we can ignore history and its teachings.

“…In every child born there are a multitude of seeds all waiting to be nurtured and watered eventually sprouting roots and emerging from their fertile soil. If we nurture the seeds of love, faith, non-violence, compassion and honesty, these attributes will grow strong and in abundance however, if the seeds of hate, jealously, intolerance, violence, fear and envy are watered they too will bear fruit.

As parents we are responsible for developing a child’s view of the world around them. The view we create for them, will likely follow them through the course of their lifetime. We can help them to develop a view of a world of possibilities, abundance and magnificent and we can also create a view of an antagonistic world where fear, unhappiness and anger predominate….“

After world war II there was some thought into the idea that their could be a cultural tendency to cruelty. But if we look at what might of taken place to that country of peoples in the years or even decades running up to these wars we can piece together possibly an understanding.

See this post for a look in to history

“…take a historical look at the role of pre-war German pedagogy, ethics, and religion in training people to distrust messages from their bodily feelings and emotions*(see note), thereby training them to distrust their internal sense of authority. People who can’t trust their own body knowledge feel out of touch, have less tolerance for ambiguity, seek clear-cut simple rules to determine their actions, tend to consider complex situations in simplistic terms, and are thus more likely to be swayed by pronouncements made by “experts” and by naive either/or arguments. The slogan “You’re either with us or against us,” for example, could seem reasonable only to a populace for which reason has become severed from an intact empathic system–to people who had thus been primed to see Jews, communists, and homosexuals as “the enemy.” In short, to the extent that a society venerates the ultimate authority of disembodied rationality, it fosters a citizenry that is out of touch with its psychosomatic knowledge base and is therefore vulnerable to political manipulation…. For more of this article (I may not agree with everything someone else says)

History also plays a great part in our own gene’s we can plot back through time a predisposition to certain medical aliments like cancer, diabetes so on and so forth which might be in our own family line.

As we can see by the post on the Hippocampus and the stress which happens during times of neglect, abuse and fear there may be a correlation between our gene’s and our treatment as a child to weather or not we have the – for arguments sake – the cancer gene switched on.

If we have the gene and we have the stress then it could be more likely to occur.

So if we can understand where the “poisonous parenting ideals” (as some are calling it the post from above history link) come from and if we can learn as a species that this parenting style is not the best for our developing brain as a human let alone as a whole society or even to the extent as a planet of people….can we not stop?

Stop from following an idea that really does not work.

Who is to say that a child who has been bullied by its parents, manipulated and controlled through various different forms of baby training – be it Babywise or Save our sleep or any of the many manuals we seem to of come to need to make us feel better at what we are doing  ….who is to say that they will not be the next Hitler, the next Columbine the next Bundy the next person on the top of the most wanted list.

But we as parents can shape the future…so lets do it!

*notes I we can also see in the use of baby training manuals that we are “training people to distrust messages from their bodily feelings and emotions” which is what happens when we numb our hearts to our children’s cry’s, questions and “pesterings”. 

A part of our western parenting style history August 22, 2008

Posted by Megan in History: Cultural Beliefs and Society Pressures, Human Development/Mental Health.
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The following passage is an excerpt by J. Sulzer, written in 1748

As far as willfulness is concerned, this expresses itself as a natural recourse in tenderest childhood as soon as children are able to make their desire for something known by means of gestures. They see something they want but cannot have; they become angry, cry, and flail about. Or they are given something that does not please them; they fling it aside and begin to cry. These are dangerous faults that hinder their entire education and encourage undesirable qualities in children. If willfulness and wickedness are not driven out, it is impossible to give a child a good education. The moment these flaws appear in a child, it is high time to resist this evil so that it does not become ingrained through habit and the children do not become thoroughly depraved.

 

Therefore, I advise all those whose concern is the education of children to make it their main occupation to drive out willfulness and wickedness and to persist until they have reached their goal. As I have remarked above, it is impossible to reason with young children; thus, willfulness must be driven out in a methodical manner, and there is no other recourse for this purpose than to show children one is serious. If one gives in to their willfulness once, the second time it will be more pronounced and more difficult to drive out. Once children have learned that anger and tears will win them their own way, they will not fail to use the same methods again. They will finally become the masters of their parents and of their nursemaids and will have a bad, willful, and unbearable disposition with which they will trouble and torment their parents ever after as the well-earned reward for the “good” upbringing they were given. But if parents are fortunate enough to drive out willfulness from the very beginning by means of scolding and the rod, they will have obedient, docile, and good children whom they can later provide with a good education. If a good basis for education is to be established, then one must not cease toiling until one sees that all willfulness is gone, for there is absolutely no place for it. Let no one make the mistake of thinking he will be able to obtain any good results before he has eliminated these two major faults. He will toil in vain. This is where the foundation first must be laid.

 

These, then, are the two most important matters one must attend to in the child’s first year. When he is over a year old, and is beginning to understand and speak somewhat, one must concentrate on other things as well, yet always with the understanding that willfulness must be the main target of all our toils until it is completely abolished. It is always our main purpose to make children into righteous, virtuous persons, and parents should be ever mindful of this when they regard their children so that they will miss no opportunity to labor over them. They must also keep very fresh in their minds the outline or image of a mind disposed to virtue, as described above, so that they know what is to be undertaken. The first and foremost matter to be attended to is implanting in children a love of order; this is the first step we require in the way of virtue. In the first three years, however, this — like all things one undertakes with children — can come ‘about only in a quite mechanical way. Everything must follow the rules of orderliness. Food and drink, clothing, sleep, and indeed the child’s entire little household must be orderly and must never be altered in the least to accommodate their willfulness or whims so that they may learn in earliest childhood to submit strictly to the rules of orderliness. The order one insists upon has an indisputable influence on their minds, and if children become accustomed to orderliness at a very early age, they will suppose thereafter that this is completely natural because they no longer realize that it has been artfully instilled in them, If, out of indulgence, one alters the order of the child’s little household as often as his whim shall dictate, then he will come to think that orderliness is not of great importance but must always yield to our whim. Such a false assumption would cause widespread damage to the moral life, as may easily be deduced from what I have said above about order. When children are of an age to be reasoned with, one must take every opportunity to present order to them as something sacred and inviolable. If they want to have something that offends against order, then one should say to them: my dear child, this is impossible; this offends against order, which must never be breached, and so on. . . .

 

The second major matter to which one must dedicate oneself beginning with the second and third year is a strict obedience to parents and superiors and a trusting acceptance of all they do. These qualities are not only absolutely necessary for the success of the child’s education, but they have a very strong influence on education in general, They are so essential because they impart to the mind orderliness per se and a spirit of submission to the laws, A child who is used to obeying his parents will also willingly submit to the laws and rules of reason once he is on his own and his own master, since he is already accustomed not to act in accordance with his own will. Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey. It is a generally recognized principle that persons of high estate who are destined to rule whole nations must learn the art of governance by way of first learning obedience. Qui nescit obedire, nescit imperare: the reason for this is that obedience teaches a person to be zealous in observing the law, which is the first quality of a ruler. Thus, after one has driven out willfulness as a result of one’s first labors with children, the chief ‘goal of one’s further labors must be obedience. It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.

Just as soon as children develop awareness, it is essential to demonstrate to them by word and deed that they must submit to the will of their parents. Obedience requires children to (I) willingly do as they are told, (2) willingly refrain from doing what is forbidden, and (3) accept the rules made for their sake. [J. Sulzer, Versuch von der Erziehung und Unterweisung der Kinder….for more

I am not sure if you see what I see but for me it became a great understanding of why our parents and grandparent act as they do.

The righteousness of parents as they “you need to have tight control so babies/children do not manipulation you with their demands…even crying out”

It seems that the fear of manipulation springs from this era and as research which dates back even from this time of writing of the above tells us that the ideas of this manipulation is wrong.

Many staunch parents miss out on the connection with their young children and the ways that humans develop. It has been shown in many studies that children treated with control or a “tight reign” actually suppress these desires, questions or needs which can later develop into mental illness and or violent behaviors or crimes against another person.

Sadly this information is still held as “normal” treatment for children today….and as a friend said a few months ago as a laugh but in a low sense “We’ll have to pay for our kids counseling in the future”.

 

Stages of Brain Development in an Infant June 30, 2008

Posted by Megan in Human Development/Mental Health.
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Many times in my posts I refer to the development of a certain skill…and I don’t mean just walking but other things like emotions and the development of empathy which is something that the Brainwave trust really looks into as an important stage of childhood.
Here I have a little bar graph which shows what I mean when the first years of a child’s life are so important and it is up to us as caregivers to respect their needs and their brains so they can develop well.
I have used some information from Brainwave and also go a little more information on this subject from this web site…click here

Feeling guilty in asking for HELP? June 30, 2008

Posted by Megan in History: Cultural Beliefs and Society Pressures, Human Development/Mental Health.
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I would like to say we have had a spate of stories in the news which tell us of children being neglected, abused and or even killed. But that would down play this problem to be occasional, odd, unusual or even shockingly unheard of when in fact it is happening everyday all day.

At some point in time the parents of these abused, neglected and killed would have asked for help.

Are you asking what do I mean by that?

Let me ask a question for you to keep in your mind as you read…Do you know how to ask for help? Do you know how to give help? Do you know when someone else needs help?

An answer to these questions could be – we learn it at home from our family and primary caregivers from our everyday interactions and “just living together” learning when someone needs help, learning when someone needs a hug, understanding tears, understanding frustration and learning how to fix this by being there and lending a hand (or a shoulder or some ears).

These “skills” need to be learned from a very early age and is not something that our western culture encourages as “we” are more focused on independence and not needing help.

 

Parents of today in our culture live in fear of “breaking the rules” of parenting and being ousted from our peers. Our “modern traditions” and ideals look down on many of the “tools” our ancestors used to cope with the years of bringing up small children.

Babywearing has been deemed as hippy, strange, clingy and is not what everyone else is doing. Breastfeeding is looked a pone as time consuming, draining, unfair a pone the father role and past about 6 months is a bit hippy and odd.

Bedding close to baby is again hippy and seen as “unsafe” despite being done since the dawn of time.

We live in small family units rather than clans as we are independent adults most of whom have grown up without seeing a baby being raised.

We as parents feel shame for not being able to stand on our feet alone when our children tire us out. We are desperate for help but are too afraid to ask as we have learnt in our upbringing that we need to be independent. Some of us possibly feel guilt of the idea that our parents never had help so why should we. Sadly some people of our parents and grandparent age group in our society also make it hard and in turn strengthen this guilt by telling us stories and denying us help when we do ask…I question are they not seeing?

 

We have parents today putting their children in daycare because they need their own head space to feel that they are achieving in the world…because no one will tell them that they are the most important person in their child’s life.

There are parents in many stages of burnout – depression, stress and anxiety because they are “doing their best” to raise their children….and in some of these cases the parents snap.

We have parents of today who may have asked for help when growing up and have been denied in the belief that this denial of help will create a strong adult who will be able to do any job by themselves.

There are parents who have they themselves been ignored, abused and frightened and missed their chances to develop empathy.

 

So here comes the old saying

It takes parents to raise a child

It takes a family to care for the parents

It takes a village to care for the family

 

SO what do we do?

How about helping…anything from holding the baby to cooking food to putting on a cupper to listening. There is so much we can do and we are all human.

 

 

I will leave you with Bob Dylan

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

Yes, ‘n’ how many seas must a white dove sail

Before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannon balls fly

Before they’re forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,

The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

 

How many times must a man look up

Before he can see the sky?

Yes, ‘n’ how many ears must one man have

Before he can hear people cry?

Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows

That too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,

The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

 

How many years can a mountain exist

Before it’s washed to the sea?

Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist

Before they’re allowed to be free?

Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head,

Pretending he just doesn’t see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,

The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

 

I do not feel that a child is bad…it is created and some of them will grow up.