Enhanced archival photos © 2000 Pat Street. Used with permission.
The song “Child, Child” raises the question, “Were your needs met when you were a child?” So I thought that the needs of a child would be worth talking about, just a bit. How we raise children, it seems to me, and how that, in turn, feeds back into how we relate to each other (as adults), are the most crucial issues having to do with who we are as individuals, and who we become as a people--to say nothing of being crucial to any child who will ever exist. There are two public success stories involving children who were raised with certain expectations and preconceived ideas in the minds of their parents, and I thought these would be a good place to start.
Tiger Woods, at
age 23, has proven himself to be one of the greatest golfers that
has ever lived. What’s important about his story, in the
context of parenting/relationship issues, is not only that he was
consciously raised to be a champion golfer from the time he was a
child, but that he is clearly a gentleman--a term that has nearly
lost its meaning and stature in this day and age, until Tiger
Woods. From the foreword of the book Training a Tiger,
by Earl Woods, Tiger writes: “...The one thing I know for
certain is that without the love, support, and guidance of my
parents, I would not have had the opportunities I have enjoyed in
life or golf.” Then Tiger goes on to quote his father from
an interview which he felt summed up the relationship between him
and his parents: “My son was subconsciously secure, knowing
that whatever parameters were established, he could always be
confident that behind him was parental power and strength.”
And as reported in Time magazine and elsewhere, Richard Williams was watching TV and happened to notice a woman win forty thousand dollars in a tennis tournament and she only played four days! He went to his wife and said, "We have to make two more kids," and she didn’t want to do it. So he hid her birth-control pills. In order to have the second child, he made sure she had her birth control pills with her, and then said to a friend, “You know we’re from the ghetto, right? You just act like the worst Crip, and take her purse.” After the event, of course, he calmed her down, knowing full well what had really happened. Mr. Williams’ idea was that having two more kids and raising them to be champion tennis players would be a way for the family to make real money. He went out and bought every book that was to be had on tennis and learned everything he could about the sport. Both daughters (Venus and Serena) reached the semifinals of the U.S.Open in 1999, and Serena won the title. But it has become clear--to the entire world--that these children are happy, and that Mr.Williams wholeheartedly loves his daughters and is not one of those “stage parents” who lives his life as a pedovampire.
My question becomes: What
if most parents had learned to firmly and consistently raise
their children, not to be champions of some sport, or to make
astronomical amounts of money, but simply to be decent,
self-fulfilled, strong, empathetic human beings--sensitive for
themselves as well as for others? Is that so farfetched? Can we
not learn this sort of thing?
In reality, however,
we are so far from being interested in that quest that the
distance is hard to behold: it’s like looking up at the
stars and wondering how they go on forever, or that our solar
system is one tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy. Such things are
too vast to give eye-to-eye everyday thought to. We would rather
have easy-to-see bigger TV screens, watch baseball, head to the
moon, than be deeply and behaviorally concerned with the person
who stands before us, with the person we see in the mirror, and
with the children we bring into the world. Yet our destiny
depends far more on how we look into the eyes of a child and how
we look into our own than on how far out in space we can go. And
there are people out there who have spoken, such as John
Bradshaw, “On The Family”; Dr.Haim G. Ginott,
“Between Parent and Child”; Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.,
“The Growth of the Mind”; or Virginia Satir, “The
New Peoplemaking,” who know things about human development,
and they tell us about family dynamics--such particular things
as: Speak to the child’s behavior--don’t put the child
down. Never hit a child. And the idea that a child’s
development is much like a puzzle--that the right pieces have to
be found for the puzzle at each stage of development! And unlike
a puzzle, the pieces don't have to be perfect--all sorts of
similar pieces will work--but there are far more pieces that will
not work!
Children do not suddenly turn 16 and go crazy, they
have been parented there--140,160 hours of parenting, 5,840 days.
People live out their entire lives with rogue pieces haunting
their days. To support and nurture a child through his or her
levels of evolvement, a parent has to find suitable pieces, and
those pieces consist of the appropriate listening-and-response
strategies for that stage of life! That’s what the pieces
consist of: listening-and-response strategies--from day one.
As you look at the world, by
and large, do you think we have learned how to relate to each
other? It doesn’t seem so to me. In my early life, frankly,
I hadn’t a clue what all this was about, my parents did not,
and no teacher I had ever did, except one. In fact, the lack of
understanding in this area could not be clearer than in the
institution of marriage and family. It isn’t that the
divorce rate is high--it’s that the marriage rate is low, it
seems to me. It isn’t that people cheat on their marriage
vows--it's that they didn’t know what on earth those vows
were about in the first place: how to get “married,”
and to whom. I see people getting married in their early 20s,
before they can have any idea who they are, what the cost of life
is, what life is about, or who that other person actually is.
“Say this, sign that, promise forever,” just
doesn’t cut it.
Blamer
Husbands and wives who originally thought they couldn’t live without each other too often grow into adversaries by the time their second child is born. Their emotional immaturity, which may have kept them from seeing or hearing each other in the first place, makes it impossible for them to handle the normal year-in-and-year-out stresses of life, to say nothing of what happens when a child is born into their midst. Everything has to be shifted when the care of a child is present, not just financially, but in terms of the kind of time the couple can no longer spend with each other. If the hidden needs of one partner are suddenly not being met, as they may seem to have been before, alienation can begin to take place, and the couple’s ability to fit those changing pieces of the child’s puzzle together (those interactive responses) can be shot all to hell, and the child’s evolvement will suffer. Necessarily. And the parent who never was taught to cherish his or her own uniqueness and freedom can find themselves resentful of a child’s high-powered discovery of the wonder of life. Some part of the parent is mumbling, “Be quiet you messy little wretch, what makes you think you have the right to be so pure and joyful?” And the child hears this, one way or other.
Placater
As I look at TV,
the talk shows, society, the political rhetoric, we pay
superficial attention to “family values,” but the idea
has no substance unless we go into the particulars of the actual
processes that need to be present, and then into how we can learn
them. This isn’t simple. But, personhood comes right out of
childhood, after all, and is a result of an unbroken chain of
events, starting from the moment of conception. If the child
commits suicide, it has done so on links that have never been
broken. If the child’s a “success,” it has done so
on links that have never been broken. If the parent doesn’t
have any idea who their child is, that he or she is doing drugs
or getting pregnant, none of the links have been broken. The kind
of connection between parent and child is made up the hours and
days since birth--always in a chain of unbroken events: needs met
or not met--140,160 hours of parenting, 5,840 days, by the age of
sixteen.
Computer
That reality can’t be faked is a fact that a child needs to learn early on. Life means limits! There are things we can’t get away with and live, or live happily. And psychologists tell us that if a child isn’t provided with firm and consistent limits, or if those limits are provided abusively, rage and indiscriminate violence can result. At a very young age, children who have been abused may torture animals, destroy property wantonly, and eventually kill others with little sense of guilt. And don’t these sorts of things live on a continuum, and we end up with the parent who doesn’t kill people, has never pulled the wings off flies, but who unconsciously, even jokingly, denigrates his or her spouse, year after year after year? What kind of parent has he or she been? Or the parent who wakes up one day to find their child has a ring in its nose with a chain that goes up its nose, down its throat and attaches to a ring on its lip, and the parent is shocked or furious. And I’ve seen these parents on television saying to their estranged children, “I love you.” And the child responds, “I don’t see it!” And the teenager is right on the mark, you can see that the mother or father is stuck in a plastic, self-alienated time warp, you can see and feel in your gut that the “I love you” has no depth or meaning at all, because the parent is just not awake.
Distracter
Who
does the child learn from?
The above drawings illustrate the four communication strategies that
people are likely to adopt under stress, identified by Virginia Satir.
Used by permission of Science and Behavior Books.
Drawings by Barry Ives
The greater tragedy, however,
lies in the lower realms of this continuum, not on the high end,
toward the most tragic. The kinds of events that capture the
headlines--the mother who locked her two children in the back
seat of her car and drove them into a lake, or the massacre at
Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, and the consequent
suicides--such abuses that grab the headlines are only the tip of
the iceberg, and the greater tragedy takes place in the millions
of lives that are only half-lived, in one way or other; the
cynicism, apathy, and “What, me worry?” attitudes that
overwhelm our society, much of it right out of childhood--stuff
that happens in the average household, that goes by unnoticed,
like the Milky Way galaxy. It’s not that adults cannot turn
their lives and wake up, find out who they are, shift their
existence, become noble for the sake of their children, it’s
that the damage of childhood is far more subtle and far-reaching,
I think, than we choose to face.
I wonder what it
would be like if our foremost interest, as a people, was to
figure out what authentic relationship is, in the first place,
and teach age-appropriate classes on the subject at every grade
level? And what if we valued the processes of human relationship
more than we did “things”? And what if we paid our
teachers and schools more than we paid our lawyers and law firms?
Mightn't we have more “education” and less litigation?
What if we
accepted the idea that most people are probably not right for
parenting, unless they have learned a lot more than they usually
do? Even then, most will not be good children responders. And
above all, what if we understood that to seek one’s
emotional fulfillment through power over somebody else is the
essence of human abuse; and to seek it through the abuse of a
child is truly immoral, as well as disgusting? And last but not
least, what if we understood the need for relationship/parenting
colleges?
You can’t legislate
decency, fairness, creativity, empathy,
generosity, caring. Such things cannot be ordered by law, they
come into the child’s uniqueness by the time he or she has
reached 12. And children are never the perpetrators--they are
always the victims--and they always have been. Then they carry it
into adulthood. The cocoons never get to be butterflies, and the
frogs never turn into princes, and people become embroiled in a
razzle dazzle set up by their own revolving mirrors--unless they
take themselves on, and by then, it ain’t easy.
Times have not changed. Through
the ages right up until now, the sins of the fathers and the
mothers have been visited upon the sons and the daughters with an
ever-increasing buildup of anger, apathy, sadness, envy and rage.
The emotional virus of the unevolved child gets insidiously more
out of hand with each generation. A society locked into things
and lost to itself through avoiding relationship comes into
being. We act without thought, feel without thinking, think
without feeling, and buy into power trips, gurus, money, temper
tantrums, hate, utopian belief systems, entertainment, and
“drugs” in order to hide from what lies
underneath--loneliness, low self esteem, denial, and
self-alienation.
When you were a child, child,
Did you want to be listened to?
I’m interested in
hearing from you. I’m compiling a book about different
attitudes and ideas about relationship, parenting, and the human
condition.
I cannot afford to pay you for your comments or
wisdom, but if you would like your voice heard in my book,
anonymously or with credit, please e-mail to me any comments, feelings,
or disagreements.
Copyright © 2006, Erik Darling. All rights reserved.