Grandpa Said A Naughty Word
[My young daughter] Sophie was sitting on my lap at Grandpa's the other day. As Grandpa was talking to Grandma, he says "Oh, I hate that goddamn show." Sophie looks up at me and whispers, "Ooooh, Grandpa said HATE... that's a naughty word!"
- David Lauer, American father and advocate for good parenting
Four-year-old Sophie had no idea of the significance of her simple heart-felt observation. Her father may have, or he may have thought of the irony of what she said as funny. Sophie's words were hugely important and I will explain why.
First let me take you back many years to a family gathering in Canada. Three generations had gathered for a family dinner on a Sunday evening. The grandson listens to the conversation quietly--having nothing to contribute anyway--as the custom then was for children to be "seen but not heard." The boy has nothing else to do but listen and learn.
The grandmother told stories that took place in the Great Depression, which was not long past. Grandmother and grandfather had survived the Depression in comfort as they owned property as well as a bakery and a grocery store. The grandmother told of many incidents where people without money or food would come to the grocery store asking for handouts. Each was given something.
One feature of most stories was an observation about the cleanliness of the people coming into the store to beg for food. They were usually not clean, the grandmother observed, neglecting to mention whether or not these people might have had access to soap and water, or even a place to live. The child, having no reference other than his own personal experience, thought there must be many dirty people around. He always had access to water and soap.
One story involved a man with dark skin, unusual in those days in a basically all-white city. When grandmother tucked "dirty" and the "N-word" into a sentence in passing, the young grandson exploded. "Oh, Nana, shut up" is all he said. He knew the words of his grandmother hurt someone who could not defend himself. He knew enough to say no more and knew he could not take back what was already out and festering.
The lad was severely reprimanded, isolated from the others present at the time and promised further punishment when the younger family got home. The "sin" had been the boy telling his grandmother to shut up, not the grandmother's expression of racism. Apparently, in that setting and that time, telling a racist relative to shut up was the greater offence. Especially if one of the offenders was a child. And the other a financial benefactor to the younger family.
The grandmother, I should mention--my own grandmother--never again expressed a word that was racist or prejudiced. I can't remember if I was punished at home later, but it would not have mattered to me. I could not listen to prejudice as if it didn't matter, even as a young lad. I felt hurt by words intended to hurt others.
Why? My parents never said or taught me anything about racism or prejudice. My only entertainment in those days was the radio. In the mid-1940s, after the Second World War and before his untimely death, I heard many audio clips of Mohandas Gandhi, fondly known by almost everyone as "The Mahatma" (Great Soul). Gandhi, born into a Hindu family, grieved as untold numbers of Hindus and Muslims died at each others hands during the migrations between India and Pakistan at the time of independence from Britain. However, he managed single handedly to prevent more slaughter than the Brits could ever avoid by speaking words of peace to the Muslims of Bengal.
The Mahatma was a man of peace, a man who put his life on the line many times in the cause of peace, understanding and respect among all people. I learned more from Gandhi than I did from my biological father. His words guided my life when my parents provided no words of guidance. Gandhi was the parent I learned from as a young child and that learning shaped who I became and what I did with my life.
Someone taught Sophie well. She knew, without thinking, that even using the word "hate" was wrong, while never giving a thought to her grandfather's "taking the Lord's name in vain." While there is virtually no evidence that "the Lord" would take offence at the grandfather's statement, the books that profess to express the Lord's wishes all say that hatred is wrong.
More significantly, Sophie had been taught this life lesson about values and mutual human respect before she was old enough to begin her formal education. That lesson will shape her life.
Someone was parenting right. Note also from the quote that Sophie was on her father's lap. Touching (the loving kind) is another critically important experience in a parent-child relationship. Not only is she receiving good parenting today, she will pass these good skills along to her children when that time arrives. She will "pay it forward" and never realize why. Many will benefit later, though few will know the background story as you do.
My friends, this is the kind of good news, of world-saving news, that our news media never report. This small incident happened in one American household. It is likely happening also in many, many more. The world needs to know.
You know these lessons about parenting. Pass them on. Kids learn about life from the people they live with before they ever begin school. Schools are not empowered or directed to teach life lessons. Young adults need to know this. They need us to do what we can to teach them.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers about what and when to teach children to assist with their social and emotional development as well as their intellectual and physical development.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Showing posts with label parenting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parenting. Show all posts
Monday, December 06, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Parental Wisdom: Lacking Respect or Missing in Action?
Parental Wisdom: Lacking Respect or Missing in Action?
Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.
- Marianne Williamson, American peace activist, author, lecturer, minister (b. 1952)
Where is wisdom in the inevitable transformation that is taking place on our planet? Is it stronger than ever, though apparently disguised. Has it vanished? Do we even recognize wisdom today as we did in the past?
Most people would agree that Albert Schweitzer was wise. Here's an example:
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
- Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
We could explain so much about our world today using this thought. Where is that kind of wisdom? While Schweitzer's observation has always been true of our species, the fact that today the leaders of industry knowingly poison the air they breathe and the water they use in their own bodies for the sake of profit should raise alarm. They have put profit ahead of survival, which is clearly in opposition to the instinct of every living thing.
Leaders of industry hold out the promise of jobs as bait so that politicians and bureaucrats will allow them to commit acts that no other civilization in history has done to itself. They argue that, in effect, "my way must be right because I thought of it." They argue that making their industry eco-friendly will be economically unfeasible, though the evidence on the ground shows that this argument is patently false.
We believe them because we somehow attribute to them wisdom. Or we want the money that derives from the jobs they will create. Today, as in the past, wealth trumps reason. Does that mean that wisdom no longer exists?
These lessons we teach to our children, whether intentionally or not.
Historically, wisdom was the purview of the elderly. Elders traditionally had experience doing much the same activities as the younger generations were doing. Experience derives from making mistakes then learning from them. That learning could be taught, which made the teachers--the elderly, experienced ones in society--considered wise.
A century ago 85 percent of the population of North America lived in rural areas and derived their income directly or indirectly from agriculture. Today 85 percent of the populations of Canada and the United States live in cities. The continuity of experience has been broken. Today's young adults don't want to learn skills of farming. Many city dwelling adults today have not accustomed themselves to social and emotional survival methods required in city life, so cannot teach them to their children.
Within the memory span of older people living today women entered the workforce (during the Second World War when men were away fighting), it became acceptable for women to wear pants rather than dresses or skirts to work, women have learned the trades of welding, plumbing, auto mechanics and others, women have become bosses and employers rather than entry level employees and women have even become heads of states in large countries. The continuity was broken. We accept these changes but have little idea how they impact our personal and family lives.
Office "pencil pushers" of the past now press buttons on keyboards. The more skilled among them program software to operate to the specific needs of companies. Today's older people have stories to pass along to younger generations, but those stories are considered by young people to lack usable information, thus don't count as wisdom. Old folks just don't "get it."
Young people in North America now text their friends 300 times a day, on average, while their grandparents may still be reluctant to pick up a phone to call someone because they "may be busy." While many of today's parents of teenagers grapple with the thought of teaching "sex" to kids younger than 16 years, close to half our kids have sex before their thirteenth birthday and the number who have sex before their ninth birthday is closing in on double digit percentages.
Somehow our adult generations have come to believe that ignorance is important in children. They call it "innocence" as if they can stop kids from behaving in certain ways as they can stop certain behaviours of family pets.
The disconnect here is that childhood is the time people are supposed to learn about adulthood, not be protected from learning about it. The whole purpose of childhood is as a training period for adulthood. Conventional "wisdom" says that the world is too ugly for children to be exposed to, yet evidence shows it is actually more peaceful, organized and orderly than ever before in history. What parents believe becomes what children accept as fact.
Children know that they should know the facts about certain things, even if they are not certain of exactly what they should know. It's a gut feeling. A child of 12 who has sex understands that he or she should know more about what they are doing than they do, but has no idea where to learn the needed information, from whom or even what they should know. What they do know is how to put tab A into slot B, as every child knows, and nature provides them with the hormones to make the convergence more compelling.
An interviewer on a U.S. national radio network asked me not long ago, on air, when I lost my virginity. When I told him he all but called me a liar because he expected me to say age 12 or 13. He said so and his on-air colleagues agreed. This is the world of today.
Parents and grandparents who are not fully connected to that world or who are in denial of the facts will not connect with children who are constantly growing and experiencing outside of home. In turn, the children will not see their parents or grandparents as wise, maybe not even credible. Not only will many adults not tell the kids the facts they want to know, they refuse to tell them and they deny what the kids are living every day. And what they are learning, often inaccurately, every day.
How can we expect young people to consider their parents or grandparents wise when they aren't? "Innocence" equals ignorance. Denial equals stupidity. Stupidity is prolific. When kids can't get answers from their parents they turn to others who will answer. Just as with making friends, the people who are easiest to get answers from are the most dangerous and undependable. For example, drug dealers hang around outside many elementary schools today, ready to give free advice as well as "samples."
Wisdom exists today, but those who want access to it must search for it. The internet has answers to all questions. Some of the answers are wrong, even dangerous. But some are dead-on right. Rather than teach children how to evaluate what they may find on the internet, many parents deny their kids will look at such things and others put kid-control programs on their computers.
Today kids can find computers all over the place and the average six-year-old can figure out the passwords their parents put on. Denying kids access to information they want makes them believe their parents are stupid or oppressive, not wise. Indeed, parents who do not avail themselves of the opportunities to teach their children what they want to know and what they need to know--the primary objective of parenthood after having sex and giving birth--do not deserve to be considered wise.
Wisdom exists today, but not in conventional places or sources. For example, you learned something by reading this article that your parents could not have imagined a generation ago.
Pass it on.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what to teach their children, and when, to help them develop socially and emotionally as well as they expect schools to help them develop intellectually. It's not what most parents think.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.
- Marianne Williamson, American peace activist, author, lecturer, minister (b. 1952)
Where is wisdom in the inevitable transformation that is taking place on our planet? Is it stronger than ever, though apparently disguised. Has it vanished? Do we even recognize wisdom today as we did in the past?
Most people would agree that Albert Schweitzer was wise. Here's an example:
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
- Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
We could explain so much about our world today using this thought. Where is that kind of wisdom? While Schweitzer's observation has always been true of our species, the fact that today the leaders of industry knowingly poison the air they breathe and the water they use in their own bodies for the sake of profit should raise alarm. They have put profit ahead of survival, which is clearly in opposition to the instinct of every living thing.
Leaders of industry hold out the promise of jobs as bait so that politicians and bureaucrats will allow them to commit acts that no other civilization in history has done to itself. They argue that, in effect, "my way must be right because I thought of it." They argue that making their industry eco-friendly will be economically unfeasible, though the evidence on the ground shows that this argument is patently false.
We believe them because we somehow attribute to them wisdom. Or we want the money that derives from the jobs they will create. Today, as in the past, wealth trumps reason. Does that mean that wisdom no longer exists?
These lessons we teach to our children, whether intentionally or not.
Historically, wisdom was the purview of the elderly. Elders traditionally had experience doing much the same activities as the younger generations were doing. Experience derives from making mistakes then learning from them. That learning could be taught, which made the teachers--the elderly, experienced ones in society--considered wise.
A century ago 85 percent of the population of North America lived in rural areas and derived their income directly or indirectly from agriculture. Today 85 percent of the populations of Canada and the United States live in cities. The continuity of experience has been broken. Today's young adults don't want to learn skills of farming. Many city dwelling adults today have not accustomed themselves to social and emotional survival methods required in city life, so cannot teach them to their children.
Within the memory span of older people living today women entered the workforce (during the Second World War when men were away fighting), it became acceptable for women to wear pants rather than dresses or skirts to work, women have learned the trades of welding, plumbing, auto mechanics and others, women have become bosses and employers rather than entry level employees and women have even become heads of states in large countries. The continuity was broken. We accept these changes but have little idea how they impact our personal and family lives.
Office "pencil pushers" of the past now press buttons on keyboards. The more skilled among them program software to operate to the specific needs of companies. Today's older people have stories to pass along to younger generations, but those stories are considered by young people to lack usable information, thus don't count as wisdom. Old folks just don't "get it."
Young people in North America now text their friends 300 times a day, on average, while their grandparents may still be reluctant to pick up a phone to call someone because they "may be busy." While many of today's parents of teenagers grapple with the thought of teaching "sex" to kids younger than 16 years, close to half our kids have sex before their thirteenth birthday and the number who have sex before their ninth birthday is closing in on double digit percentages.
Somehow our adult generations have come to believe that ignorance is important in children. They call it "innocence" as if they can stop kids from behaving in certain ways as they can stop certain behaviours of family pets.
The disconnect here is that childhood is the time people are supposed to learn about adulthood, not be protected from learning about it. The whole purpose of childhood is as a training period for adulthood. Conventional "wisdom" says that the world is too ugly for children to be exposed to, yet evidence shows it is actually more peaceful, organized and orderly than ever before in history. What parents believe becomes what children accept as fact.
Children know that they should know the facts about certain things, even if they are not certain of exactly what they should know. It's a gut feeling. A child of 12 who has sex understands that he or she should know more about what they are doing than they do, but has no idea where to learn the needed information, from whom or even what they should know. What they do know is how to put tab A into slot B, as every child knows, and nature provides them with the hormones to make the convergence more compelling.
An interviewer on a U.S. national radio network asked me not long ago, on air, when I lost my virginity. When I told him he all but called me a liar because he expected me to say age 12 or 13. He said so and his on-air colleagues agreed. This is the world of today.
Parents and grandparents who are not fully connected to that world or who are in denial of the facts will not connect with children who are constantly growing and experiencing outside of home. In turn, the children will not see their parents or grandparents as wise, maybe not even credible. Not only will many adults not tell the kids the facts they want to know, they refuse to tell them and they deny what the kids are living every day. And what they are learning, often inaccurately, every day.
How can we expect young people to consider their parents or grandparents wise when they aren't? "Innocence" equals ignorance. Denial equals stupidity. Stupidity is prolific. When kids can't get answers from their parents they turn to others who will answer. Just as with making friends, the people who are easiest to get answers from are the most dangerous and undependable. For example, drug dealers hang around outside many elementary schools today, ready to give free advice as well as "samples."
Wisdom exists today, but those who want access to it must search for it. The internet has answers to all questions. Some of the answers are wrong, even dangerous. But some are dead-on right. Rather than teach children how to evaluate what they may find on the internet, many parents deny their kids will look at such things and others put kid-control programs on their computers.
Today kids can find computers all over the place and the average six-year-old can figure out the passwords their parents put on. Denying kids access to information they want makes them believe their parents are stupid or oppressive, not wise. Indeed, parents who do not avail themselves of the opportunities to teach their children what they want to know and what they need to know--the primary objective of parenthood after having sex and giving birth--do not deserve to be considered wise.
Wisdom exists today, but not in conventional places or sources. For example, you learned something by reading this article that your parents could not have imagined a generation ago.
Pass it on.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what to teach their children, and when, to help them develop socially and emotionally as well as they expect schools to help them develop intellectually. It's not what most parents think.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, August 13, 2009
When Should Children Be Taught Certain Facts and Skills?
When Should Children Be Taught Certain Facts and Skills?
In response to an article I wrote recently about teaching information, facts and skills to children much earlier than most adults think is advisable and possible, one of my readers wrote to ask me to elaborate on the "when." When to teach children what is a critically important question, yet one that is seldom asked.
The following was my reply to her.
............................
Many adults believe that timing of information given to children is extremely important. They think that if the timing of wrong, it may harm the child's mind or morals. This is wrong in every possible way.
Teaching a child about drugs, for example, does not open the possibility that the child will adopt the taking of drugs. The whole purpose of teaching the child about drugs is to inform them about what harm can come to them by taking drugs other than under the supervision of a medical professional. Teaching a child about sex between man and woman does not encourage the child to experiment with sex prematurely. Despite these widespread beliefs, there is no evidence that early teaching about drugs, sex or any other matter that a parent should be teaching to a child affects the mind or body of the child as a result of being taught prematurely.
Despite parent supervision of internet use by children, the truth is that this is impossible. Kids are resourceful and will find ways to circumvent restrictions by the parents. One way, for example, is simply to visit a friend's house, someone who does not suffer such restrictions. In other words, information on every possible subject is available on the internet. However, some of this information is wrong and some (in its wrongness) does harm. Consider how many adults have been fooled by urban legends and so-called Nigeria scams.
A parent should be teaching life skills about all subjects when a child is young. How young is too young? You know your timing is wrong when the child shows no interest in the subject, gets distracted easily. THAT is the only criterion for premature teaching. The child, not the parent, should choose when he or she is ready to learn about a subject.
Innocence in children is admirable if you want them to never grow up. But they do. Children who have been kept innocent by their parents tend to become ignorant adults. Ignorant adults don't know what to do and when to do it. They have few coping skills when life throws them a bad curve, such as a personal assault on their person, a home invasion, divorce or death of a loved one.
Children learn about life in the womb, even before they are born. They have the ability to learn a language (a sophisticated and complex cognitive process) even before they can walk. Studies show that children study language before they even have the ability to make use of that learning through their own speech. Children have the ability to understand the most complex information we can give them at a shockingly early age.
If mistakes are make with early teaching, they would be with the adult, not with the child. The adult (usually parent) might not teach well for the learning style of the child. Imagine a parent using the lecture style of a university professor with a child of two years. No matter how fact filled the lecture might be, the child will not be interested because young children learn by doing more than by listening. They learn language by listening, but that has an incentive because the child wants to participate in family conversations. For most matters to be learned early by a child, they can learn is easier by doing something.
I most cases, children learn while they play. Play is their form of work. A parent can teach a child in the context of play. Make it a fun and enjoyable situation. Because kids want to learn, teaching them something that is given them as if imparting a secret is also a fun learning style. They often want to believe that they know something other kids don't. And they should be in that situation at least once in a while.
Let's take a teaching example. How many facts might a parent possibly teach a child about sex? Let's say 50 facts. A child of three years has no need for or use for 50 facts about sex. The child will not be interested in learning 50 facts. But he might be interested in learning a few of them. It stops being fun for a child to learn when the learning becomes memorization. A child has learning limits. Those limits are more of total accumulation at any given time than of their ability to understand something.
How many lies do parents tell their children so that they can avoid teaching them the truth? A parent may tell a child that a new baby is delivered by a stork or an angel from heaven. The child will know that is wrong. The child sees the mother grow in the belly, then return from the hospital, with baby in arms, much thinner. Which does more harm, telling the child that babies begin with the joining of sex organs (every kid has a set) of mother and father, or telling the child a lie? Believe me, telling the lie to a young child makes the child mistrust information from the parent.
A lie told to a child by a parent, no matter what the intent of the parent, is a lie to the child, a lie that undermines the trust the child has in the most important adult in his or her life. A "white lie" is a lie and it's understood as a lie by the child.
The message a child learns from a lie by his parent, no matter what the nature of the lie, is "I'm a bad parent who can't cope with teaching you the truth, so I am making up this lie. We're stuck with each other, so live with it." Children recognize lies and diversionary tactics far more readily than most adults realize. They don't know what to make of a lie, what to do about the fact that their most important source of information about life has lied to them. The child will still love the parent, but trust between them will have been undermined.
Children can handle truth at any age, even as young as age one year. No child knows what to do with a lie told by a parent, no matter how well intentioned it was. A child's life revolves around trust, and since the young child's life revolves around parents, for a parent to lie to a child to avoid telling the truth helps to destroy that environment of trust between them. It shatters the child's life.
Bad parenting does far more harm to children than teaching them too early has ever done.
Please consider these thoughts carefully. Put them into action yourself and tell other people you know. There is nothing private about this information. You and they are not too young to learn. Nor too old. There is no young age limit to learning just as there is no upper age limit.
Invite others you tell to join our group.
Children, more than adults, are built to learn. They are learning factories. Young children process an alarming amount of information daily, far more than adults do and far more than most adults realize.
Do not hesitate to write back with more questions.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know when, what and how to teach critically important information and skills to children so that they can grow up healthy and truly well balanced.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
In response to an article I wrote recently about teaching information, facts and skills to children much earlier than most adults think is advisable and possible, one of my readers wrote to ask me to elaborate on the "when." When to teach children what is a critically important question, yet one that is seldom asked.
The following was my reply to her.
............................
Many adults believe that timing of information given to children is extremely important. They think that if the timing of wrong, it may harm the child's mind or morals. This is wrong in every possible way.
Teaching a child about drugs, for example, does not open the possibility that the child will adopt the taking of drugs. The whole purpose of teaching the child about drugs is to inform them about what harm can come to them by taking drugs other than under the supervision of a medical professional. Teaching a child about sex between man and woman does not encourage the child to experiment with sex prematurely. Despite these widespread beliefs, there is no evidence that early teaching about drugs, sex or any other matter that a parent should be teaching to a child affects the mind or body of the child as a result of being taught prematurely.
Despite parent supervision of internet use by children, the truth is that this is impossible. Kids are resourceful and will find ways to circumvent restrictions by the parents. One way, for example, is simply to visit a friend's house, someone who does not suffer such restrictions. In other words, information on every possible subject is available on the internet. However, some of this information is wrong and some (in its wrongness) does harm. Consider how many adults have been fooled by urban legends and so-called Nigeria scams.
A parent should be teaching life skills about all subjects when a child is young. How young is too young? You know your timing is wrong when the child shows no interest in the subject, gets distracted easily. THAT is the only criterion for premature teaching. The child, not the parent, should choose when he or she is ready to learn about a subject.
Innocence in children is admirable if you want them to never grow up. But they do. Children who have been kept innocent by their parents tend to become ignorant adults. Ignorant adults don't know what to do and when to do it. They have few coping skills when life throws them a bad curve, such as a personal assault on their person, a home invasion, divorce or death of a loved one.
Children learn about life in the womb, even before they are born. They have the ability to learn a language (a sophisticated and complex cognitive process) even before they can walk. Studies show that children study language before they even have the ability to make use of that learning through their own speech. Children have the ability to understand the most complex information we can give them at a shockingly early age.
If mistakes are make with early teaching, they would be with the adult, not with the child. The adult (usually parent) might not teach well for the learning style of the child. Imagine a parent using the lecture style of a university professor with a child of two years. No matter how fact filled the lecture might be, the child will not be interested because young children learn by doing more than by listening. They learn language by listening, but that has an incentive because the child wants to participate in family conversations. For most matters to be learned early by a child, they can learn is easier by doing something.
I most cases, children learn while they play. Play is their form of work. A parent can teach a child in the context of play. Make it a fun and enjoyable situation. Because kids want to learn, teaching them something that is given them as if imparting a secret is also a fun learning style. They often want to believe that they know something other kids don't. And they should be in that situation at least once in a while.
Let's take a teaching example. How many facts might a parent possibly teach a child about sex? Let's say 50 facts. A child of three years has no need for or use for 50 facts about sex. The child will not be interested in learning 50 facts. But he might be interested in learning a few of them. It stops being fun for a child to learn when the learning becomes memorization. A child has learning limits. Those limits are more of total accumulation at any given time than of their ability to understand something.
How many lies do parents tell their children so that they can avoid teaching them the truth? A parent may tell a child that a new baby is delivered by a stork or an angel from heaven. The child will know that is wrong. The child sees the mother grow in the belly, then return from the hospital, with baby in arms, much thinner. Which does more harm, telling the child that babies begin with the joining of sex organs (every kid has a set) of mother and father, or telling the child a lie? Believe me, telling the lie to a young child makes the child mistrust information from the parent.
A lie told to a child by a parent, no matter what the intent of the parent, is a lie to the child, a lie that undermines the trust the child has in the most important adult in his or her life. A "white lie" is a lie and it's understood as a lie by the child.
The message a child learns from a lie by his parent, no matter what the nature of the lie, is "I'm a bad parent who can't cope with teaching you the truth, so I am making up this lie. We're stuck with each other, so live with it." Children recognize lies and diversionary tactics far more readily than most adults realize. They don't know what to make of a lie, what to do about the fact that their most important source of information about life has lied to them. The child will still love the parent, but trust between them will have been undermined.
Children can handle truth at any age, even as young as age one year. No child knows what to do with a lie told by a parent, no matter how well intentioned it was. A child's life revolves around trust, and since the young child's life revolves around parents, for a parent to lie to a child to avoid telling the truth helps to destroy that environment of trust between them. It shatters the child's life.
Bad parenting does far more harm to children than teaching them too early has ever done.
Please consider these thoughts carefully. Put them into action yourself and tell other people you know. There is nothing private about this information. You and they are not too young to learn. Nor too old. There is no young age limit to learning just as there is no upper age limit.
Invite others you tell to join our group.
Children, more than adults, are built to learn. They are learning factories. Young children process an alarming amount of information daily, far more than adults do and far more than most adults realize.
Do not hesitate to write back with more questions.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know when, what and how to teach critically important information and skills to children so that they can grow up healthy and truly well balanced.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Why Should You Care?
That is called integrity. Unfortunately it is not something you can buy or steal.
- The L Word
The easiest way to understand the basic concept of integrity is: doing the right thing when no one is looking and no reward forthcoming.
The delicious irony of the second sentence of the quote is that buying someone's good will or stealing anything would be the opposite of having integrity.
Does integrity exist today or is it a virtue more comfortably left in the past?
No one can claim to be pure and noble. We all have our weaknesses and strengths. None of us is perfect. When we demonstrate moral weakness, we join the vast majority of humanity that is not consistent about integrity.
Most of us try to do our best most of the time. Whether anyone is watching is or not, whether we may get a reward or not. If we don't, we may have trouble sleeping at night, we may suffer stress and its resulting anxiety beyond what we should, our relationships with those we love will surely suffer eventually.
Our media fill our minds with examples of every kind of immoral behaviour that is anything but integrity. Yet, somehow, most of us keep trying to do what is right.
Whether we have integrity or we act the opposite way, a large part of the responsibility lies with our parents. In the first five years of life, parents teach us by example or by actively teaching us lessons to live with integrity or to work against the benefit of society as a whole to gain for ourselves. As adults, we each make decisions for ourselves. Yet most of us, especially after age 40 (usually sooner), follow the life lessons and role models given to us by our parents.
Integrity is how we survive instead of descending into chaos as families and communities and nations.
Why should we care about our community as a whole if our community seems to not care about us? Actually, it does. Communities don't have good enough social skills to express to us how much they appreciate us. What they do have is a penchant for whining and crying when its citizens misbehave. They whine and cry because they have not yet gained sufficient maturity to know what to do to solve its problems and avoid them in the future.
As sophisticated as we have become technologically and to a lesser extent scientifically, socially as communities we are just entering our adolescence. Seven billion of us live in an immature world that only our descendents will see into adulthood.
Just as we can't force an adolescent of 14 years to act like an adult in all ways, we can't push our communities to act more mature when they don't know how.
We can only do the right thing, do our small part to see that the community we belong to grows in a healthy way.
That means living with integrity.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children into adults who live comfortably with integrity and maturity.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- The L Word
The easiest way to understand the basic concept of integrity is: doing the right thing when no one is looking and no reward forthcoming.
The delicious irony of the second sentence of the quote is that buying someone's good will or stealing anything would be the opposite of having integrity.
Does integrity exist today or is it a virtue more comfortably left in the past?
No one can claim to be pure and noble. We all have our weaknesses and strengths. None of us is perfect. When we demonstrate moral weakness, we join the vast majority of humanity that is not consistent about integrity.
Most of us try to do our best most of the time. Whether anyone is watching is or not, whether we may get a reward or not. If we don't, we may have trouble sleeping at night, we may suffer stress and its resulting anxiety beyond what we should, our relationships with those we love will surely suffer eventually.
Our media fill our minds with examples of every kind of immoral behaviour that is anything but integrity. Yet, somehow, most of us keep trying to do what is right.
Whether we have integrity or we act the opposite way, a large part of the responsibility lies with our parents. In the first five years of life, parents teach us by example or by actively teaching us lessons to live with integrity or to work against the benefit of society as a whole to gain for ourselves. As adults, we each make decisions for ourselves. Yet most of us, especially after age 40 (usually sooner), follow the life lessons and role models given to us by our parents.
Integrity is how we survive instead of descending into chaos as families and communities and nations.
Why should we care about our community as a whole if our community seems to not care about us? Actually, it does. Communities don't have good enough social skills to express to us how much they appreciate us. What they do have is a penchant for whining and crying when its citizens misbehave. They whine and cry because they have not yet gained sufficient maturity to know what to do to solve its problems and avoid them in the future.
As sophisticated as we have become technologically and to a lesser extent scientifically, socially as communities we are just entering our adolescence. Seven billion of us live in an immature world that only our descendents will see into adulthood.
Just as we can't force an adolescent of 14 years to act like an adult in all ways, we can't push our communities to act more mature when they don't know how.
We can only do the right thing, do our small part to see that the community we belong to grows in a healthy way.
That means living with integrity.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children into adults who live comfortably with integrity and maturity.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, March 02, 2009
What a Child Learns From You
By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic Americaneducation. ... From television, the child will have learned how to pick alock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long,get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety ofsophisticated armaments.
- Russell Baker, columnist and author (b.1925)
Some will read that quote and think it ironic. Others will think it sarcastic. Some will consider it pessimistic.
Yet what the quote missed is a child's main source for life information: parents. The quote is not wrong, just inadequate to convey the message.
While Baker had the age right ("by the age of six") he missed something extremely important, critically important about what a child learns in his first five years. In his first five years of life, a child learns what life is about.
You may think that age five or younger is too young to understand what life is about. Especially what the extremes, the best and worst of life, are about. While that is generally true, a young child gains his sense of the values that he will carry through his life from his parents. The life values of parents tend to be passed along to children, in so many varied ways that they can't be enumerated.
Let's say a young child is with her father in a store. The child doesn't pay attention to what the father buys or speaks about with the clerk. Back in the car, she overhears father saying to mother that the clerk gave him back five dollars too much and that he didn't return that money. That brief experience might leave a mark for a lifetime.
Children learn by example, as most of us know. Many parents don't know how important their role modelling is. A young child whose parents use drugs is highly likely to use drugs or alcohol when he grows up. Kids need to learn what life is about and we tend to not teach them until they are older, "old enough to understand." It doesn't work like that. They learn about life by taking markers from their parents, sample experiences they generalize into life lessons.
The little girl whose father kept the five dollars will generalize the experience to accept that it's all right to steal from someone, especially if the person doesn't know about it. A general belief that dishonesty is socially acceptable may not happen with a single incident. The child has no idea that the clerk will have to make up the money from her pay when she cashes out at the end of her shift. Nor might the child care. The kid is interested in what the parent does because the whole purpose of parenting is to teach actively and to be role models passively and the primary objective of a child is to learn about life from her parents.
For most children, their parents are their life for the first two years. How the parents act is how they come to believe that life is. At the time of life when their brains act like sponges to find examples to help them understand what life is about--their main purpose in life in their first few years--what their parents do is treated as a model for what they should do. They want to be adults, as all children do. They accept the values of their parents because they are desperate to learn what values adults have.
For various reasons, a child will sometimes understand that what a parent has done is wrong. Neglect or abuse of the child, for example, might make the child determined to be just the opposite with his own children when he grows up. However, history shows that a majority of children who were neglected or abused become parents who neglect or abuse their own kids. The acorn doesn't fall far from the oak.
Ironically, bad behaviour by a parent may be picked up more readily than good behaviour. The reason is that parents behave well and properly most of the time, whereas bad behaviour is so different from the norm and so rare that a child will pick up on it. The child, wanting to fill in the gaps in his understanding of life values he seldom has opportunities to learn, will see some action or hear some words by a parent and generalize from them. One tiny example of bad behaviour (believed to be tiny by the parent) becomes a life lesson to be utilized later by the child.
If you are the parent or grandparent of a young child, everything you do may be scrutinized by the child and generalized as an example of a life value or lesson. The admonition "do what I say not what I do" doesn't work with kids. They take their first examples more from behaviour of parents, less what the parents say.
If you are the parent or grandparent of a young child, you are a living example to that child of what life is. Lessons learned later may change that, but most times the later lessons do not stick the way role model lessons from parents stick.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to know what a child needs and at what time he or she needs it. It teaches people how to treat parenting responsibilities with a professional attitude.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Russell Baker, columnist and author (b.1925)
Some will read that quote and think it ironic. Others will think it sarcastic. Some will consider it pessimistic.
Yet what the quote missed is a child's main source for life information: parents. The quote is not wrong, just inadequate to convey the message.
While Baker had the age right ("by the age of six") he missed something extremely important, critically important about what a child learns in his first five years. In his first five years of life, a child learns what life is about.
You may think that age five or younger is too young to understand what life is about. Especially what the extremes, the best and worst of life, are about. While that is generally true, a young child gains his sense of the values that he will carry through his life from his parents. The life values of parents tend to be passed along to children, in so many varied ways that they can't be enumerated.
Let's say a young child is with her father in a store. The child doesn't pay attention to what the father buys or speaks about with the clerk. Back in the car, she overhears father saying to mother that the clerk gave him back five dollars too much and that he didn't return that money. That brief experience might leave a mark for a lifetime.
Children learn by example, as most of us know. Many parents don't know how important their role modelling is. A young child whose parents use drugs is highly likely to use drugs or alcohol when he grows up. Kids need to learn what life is about and we tend to not teach them until they are older, "old enough to understand." It doesn't work like that. They learn about life by taking markers from their parents, sample experiences they generalize into life lessons.
The little girl whose father kept the five dollars will generalize the experience to accept that it's all right to steal from someone, especially if the person doesn't know about it. A general belief that dishonesty is socially acceptable may not happen with a single incident. The child has no idea that the clerk will have to make up the money from her pay when she cashes out at the end of her shift. Nor might the child care. The kid is interested in what the parent does because the whole purpose of parenting is to teach actively and to be role models passively and the primary objective of a child is to learn about life from her parents.
For most children, their parents are their life for the first two years. How the parents act is how they come to believe that life is. At the time of life when their brains act like sponges to find examples to help them understand what life is about--their main purpose in life in their first few years--what their parents do is treated as a model for what they should do. They want to be adults, as all children do. They accept the values of their parents because they are desperate to learn what values adults have.
For various reasons, a child will sometimes understand that what a parent has done is wrong. Neglect or abuse of the child, for example, might make the child determined to be just the opposite with his own children when he grows up. However, history shows that a majority of children who were neglected or abused become parents who neglect or abuse their own kids. The acorn doesn't fall far from the oak.
Ironically, bad behaviour by a parent may be picked up more readily than good behaviour. The reason is that parents behave well and properly most of the time, whereas bad behaviour is so different from the norm and so rare that a child will pick up on it. The child, wanting to fill in the gaps in his understanding of life values he seldom has opportunities to learn, will see some action or hear some words by a parent and generalize from them. One tiny example of bad behaviour (believed to be tiny by the parent) becomes a life lesson to be utilized later by the child.
If you are the parent or grandparent of a young child, everything you do may be scrutinized by the child and generalized as an example of a life value or lesson. The admonition "do what I say not what I do" doesn't work with kids. They take their first examples more from behaviour of parents, less what the parents say.
If you are the parent or grandparent of a young child, you are a living example to that child of what life is. Lessons learned later may change that, but most times the later lessons do not stick the way role model lessons from parents stick.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to know what a child needs and at what time he or she needs it. It teaches people how to treat parenting responsibilities with a professional attitude.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Evil Consequences of the Anti-Abortion Movement
Irony? Hypocrisy? Double standard? No term fits the need to describe the situation where a person who believes in the right to life for a zygote a few days old or a fetus a few days older still is prepared to take the life of another who wants to abort it.
Most people who subscribe to the anti-abortion movement do not believe in killing the abortion doctor and cases of people of this belief killing a woman who has had an abortion are rare. But they are prepared to attach a social stigma to a woman who has had an abortion, one that would last for the lifetime of the woman and even potentially impact the lives of any children she might have in the future.
The anti-abortion or Right To Life movement bases its whole argument against abortion on the emotional issue of morality. They claim it's morally wrong to end the life of a newly conceived human. They claim it's a sin.
They have no problem eating a potato, which had more advanced life within it at the time it was wrenched from the ground than an aborted fetus. For them, killing a potato is not a moral issue, aborting a human life is. Killing one form of life, they say, is a sin, whereas killing another is quite acceptable. Perhaps because they stand to gain personally from the nutrition gained by eating the potato.
Bacteria, billions of which live within our bodies and help us hold onto the very fabric of our life and without which what we think of as life could not exist, benefit from the disposal of an aborted fetus. Starving existing bacteria and preventing the multiplication of bacterial life forms that would follow the eating of the aborted fetus are not issue for them. For anti-abortionists, that kind of killing is not on their radar. Maybe because they are the ones doing it.
For the Right To Life folks, the human form of life is far more important than any other life form. This may seen natural because the Right To Life people are humans. They have a vested interest in the survival and increase in number of their kind, as explained by evolution theory.
The problem--at its foundation--is that morality is based entirely on emotion. Though humans make claims based on morality they say came to them from God, God remains silent on the issue to everyone except the believers. Those believers, in most cases, belong to a form of religion. All religions, as a close examination of any of them readily reveals, were creations of humankind.
No evidence exists that any religion is supported by God. No evidence exists that any religion ever began with God as its foundation, despite the fact that hundreds of religions in the world today claim exactly that. In every religion, one or a very small number of people claim that God has given them direction. That claim cannot be reproduced by others not of the religion, nor has it been reproduced by other members of the same religion that made the claim.
God, they say, is for everyone. But God only speaks directly to one or a very few who claim they have a special relationship with him. The hypocrisy of that never seems to dawn on the believers.
Morality is a human creation, directly related to attempts by religions to influence the character and behaviour of their followers and others who are not of their belief set.
Morality is based on emotion. As scientist and author Carl Sagan said, "Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves." Or, in the case of religions that ask their followers to believe while providing no evidence to support their claims or making their God accessible to every believer, we allow ourselves to be fooled.
Abortion is an ethical issue, not a moral one. The difference is that ethical issues allow everyone to participate in the careful scrutiny of evidence and arguments in order to winnow out a conclusion or opinions, whereas moral issues are solved merely by having the leader or a religion make a statement and make it dogma for the followers of that religion. Believers of a religion are asked to believe the dictates of its dogma as well, its moral code.
Moralists claim that the abortion doctor and the woman who allows herself to be aborted are sinners and life-takers. They believe that because that is what they have been taught by the perpetrators of the morality plot.
The aborted life, they claim, has a right to life. What kind of life, they never allow to become an issue or to come under examination.
A woman aborts because she believes that she cannot provide the necessities of life to her future child. Those necessities do not include just food and shelter, as the anti-abortionists say they could be provided through social assistance. The anti-abortionists are prepared to increase the socio-economic class we know as poverty immensely by preventing newly conceived lives from being snuffed. Look at the people who are mired in poverty today and you will find families led by single mothers well represented.
Setting aside the issue of increasing the rate of poverty by disallowing abortions, let's look at the lives of the children who would be allowed to live if abortion were prevented. The children are at the heart of the abortion issue, though the Right to Life people never seem to want it to be discussed.
A child raised by a mother and/or father who doesn't want it. A child raised by a mother or father who has almost no information, knowledge or skills in parenting. A child raised by a parent who may well be scared to death of the child because he or she doesn't know what to do with it. A child raised by a parent whose only source of income is the welfare of the state. Usually the parent cannot provide the lessons of life the child needs because the parent has not experienced or learned them herself, or himself.
Everyone agrees that women who get pregnant when they don't want a child made a mistake. A mistake should not be multiplied into a living hell for a child who was raised by a parent who does not have the tools or the skills or the finances to provide full parenting to it. All because moralists insist that the mother must pay for her mistake. Must the child suffer for a lifetime as well?
My parents wanted me. It was what they had been taught young adults should do, get married and have children. However, my parents had no idea about parenting skills. I never played with another child until I was six years old. My parents never played with me themselves because they didn't know how. When I was around three, my father told my mother than I may be mentally deranged because I had invented a fictional character to play with. That character was a cow I kept behind the dining room door.
I lived in a rural area, a farming area where cattle were the most plentiful form of life I saw in the few times I was taken in the family car for some visit to town. I saw children the odd time, not usually. But the children I saw were playing. As I had no concept of what playing was, I could not create a fictional child friend. A fictional cow friend was the best I could do. The best I knew how to do.
I was also never read to, never included in an adult conversation, never included in a parent-child conversation because none ever happened. I was a prisoner of life. My parents loved me, I guess. But they didn't know how to show that love, so I couldn't be sure. They weren't mean to me, except when they almost starved me because they insisted upon leaving me at the kitchen table because I could not and would not eat canned corn and I chose to starve instead. I detested corn, while my father loved it, so he could not understand why his child should not be forced to eat it.
I grew up in a family where I was wanted, but my parents had no parenting skills. I can honestly say that it took me 60 years to recover from my first six years with no parenting and no contact with other children. Many unwanted children of today may not recover.
I didn't become a criminal, though my background provided me with the potential for it. I considered it as an occupation at one time, but chose against it. Not because my parents talked me out of it, because they never gave me parent-to-child advice. I chose not to be a criminal because I didn't know how and didn't have the mentor to show me. There was no right-wrong decision made, just a utilitarian one based on the cold hard facts: I had no way to learn how to be a competent criminal.
Almost every criminal behind bars today can be shown to be and have been in their formative years backward or slow in both social and emotional development, the same problems I had growing up and in my first few decades as an adult. Almost everyone who takes Prozac, other mood altering prescriptions drugs, illegal drugs or an excess of alcohol on a regular basis can be shown to have deficiencies in their social or emotional development (often both).
Somehow, I missed all that. I was lucky in that way. But I lived for most of my life in a kind of prison that someone who has not experienced it could never understand. I was not a real person. Not real enough.
That is the kind of life that anti-abortionists would create for far more people than live it today, if abortion were banned and unwanted children or children born to parents who lack parenting skills and sufficient financial means to raise them adequately were allowed to happen. They could have social or psychological problems. They could have axes to grind.
The effects on the health care and social services systems of people with social and emotional deficiencies or malformations in our communities is so staggeringly large that it may not even be possible to calculate it. The consequences of having these people in positions where they can influence political decisions such as those relating to war or capital punishment is unknowable. The imagination allows us to consider how our society has been influenced by people who grew up in families where they did not receive proper assistance with their social and emotional development. Few do that because it's uncomfortable.
Where a political decision could affect whether or not people with low levels of intelligence are born and allowed to be supported for their lifetimes by the social systems of our communities, the decision is somehow clear. Where children will be born into families that don't want them, can't support them financially, do not have the parenting skills to raise them properly and that will condemn them to a life of incompleteness and social and emotional ineptitude, the decision seems to be made harder by those whose investment in the abortion issue is purely emotional. Emotional. Let every child conceived live, no matter what the consequences.
All it takes to become a parent is the ability and circumstance to have sex with someone of the opposite gender. For those who oppose abortion, that too is sufficient background for them to raise the children that result from those few moments of hormonal excitement.
Each of us must consider the ethics of this issue. However, as someone who spent 60 years learning how to be a child, learning what an adolescent of 16 should know but having agonized with the lack of skills and knowledge for so long, the morality of bringing an unwanted child into the world is clear to me.
Now consider what I passed along to my children, and they will pass along to their own kids. Knowing nothing about what a child should learn and what a parent should do while I was raising my own kids, I will tell you and they would tell you that I failed them badly. However, that confession doesn't make them better parents. We do not even have the social structure in our society to provide them with what they need to know as parents. Why I lacked in knowledge, they will lack as parents as well.
The question surrounding abortion should not be whether or not a conceived fetus should be allowed to have life. The question should be what kind of life they would have if they were allowed to be born. Not good.
In the courts, ignorance of the law is not accepted as an excuse for violating that law. In life, ignorance of parenting skills and child development is accepted as sufficient reason to let a child be born and raised in a social and emotional prison.
The same people who cry that science must never be allowed to produce cloned babies or to use genetic manipulation to produce children of superior skills or intelligence will happily and eagerly permit young adults who are ignorant of parenting skills to raise children who may be socially and emotionally defective or underdeveloped for life.
The existence or non-existence of life is not the critical issue surrounding abortion. The most important criteria have to do with the quality of life to which unwanted children would be subjected.
That is cruelty as egregious as genocide or murder. That is inhumane treatment of our fellow humans.
From a morality standpoint, abortion--a one-time event--is the main issue. Ethically, preventing abortions of unwanted children is an issue that extends over many lifetimes and generations.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who are socially and emotionally developed as much as they are intellectually and physically developed.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Most people who subscribe to the anti-abortion movement do not believe in killing the abortion doctor and cases of people of this belief killing a woman who has had an abortion are rare. But they are prepared to attach a social stigma to a woman who has had an abortion, one that would last for the lifetime of the woman and even potentially impact the lives of any children she might have in the future.
The anti-abortion or Right To Life movement bases its whole argument against abortion on the emotional issue of morality. They claim it's morally wrong to end the life of a newly conceived human. They claim it's a sin.
They have no problem eating a potato, which had more advanced life within it at the time it was wrenched from the ground than an aborted fetus. For them, killing a potato is not a moral issue, aborting a human life is. Killing one form of life, they say, is a sin, whereas killing another is quite acceptable. Perhaps because they stand to gain personally from the nutrition gained by eating the potato.
Bacteria, billions of which live within our bodies and help us hold onto the very fabric of our life and without which what we think of as life could not exist, benefit from the disposal of an aborted fetus. Starving existing bacteria and preventing the multiplication of bacterial life forms that would follow the eating of the aborted fetus are not issue for them. For anti-abortionists, that kind of killing is not on their radar. Maybe because they are the ones doing it.
For the Right To Life folks, the human form of life is far more important than any other life form. This may seen natural because the Right To Life people are humans. They have a vested interest in the survival and increase in number of their kind, as explained by evolution theory.
The problem--at its foundation--is that morality is based entirely on emotion. Though humans make claims based on morality they say came to them from God, God remains silent on the issue to everyone except the believers. Those believers, in most cases, belong to a form of religion. All religions, as a close examination of any of them readily reveals, were creations of humankind.
No evidence exists that any religion is supported by God. No evidence exists that any religion ever began with God as its foundation, despite the fact that hundreds of religions in the world today claim exactly that. In every religion, one or a very small number of people claim that God has given them direction. That claim cannot be reproduced by others not of the religion, nor has it been reproduced by other members of the same religion that made the claim.
God, they say, is for everyone. But God only speaks directly to one or a very few who claim they have a special relationship with him. The hypocrisy of that never seems to dawn on the believers.
Morality is a human creation, directly related to attempts by religions to influence the character and behaviour of their followers and others who are not of their belief set.
Morality is based on emotion. As scientist and author Carl Sagan said, "Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves." Or, in the case of religions that ask their followers to believe while providing no evidence to support their claims or making their God accessible to every believer, we allow ourselves to be fooled.
Abortion is an ethical issue, not a moral one. The difference is that ethical issues allow everyone to participate in the careful scrutiny of evidence and arguments in order to winnow out a conclusion or opinions, whereas moral issues are solved merely by having the leader or a religion make a statement and make it dogma for the followers of that religion. Believers of a religion are asked to believe the dictates of its dogma as well, its moral code.
Moralists claim that the abortion doctor and the woman who allows herself to be aborted are sinners and life-takers. They believe that because that is what they have been taught by the perpetrators of the morality plot.
The aborted life, they claim, has a right to life. What kind of life, they never allow to become an issue or to come under examination.
A woman aborts because she believes that she cannot provide the necessities of life to her future child. Those necessities do not include just food and shelter, as the anti-abortionists say they could be provided through social assistance. The anti-abortionists are prepared to increase the socio-economic class we know as poverty immensely by preventing newly conceived lives from being snuffed. Look at the people who are mired in poverty today and you will find families led by single mothers well represented.
Setting aside the issue of increasing the rate of poverty by disallowing abortions, let's look at the lives of the children who would be allowed to live if abortion were prevented. The children are at the heart of the abortion issue, though the Right to Life people never seem to want it to be discussed.
A child raised by a mother and/or father who doesn't want it. A child raised by a mother or father who has almost no information, knowledge or skills in parenting. A child raised by a parent who may well be scared to death of the child because he or she doesn't know what to do with it. A child raised by a parent whose only source of income is the welfare of the state. Usually the parent cannot provide the lessons of life the child needs because the parent has not experienced or learned them herself, or himself.
Everyone agrees that women who get pregnant when they don't want a child made a mistake. A mistake should not be multiplied into a living hell for a child who was raised by a parent who does not have the tools or the skills or the finances to provide full parenting to it. All because moralists insist that the mother must pay for her mistake. Must the child suffer for a lifetime as well?
My parents wanted me. It was what they had been taught young adults should do, get married and have children. However, my parents had no idea about parenting skills. I never played with another child until I was six years old. My parents never played with me themselves because they didn't know how. When I was around three, my father told my mother than I may be mentally deranged because I had invented a fictional character to play with. That character was a cow I kept behind the dining room door.
I lived in a rural area, a farming area where cattle were the most plentiful form of life I saw in the few times I was taken in the family car for some visit to town. I saw children the odd time, not usually. But the children I saw were playing. As I had no concept of what playing was, I could not create a fictional child friend. A fictional cow friend was the best I could do. The best I knew how to do.
I was also never read to, never included in an adult conversation, never included in a parent-child conversation because none ever happened. I was a prisoner of life. My parents loved me, I guess. But they didn't know how to show that love, so I couldn't be sure. They weren't mean to me, except when they almost starved me because they insisted upon leaving me at the kitchen table because I could not and would not eat canned corn and I chose to starve instead. I detested corn, while my father loved it, so he could not understand why his child should not be forced to eat it.
I grew up in a family where I was wanted, but my parents had no parenting skills. I can honestly say that it took me 60 years to recover from my first six years with no parenting and no contact with other children. Many unwanted children of today may not recover.
I didn't become a criminal, though my background provided me with the potential for it. I considered it as an occupation at one time, but chose against it. Not because my parents talked me out of it, because they never gave me parent-to-child advice. I chose not to be a criminal because I didn't know how and didn't have the mentor to show me. There was no right-wrong decision made, just a utilitarian one based on the cold hard facts: I had no way to learn how to be a competent criminal.
Almost every criminal behind bars today can be shown to be and have been in their formative years backward or slow in both social and emotional development, the same problems I had growing up and in my first few decades as an adult. Almost everyone who takes Prozac, other mood altering prescriptions drugs, illegal drugs or an excess of alcohol on a regular basis can be shown to have deficiencies in their social or emotional development (often both).
Somehow, I missed all that. I was lucky in that way. But I lived for most of my life in a kind of prison that someone who has not experienced it could never understand. I was not a real person. Not real enough.
That is the kind of life that anti-abortionists would create for far more people than live it today, if abortion were banned and unwanted children or children born to parents who lack parenting skills and sufficient financial means to raise them adequately were allowed to happen. They could have social or psychological problems. They could have axes to grind.
The effects on the health care and social services systems of people with social and emotional deficiencies or malformations in our communities is so staggeringly large that it may not even be possible to calculate it. The consequences of having these people in positions where they can influence political decisions such as those relating to war or capital punishment is unknowable. The imagination allows us to consider how our society has been influenced by people who grew up in families where they did not receive proper assistance with their social and emotional development. Few do that because it's uncomfortable.
Where a political decision could affect whether or not people with low levels of intelligence are born and allowed to be supported for their lifetimes by the social systems of our communities, the decision is somehow clear. Where children will be born into families that don't want them, can't support them financially, do not have the parenting skills to raise them properly and that will condemn them to a life of incompleteness and social and emotional ineptitude, the decision seems to be made harder by those whose investment in the abortion issue is purely emotional. Emotional. Let every child conceived live, no matter what the consequences.
All it takes to become a parent is the ability and circumstance to have sex with someone of the opposite gender. For those who oppose abortion, that too is sufficient background for them to raise the children that result from those few moments of hormonal excitement.
Each of us must consider the ethics of this issue. However, as someone who spent 60 years learning how to be a child, learning what an adolescent of 16 should know but having agonized with the lack of skills and knowledge for so long, the morality of bringing an unwanted child into the world is clear to me.
Now consider what I passed along to my children, and they will pass along to their own kids. Knowing nothing about what a child should learn and what a parent should do while I was raising my own kids, I will tell you and they would tell you that I failed them badly. However, that confession doesn't make them better parents. We do not even have the social structure in our society to provide them with what they need to know as parents. Why I lacked in knowledge, they will lack as parents as well.
The question surrounding abortion should not be whether or not a conceived fetus should be allowed to have life. The question should be what kind of life they would have if they were allowed to be born. Not good.
In the courts, ignorance of the law is not accepted as an excuse for violating that law. In life, ignorance of parenting skills and child development is accepted as sufficient reason to let a child be born and raised in a social and emotional prison.
The same people who cry that science must never be allowed to produce cloned babies or to use genetic manipulation to produce children of superior skills or intelligence will happily and eagerly permit young adults who are ignorant of parenting skills to raise children who may be socially and emotionally defective or underdeveloped for life.
The existence or non-existence of life is not the critical issue surrounding abortion. The most important criteria have to do with the quality of life to which unwanted children would be subjected.
That is cruelty as egregious as genocide or murder. That is inhumane treatment of our fellow humans.
From a morality standpoint, abortion--a one-time event--is the main issue. Ethically, preventing abortions of unwanted children is an issue that extends over many lifetimes and generations.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who are socially and emotionally developed as much as they are intellectually and physically developed.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Do You Know What You Missed As A Child?
Turn the power of praise upon whatever you wish to increase. Give thanks that it is now fulfilling your ideal.
- Charles Fillmore, cofounder of Unity School of Christianity (1854-1948)
Okay, I accept that the quote sounds like it was spoken directly from a pulpit. But that was the way Fillmore spoke and wrote.
Praise is to human social interaction what fertilizer is to gardens. Most gardens will grow without using fertilizer, but they may grow stronger, healthier (free from risks of attack by competing species of plants) and more plentiful with fertilizer. So will the good effects of praise on relationships, including work relationships.
As members of a social species, we human naturally seek acceptance from our fellow humans. We want to fell that we belong. We want to feel that we are a part of something of significance. We want to feel that the part we contribute helps to make our total experience work better, both for us and for those who are part of our group.
The traditional model of relationships in a work environment was based mostly on the old master-slave model of our distant past. People work to the best of their abilities because they get paid to do so, so that model dictates. But it doesn't always work that way.
People can do barely adequate work for which they get paid a more than reasonable wage, but they can't necessarily be fired without the employer risking a wrongful dismissal legal case. A barely adequate job may not only hold a company back, it could bury the company if a significant number of employees have a similar attitude.
In the new business model that is increasing in popularity since the 1980s, an employer tries to make each employee feel that the success of the company is a direct reflection of their own person success. Even in times of poor markets, the employer strives to encourage employees by watching carefully for individual examples of good work and successful dealings with the various publics of the business so that the employees feel that they will al work their way through troubled times together.
In this business model, there are no bad employees (or there shouldn't be), only employees that need more encouragement and direction to be more successful. Every one of us has bad times in our lives and they don't correspond with the bad times at our place of work (we hope). A good employer will help a troubled employee through those bad personal times in order to get good work while on the job.
It works the same in a family. Every young child seems to bring home a steady supply of creations (usually paintings) from school or a pre-school facility. Those creations make their way onto the refrigerator or a bulletin board, so the child knows he or she is appreciated. But that only works for just so long.
A child knows if he or she has produced a piece of trash painting, even if the teacher praised it and encouraged the child to take it home (less trash to dispose of after school). If the parent gives only blanket praise, as the teacher had done, the child knows that the parent is praising him or her, only the effort that went into it. In other words, flattery, with no substance or sincerity.
A child needs to know what is good about a piece of work, not that the whole thing is "marvelous." A child needs to know that the parent understands what is in the painting, The child learns that by having the parent ask questions about it, then adding comments and constructive advice.
Just as an Olympic athlete feeds on successes along the way to the next international Olympics, a child grows in a positive way by both praise and help to improve next time. Blanket (non-specific) praise is treated by a child the way everyone should treat flattery, knowing that it's for show, but without value.
The sole objective of a child--every child--is to grow to be a competent and confident adult who can cope with downturns in life because he or she has the skills and tools to work with, yet having the ability to achieve great successes because their increasing body of skills and improved talents have produced better than ever results.
Kids know this intuitively. Parents, many of whom treat their children as if they were never children themselves, don't necessarily remember this.
The prime objective of a parent is not to provide food, shelter and video games for the child. The prime objective is to be a role model and teacher so that the child stands "on the shoulders of giants" (Isaac Newton's words) in order to reach greater heights than the parents could or have.
No child ever has the objective of being nearly as good as his or her parent. Nor should it ever be the objective or a parent that the child should only be nearly as good. Both child and parent should want the child to be better because the child could take advantage of the experience, skills and talents of the parent, then add their own to create something new and unique.
If a parent doesn't "get it," the child may not be what he or she could have been.
A person doesn't need perfect parents in order to reach self fulfillment and achieve their potential. But a child who has parents who know what they are doing in growing the child will reach greater heights sooner than the one with little help from home.
As an educator and sociologist specializing in education, I have never met a parent who didn't do and want to do their very best for their children. I also have never met a parent who claimed that they knew enough--what they needed to know and should have known--about raising children when they first became parents.
That's wrong. The discrepancy is both tragic and unnecessary. People--kids and adults--suffer because they don't know.
We have the knowledge. But it's tied up with a few educators and social science professionals who meet roadblocks everywhere they turn trying to spread the word.
Talk about it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know what kids really need instead of just the limited stuff that school curriculum provides.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Charles Fillmore, cofounder of Unity School of Christianity (1854-1948)
Okay, I accept that the quote sounds like it was spoken directly from a pulpit. But that was the way Fillmore spoke and wrote.
Praise is to human social interaction what fertilizer is to gardens. Most gardens will grow without using fertilizer, but they may grow stronger, healthier (free from risks of attack by competing species of plants) and more plentiful with fertilizer. So will the good effects of praise on relationships, including work relationships.
As members of a social species, we human naturally seek acceptance from our fellow humans. We want to fell that we belong. We want to feel that we are a part of something of significance. We want to feel that the part we contribute helps to make our total experience work better, both for us and for those who are part of our group.
The traditional model of relationships in a work environment was based mostly on the old master-slave model of our distant past. People work to the best of their abilities because they get paid to do so, so that model dictates. But it doesn't always work that way.
People can do barely adequate work for which they get paid a more than reasonable wage, but they can't necessarily be fired without the employer risking a wrongful dismissal legal case. A barely adequate job may not only hold a company back, it could bury the company if a significant number of employees have a similar attitude.
In the new business model that is increasing in popularity since the 1980s, an employer tries to make each employee feel that the success of the company is a direct reflection of their own person success. Even in times of poor markets, the employer strives to encourage employees by watching carefully for individual examples of good work and successful dealings with the various publics of the business so that the employees feel that they will al work their way through troubled times together.
In this business model, there are no bad employees (or there shouldn't be), only employees that need more encouragement and direction to be more successful. Every one of us has bad times in our lives and they don't correspond with the bad times at our place of work (we hope). A good employer will help a troubled employee through those bad personal times in order to get good work while on the job.
It works the same in a family. Every young child seems to bring home a steady supply of creations (usually paintings) from school or a pre-school facility. Those creations make their way onto the refrigerator or a bulletin board, so the child knows he or she is appreciated. But that only works for just so long.
A child knows if he or she has produced a piece of trash painting, even if the teacher praised it and encouraged the child to take it home (less trash to dispose of after school). If the parent gives only blanket praise, as the teacher had done, the child knows that the parent is praising him or her, only the effort that went into it. In other words, flattery, with no substance or sincerity.
A child needs to know what is good about a piece of work, not that the whole thing is "marvelous." A child needs to know that the parent understands what is in the painting, The child learns that by having the parent ask questions about it, then adding comments and constructive advice.
Just as an Olympic athlete feeds on successes along the way to the next international Olympics, a child grows in a positive way by both praise and help to improve next time. Blanket (non-specific) praise is treated by a child the way everyone should treat flattery, knowing that it's for show, but without value.
The sole objective of a child--every child--is to grow to be a competent and confident adult who can cope with downturns in life because he or she has the skills and tools to work with, yet having the ability to achieve great successes because their increasing body of skills and improved talents have produced better than ever results.
Kids know this intuitively. Parents, many of whom treat their children as if they were never children themselves, don't necessarily remember this.
The prime objective of a parent is not to provide food, shelter and video games for the child. The prime objective is to be a role model and teacher so that the child stands "on the shoulders of giants" (Isaac Newton's words) in order to reach greater heights than the parents could or have.
No child ever has the objective of being nearly as good as his or her parent. Nor should it ever be the objective or a parent that the child should only be nearly as good. Both child and parent should want the child to be better because the child could take advantage of the experience, skills and talents of the parent, then add their own to create something new and unique.
If a parent doesn't "get it," the child may not be what he or she could have been.
A person doesn't need perfect parents in order to reach self fulfillment and achieve their potential. But a child who has parents who know what they are doing in growing the child will reach greater heights sooner than the one with little help from home.
As an educator and sociologist specializing in education, I have never met a parent who didn't do and want to do their very best for their children. I also have never met a parent who claimed that they knew enough--what they needed to know and should have known--about raising children when they first became parents.
That's wrong. The discrepancy is both tragic and unnecessary. People--kids and adults--suffer because they don't know.
We have the knowledge. But it's tied up with a few educators and social science professionals who meet roadblocks everywhere they turn trying to spread the word.
Talk about it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know what kids really need instead of just the limited stuff that school curriculum provides.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, April 14, 2008
Abe Lincoln's Best Advice
"A child is a person who is going to carry on whatever you have started. He is going to sit where you are sitting and when you are gone, attend to those things which you think are important. You may adopt all the policies you please, but how they will be carried out depends on him. He will assume control of your cities, states and nations. He is going to move in and take over your churches, schools, universities, and corporations. Your books are going to be judged, accepted or condemned by him. The fate of humanity is in his hands. So it might be well to pay him some attention."
- Abraham Lincoln
"He is going to...attend to those things which you think are important."
What do you think is important? Did you (Do you) consciously, proactively, knowingly teach those things to your children?
Surprisingly, most people don't. Children, to a great extent in their first six years and to a slightly lesser extent during the following five years, form and reform concepts of their world frequently. Not your world, but the one they perceive with their senses and conceptualize with their minds.
Their entire existence rests within the concept they form of their world, usually based on what they observe from their parents, what they are taught by their parents and how they are treated by their parents. If their parents have extensive social skills, the kids will pick them up whether the lessons are taught formally or not. They will fare better if the parents teach pertinent social skills (such as how to make and keep friends, how to treat casual friends and classmates) rather than requiring the children to pick them up vicariously.
What children don't learn by watching is emotional skills, knowledge to advance their emotional development, especially in a small family with only one child. These kinds of skills--how to cope with life's problems and downturns--need to be taught and learned through experience and lessons from parents.
Will your child "assume control of your cities, states and nations" and "take over your churches, schools, universities, and corporations" as you move on, the way Lincoln said? Yes, but only a very few of them will. Those who receive a balanced upbringing, with equal emphasis on intellectual, physical, social and emotional development will have the ability to assume leadership roles.
Don't the smartest ones reach the top? Not usually. The people who reach the top of situations such as Lincoln described have had thorough and balanced development in the four streams listed in the previous paragraph, but they also have a great deal of drive and determination to excel. These they usually pick up from their parents, though other sources (mentors) are possible.
Most people in our various societies are drones that get by with sufficient knowledge and skills in what they need to know and do, but know little else beyond that. An architect may not be able to sort recyclables on trash pickup day. A factory worker may know how to change a flat tire, but not how to economize on fuel efficiency and eliminate as much pollution as possible from his vehicle.
We all depend on others to do for us what we can't or don't know how to do ourselves. Mostly we don't do these things because we never learned how. We weren't taught by a parent or grandparent. Most of us know very little and can do very little beyond what we do for a living and what we do as hobbies.
We can't do what we never learned how to do. Most of the fundamentals of what we can do we learned from our parents, either by watching them or by learning from lesson they taught. Or we were prompted by them or some experience we had.
As children we depend on our parents to help us form our world. If they don't help with that (and many don't do it actively and knowingly), we grow up with many misconceptions, misinformation or ignorance about many subjects we should be able to get by with.
Sadly, there are few classes where parents can learn what they need to know and do to be parents and what they need to teach their children to help them with their various kinds of development. Every parent tries to do their best, but few know what they need to know.
Maybe you could get together with some others of your neighbours and encourage your board of education or school administration to launch such a program.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents who want to know what their children need and when they need it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Abraham Lincoln
"He is going to...attend to those things which you think are important."
What do you think is important? Did you (Do you) consciously, proactively, knowingly teach those things to your children?
Surprisingly, most people don't. Children, to a great extent in their first six years and to a slightly lesser extent during the following five years, form and reform concepts of their world frequently. Not your world, but the one they perceive with their senses and conceptualize with their minds.
Their entire existence rests within the concept they form of their world, usually based on what they observe from their parents, what they are taught by their parents and how they are treated by their parents. If their parents have extensive social skills, the kids will pick them up whether the lessons are taught formally or not. They will fare better if the parents teach pertinent social skills (such as how to make and keep friends, how to treat casual friends and classmates) rather than requiring the children to pick them up vicariously.
What children don't learn by watching is emotional skills, knowledge to advance their emotional development, especially in a small family with only one child. These kinds of skills--how to cope with life's problems and downturns--need to be taught and learned through experience and lessons from parents.
Will your child "assume control of your cities, states and nations" and "take over your churches, schools, universities, and corporations" as you move on, the way Lincoln said? Yes, but only a very few of them will. Those who receive a balanced upbringing, with equal emphasis on intellectual, physical, social and emotional development will have the ability to assume leadership roles.
Don't the smartest ones reach the top? Not usually. The people who reach the top of situations such as Lincoln described have had thorough and balanced development in the four streams listed in the previous paragraph, but they also have a great deal of drive and determination to excel. These they usually pick up from their parents, though other sources (mentors) are possible.
Most people in our various societies are drones that get by with sufficient knowledge and skills in what they need to know and do, but know little else beyond that. An architect may not be able to sort recyclables on trash pickup day. A factory worker may know how to change a flat tire, but not how to economize on fuel efficiency and eliminate as much pollution as possible from his vehicle.
We all depend on others to do for us what we can't or don't know how to do ourselves. Mostly we don't do these things because we never learned how. We weren't taught by a parent or grandparent. Most of us know very little and can do very little beyond what we do for a living and what we do as hobbies.
We can't do what we never learned how to do. Most of the fundamentals of what we can do we learned from our parents, either by watching them or by learning from lesson they taught. Or we were prompted by them or some experience we had.
As children we depend on our parents to help us form our world. If they don't help with that (and many don't do it actively and knowingly), we grow up with many misconceptions, misinformation or ignorance about many subjects we should be able to get by with.
Sadly, there are few classes where parents can learn what they need to know and do to be parents and what they need to teach their children to help them with their various kinds of development. Every parent tries to do their best, but few know what they need to know.
Maybe you could get together with some others of your neighbours and encourage your board of education or school administration to launch such a program.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents who want to know what their children need and when they need it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Dead-Ends of Society Are Drowning Us
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)
"I don't vote because my one vote won't make any difference." Yet the whole process of democratic government is founded on the collection and sorting of those single votes that "don't make any difference." It's what democracy is.
"I don't contribute to cancer research because my few dollars wouldn't make a difference between solving the mystery of cancer and not finding the solution." Yet every cancer researcher depends heavily on small contributions from individuals who don't have much to give. Solutions are coming, but slower than cancer victims and their loved ones would hope.
"I don't save money in the bank (or under my matress) because I can only put away a small amount each week and that way would take forever to build up. And banks don't give you much interest anyway." Yet the same person will borrow on a 30 year mortgage to buy a house or a long term loan to buy a vehicle. Contributing, one way or another, a little bit each week.
"I don't coddle my child too much because I'm trying to make him independent, to help him learn that he will have to make his way alone in the world as an adult." Yet young children desperately need that cuddling and coddling while they learn the skills, knowledge and ways of the world that will allow them to cope with the downturns of their lives and to excel when they have the opportunities. Too many children grow up to be like trees that lack enough roots to provide the security and nutrition the part above ground needs to survive.
"I don't read magazines and books because no one can keep up with how fast new information is being revealed these days. And beside, my school days of book-learning are over." They likely didn't read a book in school either, except to fake the odd book report. With the rapid increase in knowledge, those who don't try to keep up enclose themselves in a bubble that gradually rolls them into history long before their time on earth is up. They become living anachronisms who increasingly hate the world as they age.
"I don't help those homeless people on the street because it just encourages them to not get jobs where they could afford their own homes." Yet many of those homeless people were so neglected in their childh0od development that the adults in their lives never realized that they had learning problems, coordination problems, physical weaknesses, genetic diseases that would not show up until they were adults or a learning problem similar to a runner "hitting the wall" where everthing taught beyond that point will be missed and most of what went before will be lost. On the street, as begging adults, they're just failures.
In a world of 6.5 billion people, no one person can make a huge difference. Indeed, our design as social animals demands that the only way we can be successful at building rather than destroying our culture, at improving our people rather than harming them, at creating peace rather than sinking again into war, is to work together.
Social animals can survive alone, but they can't grow, can't improve, can't do what our species has the ability to do together.
Failures in life are not those who do not try. Those who do not try are a waste of natural resources. The real failures of life are those who are picking themselves up and looking to how they can build themselves into something new. That kind of failure is temporary. The never-try variety are the dead-ends of our species.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to gather people together to eradicate those problems that the dead-ends claim can't be solved. They can if we work together and have the right tools and methods.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)
"I don't vote because my one vote won't make any difference." Yet the whole process of democratic government is founded on the collection and sorting of those single votes that "don't make any difference." It's what democracy is.
"I don't contribute to cancer research because my few dollars wouldn't make a difference between solving the mystery of cancer and not finding the solution." Yet every cancer researcher depends heavily on small contributions from individuals who don't have much to give. Solutions are coming, but slower than cancer victims and their loved ones would hope.
"I don't save money in the bank (or under my matress) because I can only put away a small amount each week and that way would take forever to build up. And banks don't give you much interest anyway." Yet the same person will borrow on a 30 year mortgage to buy a house or a long term loan to buy a vehicle. Contributing, one way or another, a little bit each week.
"I don't coddle my child too much because I'm trying to make him independent, to help him learn that he will have to make his way alone in the world as an adult." Yet young children desperately need that cuddling and coddling while they learn the skills, knowledge and ways of the world that will allow them to cope with the downturns of their lives and to excel when they have the opportunities. Too many children grow up to be like trees that lack enough roots to provide the security and nutrition the part above ground needs to survive.
"I don't read magazines and books because no one can keep up with how fast new information is being revealed these days. And beside, my school days of book-learning are over." They likely didn't read a book in school either, except to fake the odd book report. With the rapid increase in knowledge, those who don't try to keep up enclose themselves in a bubble that gradually rolls them into history long before their time on earth is up. They become living anachronisms who increasingly hate the world as they age.
"I don't help those homeless people on the street because it just encourages them to not get jobs where they could afford their own homes." Yet many of those homeless people were so neglected in their childh0od development that the adults in their lives never realized that they had learning problems, coordination problems, physical weaknesses, genetic diseases that would not show up until they were adults or a learning problem similar to a runner "hitting the wall" where everthing taught beyond that point will be missed and most of what went before will be lost. On the street, as begging adults, they're just failures.
In a world of 6.5 billion people, no one person can make a huge difference. Indeed, our design as social animals demands that the only way we can be successful at building rather than destroying our culture, at improving our people rather than harming them, at creating peace rather than sinking again into war, is to work together.
Social animals can survive alone, but they can't grow, can't improve, can't do what our species has the ability to do together.
Failures in life are not those who do not try. Those who do not try are a waste of natural resources. The real failures of life are those who are picking themselves up and looking to how they can build themselves into something new. That kind of failure is temporary. The never-try variety are the dead-ends of our species.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to gather people together to eradicate those problems that the dead-ends claim can't be solved. They can if we work together and have the right tools and methods.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Has Lawbreaking Become A Social Norm?
Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
- Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)
Most of us who are Baby Boomers or older grew up in a time when laws were to be obeyed. We knew what the laws were and it was our social (and family) responsibility to uphold them.
We didn't know much about those who freely and frequently broke laws because we didn't come in contact with them much. Recent studies in the US have shown that 90 percent of people today break laws frequently and without twinges of conscience. Most violations are minor, but they make laws in general seem like a social evil.
What changed? Why do we have so little respect for laws today compared to a couple of generations ago?
There are no simple answers to these questions, but I will try to simplify the complex answers and give you the opportunmity to think them through yourself.
Prior to the 1960s children were drilled formally and taught incidentally the range and scope of laws they were expected to obey, by parents, teachers and leaders of their respective church groups. In the interim, regular attendance at religious services dropped off dramatically, school curricula have been loaded to overflowing with "basic learning" information and skills and two parents working in most families have left little time for parental role modelling and direct teaching of the laws of their community and their nation.
As more children grew to be young adults who lacked knowledge about laws that affected them, more also became adults who were not clear about the moral obligations each person has to the social structure of their family and their community. In other words, they broke laws because they weren't certain the laws were all that important anyway or because they didn't know what the laws were.
Governments, reacting with shock to the increase in law breaking, passed more laws and bylaws. These became filled with details of specific examples of lawbreaking so that judges, magistrates and justices of the peace were left with fewer doubts as to what behaviours were illegal and what penalties should apply to each.
The plethora of laws to which each citizen must subscribe today is so complex that almost nobody knows what they all are. In their rush to create more laws and put more power into the hands of more police officers to catch more lawbreakers, the law makers neglected to provide clear and pervasive methods by which each child or adolescent would be able to learn the many laws he should abide by.
A teenager today may be able to do physics his parents don't understand, speak languages his parents have seldom heard and know a huge amount of information his parents were never exposed to, but he may not know the laws of his community and his country because most of them never made it onto the curriculum of his school.
Moreover, he may read the pages of any newspaper to find many examples of where people have broken laws. He will know many schoolmates and acquaintances in his community who break laws freely without being caught. Even television programs deal mostly with the most violent laws, seldom with those that affect most people on a daily basis.
A young person may even see a police officer speeding down a city street or highway on their way to a coffee break or to signout for their shift. He knows that the same police officer may catch and charge him the following day for speeding on the same street.
There are many laws that are never enforced by the police because they will not be supported in court or because the courts have many more important cases to attend to than minor cases that will "waste" precious time.
Like anything else in life, if we want people to obey laws, we need to teach those laws to children before they get old enough to find out that breaking them might just work. They need to be taught the gritty details about what is wrong, about the consequences that result when people break laws. They need to know the harm that lawbreaking does and that the harm is wrong.
Not teaching about drug laws because we fear that kids will find out about drugs and become addicts, for example, has no evidence to support it. Kids who know the truth about drugs before they are exposed to drugs on the street (often by the age of six years) tend to avoid the drugs.
By the same token, kids who know the details about sex and the responsibilities and consequences of pregnancies have a much lower incidence of teenage pregnancies and often do not have close relationships with members of the opposite sex until later than their more ignorant peers. Where do laws and sex come together? Ask a 16 year old father or mother who has life-altering responsibilities for a child they didn't want but will have to look after and be fully responsible for during the next 20+ years.
Making laws is one thing. Teaching them to everyone who must obey them is quite another.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make the complexities of life clear and concise.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)
Most of us who are Baby Boomers or older grew up in a time when laws were to be obeyed. We knew what the laws were and it was our social (and family) responsibility to uphold them.
We didn't know much about those who freely and frequently broke laws because we didn't come in contact with them much. Recent studies in the US have shown that 90 percent of people today break laws frequently and without twinges of conscience. Most violations are minor, but they make laws in general seem like a social evil.
What changed? Why do we have so little respect for laws today compared to a couple of generations ago?
There are no simple answers to these questions, but I will try to simplify the complex answers and give you the opportunmity to think them through yourself.
Prior to the 1960s children were drilled formally and taught incidentally the range and scope of laws they were expected to obey, by parents, teachers and leaders of their respective church groups. In the interim, regular attendance at religious services dropped off dramatically, school curricula have been loaded to overflowing with "basic learning" information and skills and two parents working in most families have left little time for parental role modelling and direct teaching of the laws of their community and their nation.
As more children grew to be young adults who lacked knowledge about laws that affected them, more also became adults who were not clear about the moral obligations each person has to the social structure of their family and their community. In other words, they broke laws because they weren't certain the laws were all that important anyway or because they didn't know what the laws were.
Governments, reacting with shock to the increase in law breaking, passed more laws and bylaws. These became filled with details of specific examples of lawbreaking so that judges, magistrates and justices of the peace were left with fewer doubts as to what behaviours were illegal and what penalties should apply to each.
The plethora of laws to which each citizen must subscribe today is so complex that almost nobody knows what they all are. In their rush to create more laws and put more power into the hands of more police officers to catch more lawbreakers, the law makers neglected to provide clear and pervasive methods by which each child or adolescent would be able to learn the many laws he should abide by.
A teenager today may be able to do physics his parents don't understand, speak languages his parents have seldom heard and know a huge amount of information his parents were never exposed to, but he may not know the laws of his community and his country because most of them never made it onto the curriculum of his school.
Moreover, he may read the pages of any newspaper to find many examples of where people have broken laws. He will know many schoolmates and acquaintances in his community who break laws freely without being caught. Even television programs deal mostly with the most violent laws, seldom with those that affect most people on a daily basis.
A young person may even see a police officer speeding down a city street or highway on their way to a coffee break or to signout for their shift. He knows that the same police officer may catch and charge him the following day for speeding on the same street.
There are many laws that are never enforced by the police because they will not be supported in court or because the courts have many more important cases to attend to than minor cases that will "waste" precious time.
Like anything else in life, if we want people to obey laws, we need to teach those laws to children before they get old enough to find out that breaking them might just work. They need to be taught the gritty details about what is wrong, about the consequences that result when people break laws. They need to know the harm that lawbreaking does and that the harm is wrong.
Not teaching about drug laws because we fear that kids will find out about drugs and become addicts, for example, has no evidence to support it. Kids who know the truth about drugs before they are exposed to drugs on the street (often by the age of six years) tend to avoid the drugs.
By the same token, kids who know the details about sex and the responsibilities and consequences of pregnancies have a much lower incidence of teenage pregnancies and often do not have close relationships with members of the opposite sex until later than their more ignorant peers. Where do laws and sex come together? Ask a 16 year old father or mother who has life-altering responsibilities for a child they didn't want but will have to look after and be fully responsible for during the next 20+ years.
Making laws is one thing. Teaching them to everyone who must obey them is quite another.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make the complexities of life clear and concise.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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