Richard Lloyd Jones: Human beings have been raising kids forever. There are oceans of words and theories on the subject, even comic strips. You can pay to hear child-rearing advice, or get an ear full of the unpaid kind every time the in-laws come over. But are there any final conclusions? Well, I think we can get you a little closer. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or on my blog at somebodyelseshead.blogspot.com. Okay, raising kids. Well, just try Googling that and see how many pages you get, or enter it into Amazon's search bar. There is sure no shortage of advice out there, and still it seems, no matter what you do, sooner or later some expert's going to pop up and declare with absolute certainty that you did it all wrong.
But if we're finalizing the mapping of the human psyche, we must be able to draw some more definitive conclusions these days. Salma Genzani is a psychoanalyst at Dr. Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy Institute in São Paulo, Brazil. She sees a wide range of clients, including many children and their parents. What are the common perceptions about raising kids, Salma, and where are we missing the boat these days?
There is the idea that kids should be left free. The more you leave them free to do what they want, it's the best for them. And this is a big mistake. The children have to be frustrated in their will since they are small kids. Because if they do this, they learn to hold back their pathology and consequently live more in reality. If they are not taught to do so, if they are in their free will all the time, they are going to follow the most destructive aspects that they have.
If you leave them alone when they are small, the tendency is that they are going to hurt themselves. We human beings, we are born inverted and we have an attraction for what is destructive. Since we are small kids, we can notice this. So, they have to be thought and frustrated not to do what they want to do all the time. Otherwise, the result is negative for them.
Richard: Well, I can feel the shudders that some of our listeners must be experiencing, Selma. Or maybe it's just my projection. You know, we're not very fond, in North America at least, of the idea of frustrating ourselves. We're raised mostly to want it all, that we deserve it all, even. We believe that repressing a kid can cause damage. So your point is provocative, and it's a very challenging first step for us into this subject today.
Take us a little further into what you've found to be the problems of raising kids.
Many parents, they raise the children today giving them all the material comfort that they can because they believe that this is the way that they can make their children happy. So many children, they have everything in their homes that they want. And they watch TV what time they want and they play with the video games as many hours as they want.
So they are in a philosophy that they are here to be served. All that they want has to be fulfilled. And this is a wrong idea that we give for the children because we have to teach them that children are here to serve. We are here to serve the world we live in, to help the people and help even our planet not to be destroyed.
So we have to think how we are going to be useful and not how we are going to suck from the society, from the parents, from the other people. So a child that is raised with this philosophy that she has to expect everything from the others, she becomes a person who has no, let's say, utility. And she will feel very bad when she's an adult like this.
She will be very frustrated, always expecting and not serving.
Richard: So, we've got to frustrate our kids. We can't let them do whatever they want. We've got to help them not to be so concerned about themselves. It's a very tall order, but it seems to me to be speaking very directly to some of the problems that we see in raising kids these days.
But let's start now to deal with some specific problems with raising kids. What's going on with the really shy kids, Selma?
What I see is that usually this problem is concerned with the censorship, censorship that the parents put into the child's life. There is something that is important to distinguish here, that is censorship to consciousness and censorship to bad action. And it's a big confusion that people do.
So if you have a child that has the attitude of hitting her friends or destroying the toys that the friends have, it's important that you stop her from doing this. But you cannot censor the consciousness that the child is bringing in that situation. You have to see that you have a kid that is aggressive and try to help her, show her that she's aggressive and being aggressive with others.
She's first being aggressive with herself. She's destroying, she's attacking what is good in herself. That's why she destroys and attacks toys and other friendships. But to do this, the parents, they have to do this exercise with themselves first. Because usually if you have aggressive kids, you have aggressive parents. They copy everything we do. They are mirrors for ourselves, the kids. Because they are not masked.
They are spontaneous. So the kids show everything that happens in a family. And the parents don't like this. They want to censor, to cover up the consciousness. And that's very bad. It's important that the consciousness come up and we learn how to deal with it.
Richard: You know, strong censorship of problems is something I see too, Selma, that drives a child to shyness and maybe also to this mania of perfectionism.
You know, if the child continues that habit, it can be very difficult to treat later because it stays hidden. I notice this a lot in the work I do in workshops of things like public speaking and communication. Let's turn to a more problematic condition now, Selma, attention deficit disorder. What's going on there?
So these kids who are very agitated, they don't stop, they don't concentrate in any activity.
They don't concentrate also in themselves. It's a problem that they don't have enough contact with their inner self. If a child has this disorder, we see usually what happens is that the parents expect too much from them. Parents put too many expectations on the kids. They want them to be like this, to be like this, to do this, to do that. The parents don't have enough contact with the children to see they are human beings.
They have pathology. They have problems to deal with. But they also have a lot of gifts inside to be developed. But they are not going to be what the parents want them to be. They are what they are. And parents who put too much expectations are then children create agitated children who don't concentrate. They don't want to be with themselves. They see that the parents don't accept as they are.
So they don't accept themselves as they are as well.
Richard: So what's a poor parent to do, huh? There's a lot of pressure and influence out there in society, some of it positive, a lot of it negative. On top of our own pathology, as you described it, that's working inside each one of us to try to diminish our qualities, to take away our success and happiness. What are your ideas about the kind of environment you need to have, the kinds of values that we need to instill in our children to give them the best chance at being a happy and contributing member of society?
We have to help her to see the good qualities that she has, especially teach a child to do good, to say the truth, to think about helping the others, being useful, helping at home, helping her colleagues, respecting adults and teachers. This is another problem that we see today that the kids don't respect. First the parents at home and then teachers and then other people who can help them in life.
So they are very much selfish and they believe they know everything already and don't respect the people that can teach important things to them. And so this creates a vicious circle that we have to break, teaching them that everything is upside down. We have to think about how to be useful and do good.
Richard: Much food for thought, especially as the idea is flying directly in the face of much of the conventional wisdom about raising kids and self-esteem.
It also strikes me we need to do a similar program soon on dealing with teenagers. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
