"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates."
- Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus in Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center
Don't worry about finding yourself, dear. Mommy will drive you there.
That's my quote, from myself. If parents do everything for their children, including providing them with the latest electronic toys and "in" gear, when do the children have the opportunity to create the person they want to be? They don't even know that is what they are supposed to do.
Some parents do very little for their children, believing that they will find their own way, as the parents themselves did when they were kids. Sure enough, the kids do find a way. It may not be the best way or even a healthy way. Maybe it's "cool" though.
Both of the above scenarios are prescriptions for possible dilinquency or emotional stress in children, usually during their adolescence or later (for the emotional problems especially).
Most of the people who will read this are mature, meaning that they have managed to scrape through the early years of their lives, often at great personal peril, and have built at least a tentative new life for themselves. I say tentative only because people who create lives for themselves well beyond childhood are often uncertain if they have made the right choices, especially as the choices were not often those recommended by their parents.
They're doing it right, but it's not the way prescribed by the social establishment.
Eventually those mature adults become wise adults. Most of you fit that description.
Many adults are neither mature nor wise because their lives are nothing more than the fulfillment of the prescribed workaday lives expected by industry (aka the establishment). All they are certain of is that they must be doing the right thing because they are making money and spending it dutifully the way the big companies want them to spend it. They are emotional slaves, but they believe they are happy and fulfilled because the establishment approves of what they do.
To those of you adults reading this, both mature and wise, congratulations! You have done something the majority of people never accomplish.
How could we get more children to grow up to develop the kind of maturity and wisdom that you have? Ohhhhh! I can't answer that question without directing you to my book, which answers that question and many more.
You can, however, read a great deal from my web site which will give you some very good clues as to how to answer that question about how to develop sound and intellectually, emotionally and socially fit adults from today's and tomorrow's children.
Scientists refer to reproduction as the biological imperative. In nature, young animals who are not taught properly and completely by their parents die young.
In human society, they roam the streets and involve themselves with all kinds of anti-social behaviours.
It doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. You should learn how.
Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to make everyone aware that there are answers and solutions to the worst problems we have, as individuals and as societies.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, July 14, 2006
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