Alice’s Words below describe what I witness parents and educators do, everywhere I go, to children with behavior problems. Children with behavior problems, they don’t need more punishment, but understanding and someone on their side.
A child that is misunderstood and not protected can turn into a very bad adult.
One reason I have very little hope for humanity is because of most people's idealization of one’s own parents and childhood as a major obstacle for parents and educators.
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“Since a child is often used as a substitute for one's own parents, he or she can become the object of an endless number of contradictory wishes and expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled. In extreme cases, psychosis, drug addiction, or suicide may be the only solution. But often the child's feeling of helplessness leads to increasingly aggressive behavior, which in turn convinces parents and educators of the need for strict countermeasures.”
All this does not mean that children should be raised without any restraints. Crucial for healthy development is the respect of their caregivers, tolerance for their feelings, awareness of their needs and grievances, and authenticity on the part of their parents, whose own freedom--and not pedagogical considerations--sets natural limits for children.
It is this last point that causes great difficulty for parents and pedagogues, for the following reasons:
1. If parents have had to learn very early in life to ignore their feelings, not to take them seriously, to scorn or ridicule them, then they will lack the sensitivity required to deal successfully with their children. As a result, they will try to substitute pedagogical principles as prostheses. Thus, under certain circumstances they may be reluctant to show tenderness for fear of spoiling the child, or, in other cases, they will hide their hurt feelings behind the Fourth Commandment.
2. Parents who never learned as children to be aware of their own needs or to defend their own interests because this right was never granted them will be uncertain in this regard for the rest of their life and consequently will become dependent on firm pedagogical rules. This uncertainty, regardless of whether it appears in a sadistic or masochistic guise, leads to great insecurity in the child in spite of these rules. An example of this: a father who was trained to be obedient at a very early age may on occasion take cruel and violent measures to force his child to be obedient in order to satisfy his own need to be respected for the first time in his life. But this behavior does not exclude intervening periods of masochistic behavior when the same father will put up with anything the child does, because he never learned to define the limits of his tolerance. Thus, his guilt feelings over the preceding unjust punishment will suddenly lead him to be unusually permissive, thereby awakening anxiety in the child, who cannot tolerate uncertainty about the father's true face. The child's increasingly aggressive behavior will finally provoke the father into losing his temper. In the end, the child then takes on the role of the sadistic opponent in place of the grandparents, but with the difference that the father can now gain the upper hand. Such situations, in which the child "goes too far," prove to the pedagogue that disciplining and punishment are necessary.
3. Since a child is often used as a substitute for one's own parents, he or she can become the object of an endless number of contradictory wishes and expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled. In extreme cases, psychosis, drug addiction, or suicide may be the only solution. But often the child's feeling of helplessness leads to increasingly aggressive behavior, which in turn convinces parents and educators of the need for strict countermeasures.
4. A similar situation arises when it is drilled into children, as it was in the anti-authoritarian upbringing of the sixties,
* to adopt certain ways of behavior that their parents wished had once been allowed them and that they, therefore, consider to be universally desirable. In the process, the child's real needs can be totally overlooked. In one case I know, for example, a child who was feeling sad was encouraged to shatter a glass when what she most wanted to do was to climb up onto her mother's lap. If children go on feeling misunderstood and manipulated like this, they will become genuinely confused and justifiably aggressive.
* This was a recent direction taken in German child-rearing methods, loosely based on permissive child-rearing in the United States.
In contrast to generally accepted beliefs and to the horror of pedagogues, I cannot attribute any positive significance to the word pedagogy. I see it as self-defense on the part of adults, as manipulation deriving from their own lack of freedom and their insecurity, which I can certainly understand, although I cannot overlook the inherent dangers. I can also understand why criminals are sent to prison; but I cannot see that deprivation of freedom and prison life, which is geared wholly to conformity, subordination, and submissiveness, can really contribute to the betterment, i.e., the development, of the prisoner. There is in the word pedagogy
the suggestion of certain goals that the charge is meant to achieve--and this limits his or her possibilities for development from the start. But an honest rejection of all forms of manipulation and of the idea of setting goals does not mean that one simply leaves children to their own devices. For children need a large measure of emotional and physical support from the adult. This support must include the following elements if they are to develop their full potential:
1. Respect for the child
2. Respect for his rights
3. Tolerance for his feelings
4. Willingness to learn from his behavior
a. About the nature of the individual child
b. About the child in the parents themselves
c. About the nature of emotional life, which can be observed much more clearly in the child than in the adult because the child can experience his feelings much more intensely and, optimally, more undisguisedly than an adult
There is evidence among the younger generation that this kind of willingness is possible even for people who were themselves victims of child-rearing.
But liberation from centuries of constraint can scarcely be expected to take place in a single generation. The idea that we as parents can learn more about the laws of life from a newborn child than we can from our parents will strike many older people as absurd and ridiculous. Younger people may also be suspicious of this idea because many of them have been made insecure by a mixture of psychological literature and internalized "poisonous pedagogy." A very intelligent and sensitive father, for example, asked me if I didn't think it was taking advantage of children to try to learn from them. This question, coming from someone born in 1942 who had been able to rise above the taboos of his generation to an extraordinary degree, showed me that we must be mindful of the misunderstanding and new insecurity that can result from reading books on psychology.
Can an honest attempt to learn be considered an abuse? If we are not open to what the other person is telling us, genuine rapport is hardly possible. We need to hear what the child has to say in order to give our understanding, support, and love. The child, on the other hand, needs free space if he or she is to find adequate self-expression. There is no discrepancy here between means and ends, but rather a dialectical process involving dialogue. Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn. It is a different matter for parents or educators who would like the child to be a certain way or think they must expect him to be that way. To reach their sacred ends, they try to mold the child in their image, suppressing self-expression in the child and at the same time missing out on an opportunity to learn something. Certainly, abuse of this sort is often unintentional; it is not only directed against children but--if we look more closely--pervades most human relationships, because the partners frequently were abused children and are now showing unconsciously what happened to them in childhood.
Antipedagogical writings (by Braunmuhl and others) can be of great help to young parents as long as they do not interpret them as instructions on "how to be a parent" but use them to expand their knowledge; they can then find encouragement to abandon their prejudices and look at things in a new way." Alice Miller
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