Reflections

Reflections…

Children are our mirrors.

It occurs to me that the very simplest argument for treating children with kindness, love and respect (apart from that it feels right) is that they always reflect these things back to us their parents, and to everyone they interact with. The time and energy that we put into them is not a sacrifice. Our children are not drains that suck away our energy and life, they are the most potent mirrors of who we are, and the return on our investment of time, love and understanding is many fold.

I’ve picked up a great book from the local library (kudos to our local libraries for stocking gentle parenting books!) called, aptly, “What Your Pediatrician Doesn’t Know Can Hurt Your Child”, by Susan Markel MD. Her chapter on discipline is headed simply, “Treat Me Like I’m Someone You Love”.

Treat me like I’m someone you love. I see children being treated as the enemy. I see them being shamed, belittled, yelled at, told they are wrong, can’t do, must do, slapped, berated and used as whipping dogs for their parents’ angers and frustrations. I see them tucked away out of sight in prams and ‘baby buckets’, where their cries of increasing distress and outright loneliness can be zoned out as background noise. Only rarely do I really see children being treated as someone their parents love. And like. And as though they are actually seen as a person.

Storytime at a local library recently was utterly ruined for me by the other mothers. One told her child loudly, 5 or 6 times, that she was ‘stupid!’ Another roughly snatched glitter off her tiny daughter, told her that she can’t do this and shouldn’t do that (we were making turtles out of old yogurt containers, I felt a little experimentation and creativity might be an acceptable part of the process), berated and bullied the child into a belligerent response (the mirror), then ignored the three year old while she wandered out onto the footpath next to the highway for 20 minutes. The little girl was then shouted at for ‘running away’, threatened, told she was naughty, and to ‘get in the car NOW!’ Another mother at a shopping centre change room roughly slapped her little boy for moving about too much while she changed his nappy.

What will these children learn from these interactions with their parents? Will it make them ‘good’? Oh, and doesn’t that open the proverbial worm can. What is good? If you ask the average parent to outline what a good child is, what will the answer be? Almost certainly, the measure of a ‘good’ child is compliance. Is that the measure of a ‘good’ adult, and if so what does that say for the oft quoted ‘all it takes for evil to flourish is that good people stand by and do nothing’? If by good we mean compliant, if we all learn that the only choices are to be ‘good’ victims or to be bullies, then the usual round of unsatisfactory and violent human interactions continues.

While the modern connotations of the word ‘discipline’ make me reluctant to use it, its actual meaning is ‘to teach’. Every single interaction we have with our children, with other peoples’ children, teaches them something about the world, something about themselves, whether we know it, care about that, or not.

When a tiny child is hit by his mother, the person he loves and trusts most in the world, for following his irresistible bodily need for movement (at what happens to be an inconvenient time for mum) what does he learn? In this case, he said, “sorry mum” in a little sorry voice. Perhaps he learns that those who are bigger and more physically powerful than he is can control him, and he must appease them to be accepted. Perhaps he learns to feel shame in relation to toileting. Maybe he learns that his natural impulses are wrong and bad and will bring him pain – both physical and by the withdrawal of approval and love. What seems most unlikely in this scenario is that he will learn to co-operate with others out of mutual respect, because there is no respect involved in hitting a tiny child, and he cannot learn, cannot mirror, what is not shown to him. This mother may wonder what is wrong with her boy when he hits children in the playground later. Maybe she will hit him for hitting other people.

It is easy to see this mirror effect in other peoples’ interactions with their children. It’s much harder to see what you are doing yourself, because that means going behind the mirror, looking below the surface of the view we have of ourselves, of the version of our self that we want others to see, and finding the heart of the matter.

When I am stressed or distressed, when I am exhausted and at a low ebb or at odds with important people in my life, my daughter gets the short end of the stick (although I never treat her with anything like the kinds of physical and emotional violence outlined above). I lose my patience too easily, I grit my teeth when I should just bend with her, I get snappy over spilled things rather than calmly saying “That’s ok, let’s pick it up”. When I do the latter, she picks it up every time, gracefully, willingly, with me. When I can see clearly, I see how willing she is, how kind, how much she wants to flow with me and I can see when she needs to express things in herself and follow through on her own. I can see her needs and we can work together to get them met. But when I am stressed, distressed, the little girl bits of me struggle through, that early person who is still angry about being ignored, shamed and who still has unmet needs, elbows her way past loving mother me, and to this part of myself my daughter is just someone else who is standing in the way of getting her needs met. I mirror, at these times, the parenting I had.

The trick here is simple awareness.

When my daughter mirrors back to me my anger, my anxieties, my inability to hold onto my patience in all the small ways she needs me to, it’s easy to make excuses. “Oh, I’m cranky because I’m tired, because I’m pregnant, because the hormones made me do it!” It’s a bit too easy. Because one very simple fact remains amongst all this flurry of efforts to make myself feel better about behaviors I don’t like in myself. My daughter and her mirror. The simple fact is that regardless of the reason, regardless of the fact that I had certain deficiencies in my own upbringing,or of my hormones or tiredness or stresses, it affects my daughter negatively. The depth of my love for my child has taught me this, that I am the adult, I am the one who can change things, make better choices, who can give her the very best of me so that she can naturally give the world, and her children, these things easily.

And, perhaps best of all, she gives these better things back to me. Absolutely invariably, when I make the effort to regain my patience, when I step back and soothe my own anger, clear it from my vision, and see what she really needs and offer her gentle loving guidance and the room to learn from her own (harmless) mistakes, she repays my efforts with heartbreaking gestures of love and sharing. The countless hours, days, months of wearing her close to me, breastfeeding as she needed it, soothing her fears at night, listening to her, being interested in her and pouring in often more patience and understanding than I felt I had, all swamp back to me when the tiny lips kiss me, when her little warm body presses close to me in absolute trust that I will keep her safe, when she trusts me with the safekeeping of some treasure or shares a precious food with me.

I am passionate about gentle pregnancy, birth and parenting for these reasons, and because every time I hear someone talking about leaving a baby to ‘cry it out’ (cry what out?), or notice a child being berated or shamed, or see the person who a child should be able to trust completely to keep him safe instead smack him, I feel that we’ve lost something. And it makes me profoundly sad.

 There really is no need for the next generation, and the next to go on and on mirroring the disinterested uncompassionate parenting that they had. But it takes effort, the effort to be aware and to take responsibility, to show a child more empathy, understanding, warmth and aware guidance than you may feel you have, to reap that reward of having all of that mirrored right back to you.

It’s easier, though, if we remember to treat our children like they are someone we love.

REFERENCE

‘What Your Pediatrician Doesn’t Know Can Hurt Your Child’, Susan Markel MD, 2010, Benbella Books, inc,