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A Crucial Task
By Jard Deville of The Fulfillment Forum
During their formative period, before and after birth, children are shaped by several forces that interact to produce an individual who is truly unique, who is different in some ways from every other person on earth. The potential for diversity is so great that we have never found two identical fingerprints. Most of this development comes through our genes -- about which we can do very little of significance after conception. Of course, scientists and surgeons are now removing, repairing and replacing unhealthy genes for medical purposes, although they can deal with only a few of the countless genes in the ancestral bank from which we all draw at the moment of conception. Other influences on our bodies and minds come from within the mother’s womb in which the child is nurtured before birth -- and from the world into which he or she is unceremoniously thrust amidst much travail and wailing. These factors form the floor on which each child develops a personality that while unique, must fit within the parameters of the human race. The ceiling, to which each person eventually matures, however, is determined largely by the values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices first held by the parents and then modified by the child. Before a child is old enough to go to the street corner alone, a distinct personal style has emerged. One two year old twin will hid behind his mother and peer cautiously at a stranger -- while his twin will ask the stranger to lift him up. In other words, our attitudes and activities are shaped by what has been inherited from all our ancestors -- back to the very beginning of the human race. Each child is also influenced by what he learns from his world and from the major choices already being made on a daily basis. These events occur very early in each person’s development and even a small distortion at the beginning can make a major difference before reaching puberty. Dr. Joseph Weppman, of the University of Chicago, occasionally lectured my therapists and teachers when I was director of the Child Conservation Center. He taught that a child can sense something emotionally distressing in his small world as early as the sixth or eighth week after birth. Because I am an old fashioned country researcher, I believe that Joe time frame was premature -- I feel a child has to be twice as old as he assumed to sense emotional discord -- as old as twelve weeks after birth! I both jest and digress. Be that as it may, each child in every family learns specific attitudes, conducts activities and responds to others in patterns that recur over and over -- because they are locked in each their personality. Of course, when I use the word personality, I am not using it in the glamorous Hollywood sense, but as a synonym for character, although without value judgments. Some psychology writers use the term behavioral styles or personal styles but we mean much the same thing. In my book Nice Guys Finish First, which is once more in print as an e-book course available from The Fulfillment Forum, I spent several chapters discussing the importance of the four primary personality patterns. This combination of environmental practices, genetic traits and significant choices does indeed form an identifiable pattern that others readily see in ourselves, even though most persons seldom recognize their own behavioral styles until they are pointed out to them. Before I did the research that led to Nice Guys, Lovers For Life, The Psychology of Leadership and The Pastor’s Handbook on Interpersonal Relations, all of which included personality pattern assessment, I incorrectly identified my own pattern. I had to research my own test instrument before I recognized my own style. And then, although we almost all assume that we shift patterns frequently, we are reacting to our inner emotions rather than our outward behavioral manifestations through which other persons judge us. It takes many years of pressure or some great traumatic disaster to change a person’s pattern once it has jelled in early childhood. With relative few exceptions, most young parents and some who are not so young, unconsciously assume that the way they were reared, along with the myths, traditions and ideologies with which they became comfortable, form the normal way to rear their own children. We almost all come to a point in our lives when we become comfortable with what we know -- our intellectual, emotional and spiritual curiosity slows to a crawl. Actually, we never know what we don’t know and we seldom want to change much of anything, unless the change brings us some benefit. Men and women, who were abused in childhood and grew up hating their abusers, are likely to treat their own children badly, even when they feel guilty after doing it. Of course, one of the best kept secrets of child rearing is that far more frustrated women than men neglect or abuse children, probably because they spend more time with them. Obviously, men who batter their wives transmit their brutal behavior to succeeding generations. It simply feels right to their male offspring that their superior strength should be used to dominate weaker women and children. And the unfortunate girls learn that wife beating is a normal aspect of life that must be accepted -- despite being unpleasant or even dangerous. Abusive behavior offers many frustrated men outlets for their aggressive behavior, which becomes a temporary psychological payoff for their repeated brutality. Of course, the use of alcohol relaxes many inhibitions against violence, which is why so many men get drunk when they seek the relief from their frustrations that aggression gives them. They simply feel better about their miserable lives after beating a wife or child. And they can rationalize that it was the booze that made them lose control, rather than their own character flaws. Then too, a considerable amount of male abuse brings sexual rewards, as many fearful wives or adolescent daughters use their sexuality to placate the brutal men in their lives. I certainly do not blame the victims here, but some young women who have been sexually abused in their early years, remain vulnerable to dangerous men because the abusers seem more familiar than accepting men do. The entire family has become dysfunctional and often more than a little psychopathic. Della, a female psychotherapist I know, said that an experienced male abuser can go to a cocktail party and within an hour sniff out the two or three most vulnerable women there and persuade one or more of them to leave with him. These are wounded women who have unconsciously adjusted to an abusive persona, who accepts an abuser because his pattern has a familiar feel to it. Of course, all of this occurs on an unconscious level and is often transmitted to our children without any conscious attempts to do so. Unless we get our own heads screwed on straight while growing up, we are very likely to pass troubled attitudes and activities to our own kids and their kids and even the generation after that. It often takes three or four generations for the damage that a really neurotic parent brings to a marriage to wash out of the family line through marriage to reasonably normal people. Of course, the opportunities for an abuser to choose normal lovers is limited -- because emotionally healthy men or women will often sense the roiling disorder within a troubled soul and flee the relationships -- even after marriage, if one goes that far before discovering the persona behind the mask. This forces a wounded person to find an equally troubled spouse to whom the lover’s conflicted persona feels normal. The old psychotherapists’ joke is still a valid one. Never marry anyone more loony than yourself. By failing to think through our attitudes and activities, by reacting out of their anxieties, many parents set the stage for the youngsters to internalize their weaknesses and frustrations before most adults realize they are crippling them. In the musical theatrical South Pacific, Rogers and Hammerstein have Joe Cable, who has fallen in love with a Tonkinese girl, debate racism with nurse Nellie Frobush, who cannot accept Emil De Beck’s dark skinned Polynesian children. She protests that she cannot ignore her bigoted feelings -- that they were born in her. Cable then sings his lament about the way our prejudices are passed from generation to generation You‘ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You‘ve got to be taught from year to year,
People whose eyes are strangely made,
People whose skin is a different shade.
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
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Parenting Winning Children
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Very interesting read. You will have to take a look at one I did about raising perfect children and see what you think. My youngest is expecting in September and is being very careful what she eats and drinks during her pregnancy. We played soft music and held our children a lot when they were babies (they still are daddy's babies) Jim O
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