Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
- Albert Camus, French writer (1913-1960)
Well, I do, Albert, so where are you so I can refute your statement?
Seriously, Camus was right, some people do go to extensive lengths to be considered normal by others. But why?
We are social animals. As such we have standards, mores and rules/laws by which people must conduct their affairs so that our society does not descend into chaos. When we deal with a clerk in a store, for example, we have an idea of what to expect from that person, as the clerk does for us.
Two or three decades ago (depending on the location) a movement began to make people in wheelchairs have access to every building they may need to enter. That made sense for a medical building, for example, because someone in a wheelchair would certainly need to visit a doctor eventually.
People in wheelchairs wanted to be treated like everyone else and have access everywhere someone with two working legs would have. To them, normal meant having the same rights or access as those who could walk.
Striving to be normal goes much deeper than that. A child who is socially underdeveloped may work very hard to be like the rest of the kids, but that child can never be "normal" in a social setting. The child may seem to be a loner, may stutter, may remain quiet with others around, may agree with the leader of the group most often, will likely not do well with schoolwork, but try as he or she might they will not be able to be like the others, normal in a social setting.
Being socially underdeveloped as a child carries through adulthood, sometimes through life itself. Many socially underdeveloped kids eventually learn the social skills their peers did as children, whereupon they can interact in social settings like others, thus be "normal." That catching up socially requires a huge amount of effort, something Camus says that few understand.
Certainly the peers of a socially underdeveloped child don't understand. They consider the kid weird or strange. They nitpick to find faults with the child that may not exist in reality so they can talk about the odd one in their own "normal" groups.
Often a socially underdeveloped child will be bullied by another socially underdeveloped child. Bullies are classic cases of social underdevelopment, perhaps with a touch of maldevelopment. They need social interaction with peers, but have no idea how to achieve it. They want to be normal, but can't, so they lash out at the weakest among them, which is usually another socially underdeveloped child. The same happens with adult bullies and their victims.
Children who are underdeveloped emotionally have similar adjustment problems. They tend to be punished for their deficiencies and the resulting behaviours, as socially underdeveloped children are as well. What we don't understand in odd or strange children usually causes them to violate social norms, thus we punish them to teach them how to act normally.
Yes, we punish children and adults for being socially and/or emotionally underdeveloped and acting out because they can't cope with their inability to be normal with their peers.
By punishing them as children we ensure that they will not likely rise to the level of development of their peers because they will believe that it's impossible for them to be normal. They will always feel left out, different.
Almost every adult in a prison is either socially or emotionally underdeveloped or maldeveloped, or both. At that age they have been broken for so long that society could not afford to do the necessary psychological repairs, so we put them behind bars and forget about them. Pretend they don't exist in our society. Call them bad, social offenders.
It may be true that most children are born with the same potential. That potential is very different among them by the age they enter the school system because of their different opportunities (or lack thereof) to develop socially and emotionally as well as they do physically and intellectually in the intervening few years.
Trouble begins in the school system. Teachers are not only not granted permission to work to develop children's social and emotional skills according to the curriculum, they may be denied permission (in most classroom settings) by the administration. "There isn't time." "Stick to the curriculum."
By the time kids enter school, many parents believe they have taken their children as far as they need to socially and emotionally, so they leave it up to the school to carry on. The school can't do much in most cases.
Every socially or emotionally inappropriate behaviour of adults can be traced back to social or emotional (or both) deficits when they were children. No one wants to do this and few will try because it upsets everyone who prefers to deny any responsibility for underdevelopment or maldevelopment of social miscreant adults, when they were children.
Society can manage social and emotional development of children the same way it manages intellectual and physical development. In fact, plans to do this are fairly easy and very cheap to implement.
Before anything can be changed, we must admit as a society that we have children who are not receiving assistance with their social and emotional development. Then we can put programs in place to train parents and teachers how to fulfill the rest of their respective roles in raising a child.
Talk about it.
Bill Allin is a sociologist, retired teacher and author of the book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, as well as the fountain of inspiration for programs related to the TIA program.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label emotional. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emotional. Show all posts
Friday, April 25, 2008
Friday, March 02, 2007
Understanding Your Fears Helps You Know Yourself
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
- Marilyn French
Fear is a mysterious question for many people. People are often not certain what they are afraid of. They may not even be aware that they are afraid of anything. They just "naturally" dislike or avoid some things, never considering that they might be afraid of them.
Being able to identify a fear goes a long way toward overcoming it, if that is desired. Just knowing that you are afraid of something does not eliminate it as a fear. But it does allow you to take steps (usually involving monitoring and assistance from at least one other person) to conquer the fear.
Our most deep-seated fears begin in childhood. They may begin with a bad personal experience, such as hearing of a severe problem that someone else has had which may have cost that person his life or a limb, or with watching a movie for which fear is an integral part.
Adventure movies, for example, depend on the main character(s) being involved with close-to-death events. In my case, I developed a fear of confined spaces (claustrophobia) after watching a movie (with my parents, in my preschool years) about an escape from a concentration camp or prison in which the characters dug an extensive tunnel that was just large enough for them to crawl through. The movie spent considerable time focussing on the fact that the tunnel could collapse at any moment, killing anyone inside.
Horror movies, which many teens enjoy immensely, can be the sources for future fears if watched by younger children. Tarantula spiders, for example, are often used to create scary situations where the characters fear they will die of a spider bite (even though this is extremely unlikely from a tarantula bite). This movie experience by a young child may result in a fear of spiders or even of insects as well as the child gets older.
Acknowledging our fear of something is a beginning. It helps us to consider where we might have developed that fear. If our fear is of spiders, then knowing that a horror movie we saw as a child falsely portrayed a tarantula as an eight-legged arachnid worthy of fear could help us to rationalize our way out of a fear of spiders. In fact, most spiders are more helpful to us than they are harmful, a fact never conveyed in a horror movie.
Examining our fears can tell us a great deal about ourselves and our past, as fears and phobias are all learned, not instinctive. The study of some of the dark sides of ourselves can also help us to grow into more confident people as we learn how to overcome our fears and become masters of our own emotions.
Fear is a weakness of character. Learning about our fears and working to ovecome them helps us to build our character in ways we never thought possible, by empowering ourselves.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, striving to smooth out the rocky parts of life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Marilyn French
Fear is a mysterious question for many people. People are often not certain what they are afraid of. They may not even be aware that they are afraid of anything. They just "naturally" dislike or avoid some things, never considering that they might be afraid of them.
Being able to identify a fear goes a long way toward overcoming it, if that is desired. Just knowing that you are afraid of something does not eliminate it as a fear. But it does allow you to take steps (usually involving monitoring and assistance from at least one other person) to conquer the fear.
Our most deep-seated fears begin in childhood. They may begin with a bad personal experience, such as hearing of a severe problem that someone else has had which may have cost that person his life or a limb, or with watching a movie for which fear is an integral part.
Adventure movies, for example, depend on the main character(s) being involved with close-to-death events. In my case, I developed a fear of confined spaces (claustrophobia) after watching a movie (with my parents, in my preschool years) about an escape from a concentration camp or prison in which the characters dug an extensive tunnel that was just large enough for them to crawl through. The movie spent considerable time focussing on the fact that the tunnel could collapse at any moment, killing anyone inside.
Horror movies, which many teens enjoy immensely, can be the sources for future fears if watched by younger children. Tarantula spiders, for example, are often used to create scary situations where the characters fear they will die of a spider bite (even though this is extremely unlikely from a tarantula bite). This movie experience by a young child may result in a fear of spiders or even of insects as well as the child gets older.
Acknowledging our fear of something is a beginning. It helps us to consider where we might have developed that fear. If our fear is of spiders, then knowing that a horror movie we saw as a child falsely portrayed a tarantula as an eight-legged arachnid worthy of fear could help us to rationalize our way out of a fear of spiders. In fact, most spiders are more helpful to us than they are harmful, a fact never conveyed in a horror movie.
Examining our fears can tell us a great deal about ourselves and our past, as fears and phobias are all learned, not instinctive. The study of some of the dark sides of ourselves can also help us to grow into more confident people as we learn how to overcome our fears and become masters of our own emotions.
Fear is a weakness of character. Learning about our fears and working to ovecome them helps us to build our character in ways we never thought possible, by empowering ourselves.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, striving to smooth out the rocky parts of life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, January 15, 2007
Community Problems: Where Society Goes Wrong
"Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most [people's] minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide."
- Barbara Deming
This is such a difficult topic for me to discuss because I have mixed feelings about it.
Most of the problems that become the causes for possible vengeance were preventable in the first place. Not all, as we are fallible beings.
If children are taught from a very young age the tools they need to survive and thrive in their culture as adults, the kindesses and courtesies that should be accorded to others, the compassion that yields great benefits in terms of friendships rather than enmity and the emotional and social skills that will see them fit into a mutually beneficial community and nation, they will have no need to resort to the kinds of behaviours that cause others to want vengeance.
There is no need to resort to vengeance if the behaviours that precipitate it do not occur.
However, they do occur in our world. Rather than seeing them as signals or calls for help, as indicators that the "perpetrator" has needs that have not been filled and he or she cannot keep their life balance without some form of correction and addressing of needs on the part of those closest to that person, we choose instead to punish.
Punishing is so much easier and faster (if vastly less efficient in the long run) than tending to needs that should never have been ignored in the first place. Instead we let the fresh milk go sour, then blame the milk for being at fault.
Do people actually think of punishing a perpetrator as a form of victory? Absolutely, yes! Even a school principal who punishes a child for misdemeanors believes that he has done the right thing in defending his community against the ravages of evildoers (or those who will eventually become evildoers unless they are stopped young).
Parents do n0t usually consider themselves as heroes for disciplining their children following a mistake or commission of unapproved behaviour. They believe that "this hurts me more than it hurts you." Sometimes it does, in an emotional sense, because the parent knows intuitively that something has gone wrong but has no idea how to correct it.
The fact that I had to write that a parent "has no idea how to correct" the behaviour of his or her child is itself a condemnation of a society that does not teach parenting skills that it knows are required.
If we have the knowledge and skills to correct those who have "gone bad" through psychology, therapy or reprogramming, we have the knowledge and skills (the same ones) that should be taught to every young adult before they have children.
Every person who fails at life as an adult reflects back to a failed upbringing by parents. However, it's not the parents who are at fault because they didn't know what to do. Almost every new parent enters that awesome project of parenting as an amateur who knows too little about what a parent should know.
Some failing parents will blame the school and teacher for their problem children, some blame the community or peer friends, some blame television, some blame the other parent. No one wants to blame themselves because it would serve no purpose. They know they did the best they knew how.
No one puts the blame where it belongs, with a society that doesn't teach young adults what they need to know about growing and developing children.
If we want to think in terms of punishing anyone, we should punish politicians who will not authorize school boards to teach new parents and authorize teachers to teach what kids need to learn besides what is on the intellectual-stream curriculum.
Politicians are the only segment of society that reacts positively to punishment. They know what to do (at least some do) but do not make it happen. They do wrong by doing nothing.
Punish that and we will see how quickly education will change from job training to life preparation.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put the right information into the right hands, then encourage those hands to get to work with it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Barbara Deming
This is such a difficult topic for me to discuss because I have mixed feelings about it.
Most of the problems that become the causes for possible vengeance were preventable in the first place. Not all, as we are fallible beings.
If children are taught from a very young age the tools they need to survive and thrive in their culture as adults, the kindesses and courtesies that should be accorded to others, the compassion that yields great benefits in terms of friendships rather than enmity and the emotional and social skills that will see them fit into a mutually beneficial community and nation, they will have no need to resort to the kinds of behaviours that cause others to want vengeance.
There is no need to resort to vengeance if the behaviours that precipitate it do not occur.
However, they do occur in our world. Rather than seeing them as signals or calls for help, as indicators that the "perpetrator" has needs that have not been filled and he or she cannot keep their life balance without some form of correction and addressing of needs on the part of those closest to that person, we choose instead to punish.
Punishing is so much easier and faster (if vastly less efficient in the long run) than tending to needs that should never have been ignored in the first place. Instead we let the fresh milk go sour, then blame the milk for being at fault.
Do people actually think of punishing a perpetrator as a form of victory? Absolutely, yes! Even a school principal who punishes a child for misdemeanors believes that he has done the right thing in defending his community against the ravages of evildoers (or those who will eventually become evildoers unless they are stopped young).
Parents do n0t usually consider themselves as heroes for disciplining their children following a mistake or commission of unapproved behaviour. They believe that "this hurts me more than it hurts you." Sometimes it does, in an emotional sense, because the parent knows intuitively that something has gone wrong but has no idea how to correct it.
The fact that I had to write that a parent "has no idea how to correct" the behaviour of his or her child is itself a condemnation of a society that does not teach parenting skills that it knows are required.
If we have the knowledge and skills to correct those who have "gone bad" through psychology, therapy or reprogramming, we have the knowledge and skills (the same ones) that should be taught to every young adult before they have children.
Every person who fails at life as an adult reflects back to a failed upbringing by parents. However, it's not the parents who are at fault because they didn't know what to do. Almost every new parent enters that awesome project of parenting as an amateur who knows too little about what a parent should know.
Some failing parents will blame the school and teacher for their problem children, some blame the community or peer friends, some blame television, some blame the other parent. No one wants to blame themselves because it would serve no purpose. They know they did the best they knew how.
No one puts the blame where it belongs, with a society that doesn't teach young adults what they need to know about growing and developing children.
If we want to think in terms of punishing anyone, we should punish politicians who will not authorize school boards to teach new parents and authorize teachers to teach what kids need to learn besides what is on the intellectual-stream curriculum.
Politicians are the only segment of society that reacts positively to punishment. They know what to do (at least some do) but do not make it happen. They do wrong by doing nothing.
Punish that and we will see how quickly education will change from job training to life preparation.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put the right information into the right hands, then encourage those hands to get to work with it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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