OUR CHILDREN ARE THE FUTURE BUT HOW MUCH DO WE CARE?

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The family is the bedrock upon which cultures, communities, societies and nations are built. It is through the family that a community’s traditions, ethics, morals and standards are transmitted from one generation to the next. It is the family that in many ways shapes the future.

The moral compass that will guide the country is made up of the collective moral compasses of each of its citizens. Each one of these is being shaped, right now, in every home in this country where adults are raising children. What our society, our country will be like in the future, what its moral and ethical framework will look like, is being determined by how well these children are being parented. When you take apart all the different components that make up our country you find at the very end you are holding the family.

I point this out as a way of showing just how important good parenting is to the functioning of our societies, communities, and our country.

Even though parenting plays such an important part in shaping the future by shaping their children we pay scant attention to how well this is done. I know that we don’t believe that if you can have a baby then you can raise one but we act as if this were the case. There is little or no support for new parents even for those that want it and seek it.

40% of children born today are born to single mothers many of them not more than children themselves. If these mothers do not have a strong family to support them with the raising of their child then there is little hope that this child will have a healthy, happy and productive childhood. In light of what we know about the effect a child’s upbringing has on the adult he will become, this is just foolish.

We also speak about our children in ways that imply that we are committed to insuring that every child has a fair chance at a productive life and at becoming a contributing member of society. We speak of them as our future and our most valuable resource and yet as a sub group in our society, when allocating resources, their needs are never adequately met and in the time of fiscal challenges services to children are cut first. If we truly believed that our greatest resource was our children we would not be able to accept the current drop out rate, the increases in teen suicides (second cause of death among teens) and would not tolerate the fact the one in every 5 children goes to bed hungry. If we truly believed this and acted accordingly our prison population would not be the highest of all the developed countries including China. If we truly believed this, instead of talking about improving our schools, we would be doing it and we would be spending the money that it takes.

 We do far too little to show that we value families and children and now more than ever families need our help. You do not need to be a sociologist to realize that there is something dreadfully wrong with the way many parents, in this country, are raising their children. Yes there are a lot of parents doing a truly remarkable job raising happy and healthy children in spite of mounting pressures from the world around them and these are the true heroes of our society. But there are an increasing number of parents who are doing an inadequate job and this is not as much of a concern to society as it should be. Every one of those children will ultimately grow up and the majority will become a burden to society.

The examples of the problems that result from inadequate parenting are glaring, but rather than respond to the problems, rather than taking steps to solve the problem, we just learn to incorporate the fall out from these problems into our day to day reality as the price of doing business. We fail to see these horrific events as symptoms of a larger problem and as a result fail to look for solutions to those problems. Rather we treat the problem as though it were a condition which by definition does not have a solution.

The best, the most stupefying example of this has to be how the country has responded the tragedy that took place in 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton CO, where two students armed with automatic weapons killed 13 and injured 21of their high school classmates and their teachers. Initially the country was shocked. Counselors were sent in to help the students, crisis teams arrived to dissect what actually took place, memorial services were held all over the country, editorials were written, the student’s motives were analyzed and promises were made to correct the problems that resulted in these two young men becoming so alienated and filled with so much hate that they were able to commit this act.

It has been almost 14 years now since Columbine and the killings in our schools by our children continue. Their have been 27 major shootings in our schools since then. It happens with such regularity now that if it makes the news it is for a day or two. Most of these shooting you probably never heard of because shootings are no longer a news event outside the communities where they take place. 

What have we done to fix the problem permanently? We have instituted code 10 drills or emergency response plans in schools all over the county. These drills are reminiscent of the  air raid drills of the 50s where students were required to get under their desks as practice for a nuclear attack.

This updated drill has students sitting quietly in the corner of a locked classroom waiting for help to come. To keep potential intruders out the doors of  our schools remain locked all day (in one instance a principal threatened his staff with police action if , when they took their class outside,they left a door propped so they could get back in when needed).  

  Local police routinely lecture students about the importance of the emergency response drill. We have also stepped up security at our schools to prevent violence form happening  We have more police in the hallways and metal detectors at the doors. What have we done to insure that we produce fewer violent children?  What have we done to prevent young people from becoming so desperate and self loathing? What have we done to prevent children from abused in their homes both physically and emotionally? What have we done to attack the disease rather than treat the symptoms? Not a thing.

We have not taken time, since the Columbine tragedy to look at what it was in the experiences, of these young people, that so damaged them that violence was the only way they could find to release their rage. In James Gilligan’s book, Preventing Violence  he reports that research has led him to conclude that violence is the result of the combined feeling of shame and humiliation.  “…the psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation…and replace it with …the feeling of pride.” (pg29)  What experiences, in the lives of people so young, could have so damaged them psychologically that they believed that the wonton killing  of their peers with automatic weapons was the only way they could restore their pride? There is something dreadfully wrong here and we are doing precious little to fix it.

We have tragically become a society that is very adept at turning children into monsters by the age of 14 and even younger. But rather than address the problem we have adapted  to it and appear to accept that these events will continue. It is like having a leak in your and putting a bucket under it to catch the water and then rather than fix the leak you just learn to walk around the bucket.

Some time after the Columbine tragedy a student who was there was asked by a reporter, shocked that people so young could be so violent, how this could have happened. Her response, heartfelt and visceral, said more than any study could have and said it better:

         “…Let me tell you this: these questions don’t represent only me but a whole generation that is struggling to grow up and make sense of this world. People  may label us” Generation Next “ but we are more appropriately “Generation why?”

         Why did most of you lie when you made the vow of till death do us part?

         Why do you fool yourselves into believing that divorce is better for the kids in the long run?

Why do so many of you divorced parents spend more time with your new boy friends or girl friends than with your own children?

Why did you ever fall victim to the notion that kids are just as well off being raised by a complete stranger than by their own mother of father?

Why do you look down on parents who decide to stay home to raise their own children?

Why do you let us watch violent movies but expect us to maintain some type of childlike innocence?

Why do you allow us to spend unlimited amounts of time on the internet but still are shocked about our knowledge of how to build a bomb? 

Why are you afraid to tell us no sometimes?

Call us what you want to, but you will be surprised how we fail to fit you’re your neat little category….Now is the time to reap what you have sown. You might not think so, but I can guarantee that Littleton will look like a drop in the bucket compared to what might occur when a neglected “Generation Why” comes to power.(epidemic pg. 69)

I do not know the girl I have just quoted, but I wish I did, as she has touched on some of the major assumptions that parents make about raising their children that are just wrong. They make self serving decisions that damage their child and their relationship with their child and then try to spin it in a way that makes these decisions appear magnanimous and in the child's best interest. The point that this girl makes is striking in that she saw beyond what had just happened and considered the root of the problem.  She laid the blame for the tragedy not on the students responsible but on the fact that some parents are not invested enough in the job of parenting to do it right. Columbine represented for her what can happen as a result of inadequate parenting, what a toll it can take on a community. She then asks a very provocative question.  If we continue to set the same example that we have for this generation, what will happen when they are the people in power?  

An interesting question to think about once you think about it.

ONE THREAD AT A TIME

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 NOTE

 I will, in this blog, be dealing with raising children of all ages, from infancy to young adulthood.

I  am not,however, going to do this in chronological order but rather address different stages as they come up for me. This way the blog can be appealing to a wider audience.  Also some blogs, this one today for example, is relevant at all stages of development. I hope this works for you. Also please remember to register so you don't miss out on any posts. Just click the subscribe button at the bottom of the page.

 

 BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR CHILD

I have for a long time looked at building a relationship with a child as the equivalent to weaving cloth and, as in weaving cloth, the end result can be strong, flexible and well wearing over time or something loosely bound, weak and unable to with stand stress. You cannot un-weave the past. Your relationship with your child is something you will live with for the whole of your life so weave carefully and take the time to make sure it is a relationship that can withstand time.

In terms of your child the threads of your cloth are created by each and every interaction you have with your child.  Not that all interactions are equal, some will be more significant and others less so, resulting in thinner or thicker threads. But what determines the strength of the thread is the quality of the interaction.  Positive interactions yield strong threads and negative interactions yield weak threads.  So the more positive your interactions are with your child over time the stronger the weave of the cloth and the stronger the relationship. Relationships are built by the everyday, little interactions that you have with your child. It is the sum of these that create the fabric of the relationship. You have to work at it all the time. No interaction is insignificant.

. This is why parenting requires so much of our attention, particularly in the early

formative years. It is during this time that you are laying the strands that will make up the foundation of your relationship and the early yarn is defining the shape of your cloth. 

The time will come, much sooner than you can possibly believe, when the opportunities for adding to the cloth becomes far less frequent.  Your child, when he starts school, will be looking beyond the family orbit for his influences and will be guided much more by external factors, friends, culture, school, etc. than by you and his family. Your interactions will still be very important but as he grows older and moves through the educational system your influence will diminish.

 In later blogs I will be looking at how to influence your child even as he slips out of your orbit but for now I’d like to look at how you might best use your skills to build a strong relationship with your child while the building is good. The older he becomes the less time he will spend at home and the less opportunity you will have to “weave” a relationship with him. So make each one count by developing constructive principles that will almost reflexively influence and shape you interactions. It is not practical to expect that every time you speak to your child you analyze each interaction which is why you need to consciously decide on the principles that you will use to guide you through all of your interactions. You need to, over time and very carefully, develop ways of responding to your child that are constructive and then make these reactions reflex reactions.

WHAT KIDS NEED AND WANT

In order to develop a relationship with your child you need to understand your child and what his needs are at each stage of development. The frustration here is that as soon as you master one stage he is on to the next. It feels like you're always starting over. One of the first things your child will need is to feel as though he counts and his opinion counts. From a very early age they want you to see them as person and one that is valued.

Too many parents take the attitude that I am the boss, you are the child, you will do as I say, end of story. Sounds easy; too bad it doesn’t work. You can’t raise a child the way you’d run a boot camp. In his very insightful book choice theory William Glasser labels this approach External Control Psychology. Using this approach we control behavior through a system of rewards and punishments, not unlike Pavlov’s dogs.  This system works rather effectively at molding behavior while children are young but that is all that it does. This approach can be effective in the moment but it breaks down because it does not generalize, as the behaviorists have shown. The child responds as desired when he is in your company but since the behavior is dependent on your presence it does not generalize to situations when you are not there.   What it fails to do is to provide the kind of parent/child interactions that helps the child internalize the principles of behavior that you want for your child. External Control does not build parent child relationship based on mutual respect. If this approach is relied on too heavily it will build resentment and hostility in the child as he begins to feel coerced and controlled. The result is that you will have a child who resents you and has no experience of confidence in his own decision making, and in the end is both dependent on you and resentful of you at the same time.

 The alternative is to give your children choices and then teach them to make the right ones as you build a positive and supportive relationship. As Glasser  puts it “We must realize that if we coerce anyone too long there will be a point of no return. We may never be close again.  Lacking this closeness, some children begin to give up on relationships and, eventually, embark on a lifelong destructive search for pleasure.  To achieve and maintain the relationship we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, compel, punish, reward, manipulate, boss, motivate, criticize, blame, complain, nag, badger, rank, rate, and withdraw.  We must replace these destructive behaviors with choosing to care, listen, support, negotiate, encourage, love, befriend, trust, accept, welcome, and esteem.  These words define the difference between external control psychology and choice theory.”

This does not mean that rewards and consequences will never play a part in raising your child.  It means that it must play a limited role and as soon as is possible, given your child’s development, it needs to be supplanted with a system of choice that teaches your child how to make intelligent decisions for himself with your guidance but not guidance that is so strong that it is merely a disguise for coercion. “Bobby, you will do your homework or you will be grounded for two weeks, it’s your choice” is no choice and will in no way help to foster positive independent decision making in your child.  The choice is another form of coercion.

The Pit Fall here is that initially coercion is the easiest and most effective way to get children to do what we want them to do especially when they are young. Fear is the strongest motivator. Unfortunately it does not generalize or help to grow a relationship.  Also as the child gets older and consequences by necessity become more serious you hit a ceiling with  nowhere to go. I mean you can only take so much away and then nothing is left.  It is the same problem with corporal punishment.  For it to continue to be effective the severity, the level of pain inflicted, must be increased and soon we are in the area of abuse. So although the early results of this approach look good the long term prospects are disastrous. This approach, with the knowledge we now have of children, if it came in a package, would come with a warning from the surgeon general “this approach has proven to be hazardous to the well being of you and your child.’

We all have basic needs that motivate us and influence our choices every day and all day and for every day of our lives. These choices can and have been expressed in a number of different ways but for purposes of understanding what motivates your child I find that the following work as well as any.  The basic needs of a child., once our physical needs are met (and sometimes before), for food and shelter are:

            -They need to feel loved and accepted for who and what they are right now not what
               you want them to become.

            -They need to feel that they have something useful even vital to contribute to the

              community to which they belong.

            -They need to feel as though they have some control over their lives and that this

               control increases as they grow.

            -They need to feel safe both physically and emotionally in the environment

              in which they live.

           

            -They need to have consistent and age appropriate limits placed on their behavior

               that helps then gradually learn to deal with a world that gets bigger for them

               every day.

             -They need to have realistic expectations placed on them so they learn to be responsible.

             -They need to be taught compassion by being treated with compassion.
             

           

You could easily edit this list, it is not a definitive one, but it does serve to communicate the basic needs that you as a parent need to provide for you child, beyond the basic needs of food and shelter, if you are to raise a child who has the ability to make the most out of the world into which he was born.  If these basic needs are met you will have gone a long way towards creating the foundation needed to weave a relationship with your child that will have the strength to withstand the inevitable stresses that will occur between parent and child by giving him the strength of ego and sense of self worth needed for him to love and accept himself and in return to genuinely love you.

INFANCY AND NURTURUNG

                                                         

It has been accepted, for some time, that the quality of the interactions between parent and infant can influence the child’s development in ways that will last for his entire lifetime.

In his book (highly recommended) HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED, Paul Tough, provides an excellent review of the recent studies that have been conducted to give us a better understanding of the parent infant relationships including the positive results if this is done well as well as the negative if done poorly. The initial insights into the parent/ infant relationships were a by product of a study that was designed to look at an unrelated problem.

The initial study of parent/infant relationships and how they effect the infant in the long term happened almost by accident. Michael Meaney and his graduate assistant at McGill university were conducting tests on mice and their interactions with their young.  While conducting this study mice were placed in unfamiliar environments to see how they would deal with a foreign or stressful situation. A lab assistant happened to notice that some mice were bold and confident while mice others were hesitant and reluctant to explore their new space. Through further observation he was able to determine that the difference in behavior was dependent on which mothers the mice came from. The mice who had mothers who were nurturing, physical and stayed close to her young, were the mice who demonstrated less stress, and more confidence and the mice from the less nurturing mothers were far more timid and cautious.

Maeaney continued to run test after test to see how the increased ability to deal with stress would benefit the mice in other areas. “They were better at mazes. They were more social.  They were more curious. They were less aggressive. They had more self-control. They were healthier. They lived longer." Meaney and his researchers were astounded. (Tough, pg 30)

This on its own was a valuable insight but it got even better. By studying the brains of the mice after they died they discovered that the area of the brain that manages stress was more developed in the mice who had been nurtured by their mothers. The nurturing they received had fostered a physiological development of the brain. This study caused quite a stir  since this was the first time a clear link had been established between parental nurturing and the physical development of the brain. It was also significant because in all of the years of using mice and rats to conduct tests this rather insignificant behavior of the mothers that had such a profound effect on the life experiences of their off spring had gone undetected.

Meaney went on to study the brains of humans and found the same results. Those who had been raised in a stressful household where there was little or no affection were found to have an underdeveloped stress response area of the brain when compared with those who had come from a warm and nurturing environment. 

Further research has been done with humans to support this idea that nurturing in infancy can effect the infant long into adulthood. Two psychologists at the University of Minnesota conducted a long-term test to determine how the mother/infant child relationship can effect the development of the adult. What they found was that “attachment status at one year of age ….was highly predictive of a wide range of outcomes later in life.”  (Tough pg. 35)  They found that “Children with a secure attachments early on were more socially competent throughout their lives, better able to engage with preschool peers, better able to form close friendships in middle school, better able to negotiate the complex dynamics of adolescent social networks,” (Tough pg 35)

IMPLICATIONS

The implications that these studies have for parents of infants is quite obvious.  Infants need to be nurtured, held, cuddled, talked to, touched, sang to, laughed with and played with. What these studies do is show us just how important doing this is and the consequeces for both you and your child if you fail to provide a nurturing environement,

The results of nurturing will be seen early on in your child’s behaviors as he develops and becomes more expressive. More importantly, though, is the effect this will have on his ability to negotiate the complex world of school.  The child who is nurtured is better able to control his behaviors in school, independently advocate for himself, relate to peers and to get the most out of school. What kind of relationship an infant has with his parents is a much better indicator of how well he will do in school and in life than any measure that we have. As parent you have to realize that you only have one opportunity to accomplish this and if it isn’t done then it won’t be.

 Your child is an infant only once and what his experience of the world is like at this time will affect his entire life.  So regardless of what is going on in your life nurturing your infant is the most important thing and this is something that takes time.  He needs you most the time that he is not sleeping. He also needs you to respond to his needs when he expresses them so go to him when he cries –daytime or nighttime- respond to his calls for you.  Let him know that the new world he finds himself in will respond to his needs.  The idea of leaving a baby to “cry himself out” is not a good one to follow and remember you cannot spoil and infant.

NOTE FROM BLOGGER

There is always an issue with pronouns when you write for the public. What is the correct way the handle the gender pronouns. Do I use him? Her? Him/her? Or as is common practice in some countries combine them into hen?

I decided to use the rule that says you use the pronoun that is correct for your gender.  I will therefore be using him/he when referring to one child whose gender is not specified.  I hope I do not offend anyone by doing so.

Also there is a comment section now following this blog and I would love to hear what you have to say.