What is our major goal as parents?
“To produce children who are, among other things, brilliant, polite, charming, neat and well-adjusted, of course.”
Dr. Ginott looked solemn. It was obvious that this last comment had not amused him.
He leaned forward and said,
“This is how I see it.
It seems to me that our large goal is to find the ways to help our children become humane and strong
...//...
Understand me: I’m not opposed to a child being polite or neat or learned.
The crucial question for me is What methods have been used to accomplish these ends?
If the methods used are insults, attacks, and threats,
then we can be very sure that we have also taught this child to insult, attack,
to threaten, and to comply when threatened.
If, on the other hand, we use methods that are humane,
then we've taught something much more important than a series of isolated virtues.
We've shown the child how to be a person – a mensch,
a human being who can conduct his life with strength and dignity.”
pages 14-15 of Liberated Children, Liberated Parents
I place a huge emphasis on finding ways to develop or compensate, for deficiencies in skills and functions that affect an individual's experience of being able and efficacious.
But if I was to chose one area of function and one dimension of human expression to be more important than the others, it would be communication.
And communication would also be my choice if there was one skill I would chose as the one most likely to make this world a much better place if mastered and practiced by parents with their children.
I believe that most disabilities that arise from deficient skills of communication, is not due to any lack of language.
I also believe that most harm caused by communication disabilities, is far vaster and more severe than merely preventing a person from telling another what he or she wants to.
I believe humans need to experience genuine connectedness; being related to and being known .
Understood or not; just to feel known.
To feel that, for all we think and feel that make us seem so weird to ourselves, we are still not so weird as to be excommunicated; not able to be related to; but that we still are kin.
People don’t need understanding as often or as much as feeling related to and possible to empathize with; and it is by sharing in another mind than one's own that we learn of other world's of different views and ways and expand our ability to empathize.
Words are the least inclusive, direct, and lossless of all the common ways of transferring messages; yet many expect themselves and others to rely on them.
This means that those who communicate without words are excommunicated in the truest sense of the term.
Not because of an ability they lack, but because someone else have lost abilities they once had and passed up reacquiring.
From my class in Child Studies: |
We continuously, in every waking moment as a cognitive background noise, construct a story or ‘biography’ of ourselves; narrating, giving meaning to, and positioning, what we experience and ourselves relative to the story of who we are and how we got to be the person we are.
Perhaps, as often as we are spoken to and about, it is important to be spoken for; to have one’s own story of one’s self told and accepted as one’s own truth. Because our self narration - our self as our narration - places us in time and space, and identifies us both as distinct and as akin in a family of other people,humanity as a whole, and ultimately all living beings.
It is a narration that on one hand constrains and contains what we are, in what we see as what brought us and forged us; on the other hand it is the possibility of re narration that is at the heart of not only changing what is now by fixing what was brought from the past, but to make what is now the beginning of a transformation of what is to come.
It makes me recollect the concept and role of Speakers for the Dead....
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We all are aware of, to some degree and on some level, that we have done things that have been the cause of pain and doubts in others. To bring to those we wronged the context of our lives and the intentions we had to our actions and choices, has a value in and of itself.
Even if there is no forgiving, it might also ease the process of healing, of narrating and making sense of themselves, of those whose lives are so intertwined with our’s.
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