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/

How We Learn To Love An Unhealthy Lifestyle

As I write this I am experiencing a high level of anxiety brought about by stress from many different sources over a period of several weeks, my present purpose being to convey not my feelings but the effects that stress over a long period of time has on my thinking and decision making. The effects of stress on one person can affect another person similarly, if not identically, thus my experience can be a learning situation for you.

I have experienced depression and its effects in the past, though that was cleared entirely by my taking vitamin D supplements to compensate for the lack of sufficient direct sunlight on my skin to allow my body to create vitamin D on its own. The effects of depression bear striking similarities to the effects of stress/anxiety over a long period of time.

With depression I found that triggers would set off a bout of anger for a period of several minutes (up to an hour), then the emotional energy would dissipate and turn into what most of us would call depression. With stress, the anger comes to stay, varying in degree enough that it could often be called intolerance of the behaviour of others, inability to understand the life situations of others (lack of empathy) or a strong desire to get away from the company of specific people, rather than it being labelled easily as anxiety.

My present anxiety caused by long term stress has not resulted in any thoughts of suicide, which depression has done in the past. While I seek relief from the effects of my anxiety, I do not want to resort to easy solutions such as medication, addictive behaviour or the ultimate easy way out, suicide.

Why should you care? One or more people you know (perhaps many) may exhibit the some similar behaviours as I do right now, for the same causes. You may know nothing about the causes of the people you know or my own because we don't talk about them. We only talk about the effects, the bad behaviour, sometimes our own but usually of others who we think act weird or permanently irritable.

Stress has caused me to lose sleep--a considerable amount over a period of weeks--and this could easily compromise my immune system as well as causing me to exhibit symptoms of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation alone could cause irritability, inability to get along with others and a short fuse on the temper. Coupled with long term anxiety it could result in amplified instances of anger, intolerance, not paying attention to the needs of loved ones, not taking proper care of loved ones due to an egocentric attitude, even a desire to generate conditions which could destroy a close relationship just to have something "happen" to give a person the feeling that he or she is in control of something.

Stress can cause loss of sleep, but the sleep loss effects add to the effects of long term anxiety, rather than simply overlapping them. One doubles up with the other, so to speak.

Now we have causes which could result in such well known behaviours as road rage, office rage, marital arguments, marital incompatibility (real or imagined), disconnects in relationships with a person's own children, lack of interest in sex (at least of the softer, gentler, more loving kind), erectile dysfunction, inability to cope with other personal problems, even turning to addictive behaviours or substances for some form of relief.

Enter drugs, prescribed and otherwise. Prozac is the most prescribed drug in North America. Legal and illegal sales of Viagra and Cialis flourish. As many as 25 percent of people in many communities may have used marijuana or one of its derivatives in the past year.

The rates of divorce in most countries of the West hover around or above 50 percent. Examples of physical and emotional abuse surface frequently. Police must deal with family problems on about one-quarter of their calls in many communities. I don't have statistics to show what effect martial problems could have on other socially unacceptable behaviours, such as fights in bars or even theft from employers.

Where do people who suffer from these problems turn to find socially acceptable help to solve their problems? A family doctor will likely prescribe drugs, which solve nothing, merely cover up symptoms. Some--the lucky ones--get referred to counsellors who specialize in helping people who suffer from anxiety symptoms caused by high stress. Unfortunately, that part of the health care community is so fixed on a steady source of income that treatment may not be the best because it's in the financial best interests of the practitioner to have the professional help last as long as possible.

The whole ethic of teaching children about what they must do to "succeed" in the working world prepares them to face and accept stress and long term anxiety, though not how to cope with them.

We teach kids to not just enter the rat race, but to believe that this is the way life is and should be, and that they should learn to "enjoy it" by making as much money as possible and finding as many "interesting" ways of spending it as they can.

This article cannot present instant cures for complex problems. It can only point to the way that those with a concern for solving those problems should turn.

Treat broken adults one by one and we continue with our present kinds of problems. Teach children how to cope with the lives they will live in the future, as adults, and we change the path of the future for our descendants.

Change is possible if we know what we want to achieve and where to begin that change process.
Teach the children.

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 can cope with their lives as adults better than today's adults can.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

How To Avoid Marriage Failure

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce.Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person.But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and zen master, author of Being Peace

Note that the monk stresses that blaming does no good at all. Neither does it help to adopt blame for something ourselves. Blaming is not a winning strategy in relationships.

At the time of breakup of a marriage, seldom does it happen that one of the couple admits to having done wrong. When it happens, the one who admits having done wrong usually has some excuse that is valid to him or her, usually that the other has abandoned him or her physically or emotionally and he or she committed some unacceptable behaviour out of need. In a majority of cases, each blames the other for something.

In some cases, the couple chooses the middle path, counselling. Someone with a certificate in something--usually marriage counselling--interrogates each individual of the couple to find what behaviours could be changed in order to reduce the stress or improve the interaction between them. That's "using reason and argument." Sometimes it works, but the success rate is not high.

Thich says that "if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well." In other words, if we know how to take care of each other, our relationship will grow.

Very nice. Glib. The divorce rates in industrial countries (above fifty percent in almost every case) gives evidence that we don't know how to take care of each other. Without that key element, knowing how to take care of each other, we have little hope of forming a long term successful relationship. Where do we learn this skill, this knowledge?

To be fair, some do learn on the job. They muddle through the rough patches to form something wonderful, as if they knew what to do in the first place. Few do.

In no society I know are the guides for forming and cementing successful relationships taught to everyone. Ideally they should be taught to children, as young as possible. Preferably at the sandbox age. That's the age when many people learn the value of friendships, at least of having allies as opposed to enemies.

Not long after the sandbox age kids form friendships if they can, temporary alliances if they can't make friends. The temporary allies are still called friends. The friends that are really allies are more like buddies that share similar interests, even if those interests include protecting themselves from a mutual enemy or bully.

What's the difference between allies/buddies and real friends? It's the same difference as between those who form successful marriage relationships and those whose marriages break down when the two people "grow apart." It's a question of who is more important.

That's not the Who is the head of the household? question, but Who is more important to each member of the couple? If each member believes himself or herself more important, that his or her own best interests must be maintained as higher priority than the other, the two are buddies, allies. It's effectively a business relationship marriage. Businesses fail.

When both individuals believe that the best interests of the other are more important than their own, the marriage will likely succeed. The friendship will last.

"What happens to you affects me, so it's in my best interests to see that you have a happy, successful and fulfilling life." Don't blame the lettuce. Learn how to grow it so that it becomes more valuable.

The lettuce will appreciate it and reward you greatly. In human terms, that reward continues throughout the lifetime.

When you are the more important person in a relationship, more important to yourself, then your relationship is like a business association. Buddies. Allies that help each other, but always have their own bests interests at heart.

That's a pretty simple lesson to teach to children. Very hard to teach to adults. Most kids don't receive that as a consciously and proactively taught lesson.

Unless they have been taught that lesson, most kids will grow up believing that their own best interests are what they should keep in mind most of the time. That's what nature teaches them. Marriages where one or both parties believe that will eventually fail. Worse, one or both parents will be blamed by the kids and they will grow to do the same in their own marriages.

Stop the endless cycle. Teach the children.

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 can handle successful relationships as adults. The world doesn't need more buddy marriages.
Learn more at http://billallin.com