Empowerment for Children
Happy, learning children
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Empowerment for Children
In Empowerment for Teens, we saw that the way children are raised has a huge effect on their behaviour as teens and then young adults. This is found in the most basic of human instincts, the instinct of survival, one of the few a baby is born with, and is very relevant in #Empowerment for Children
To survive, a human being is programmed to do whatever it must. As a baby has little conscious thought capability at birth, everything is trial, error and instinct. Babies rely on mothers for feeding, nurturing, protection and survival. Therefore keeping mother close is a survival instinct. To do this, some babies cry, some laugh, some are cute and coy, some are funny little clowns. All are survival strategies initially; the range of survival strategies expands as the baby grows.
A toddler cry baby doesn’t get much sympathy. However, the baby can learn that a certain laugh, or a certain funny behaviour can get mother’s attention, so that becomes a strategy. This might be the start of the ‘clown’ survival strategy. Robin Williams claims this was his way of surviving school, where the bigger boys bullied him until he told jokes! Now, it is his career!
With most young animals in a nest, if there is competition for food, the bully always wins. The same with human babies – the instinct is to get in first and get the food to survive. A bigger or more boisterous baby may become a bully as a survival strategy amongst smaller siblings. A smaller one may realise that direct action against a bully would not work, but being sneaky and agile might – monkey like antics might become the survival strategy, or outright stealth, guile and theft. Just as a survival strategy.
Feeding time – who’s going to get it?
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However, we see these same strategies employed in adults! This is because these survival strategies become embedded as “sub-personalities” in the mind and psyche of the child and remain embedded as the child grows up. At one time they were all relevant as survival strategies; now, as adults many are redundant, but they remain.
Can we be sure of that? Are sub-personalities real?
Think of a young mother in an ordinary day and how many sub-personalities she operates with, just to make it through the day, from leaving bed in the morning, to bedtime at night.
Waking, she becomes a mother first, looking after the immediate needs of her children, feeding, clothing and getting them ready for school. Then she becomes a taxi-driver to deliver them to school. Then it’s onto the freeway in the car to drive to work, she’s a racing driver. At work she becomes a dutiful employee, slightly subservient to her supervisor, but definitely superior to that jerk from the mail sorting room who tried to hit on her last week! Hmmph! Then she suddenly becomes mother again at lunch time with a call from the school that one of the children has fallen and scraped a knee, but it’s OK, the school nurse has bandaged it and it will be fine. A text message from her husband, saying he’s thinking about her and how wonderful it was to cuddle up naked under the sheets last night. She started reading the messages as a loving wife, but by the end of it, a nymph had emerged. She looks up from the message and sees the other office workers looking at her and she becomes a blushing teenager! Back to work and she becomes the dutiful employee again. Time to go home and she enters rush hour traffic and she becomes the road rage Mama for half an hour. Home at last, she becomes mother again. Husband arrives home and she becomes wife for a moment as he kisses her, and then mother again as she prepares dinner and scolds the children for the noise they are making. After dinner she becomes a school teacher while helping with homework. Bedtime for the kids, she becomes a wife again and sits quietly with husband discussing the day. Bedtime for her, she showers and slips into bed and the text message nymph of earlier in the day appears and for the next hour, she is none of the previous sub-personalities from throughout the day!
Herman’s Head Sub-Personalities
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Whew! All those different sub-personalities and all appropriate at different times of the day, with different people, and different situations. Definitely not appropriate to mix them up and when that does happen, disaster is not far away!
How are sub-personalities relevant to empowerment for children?
The baby we first looked at is developing sub-personalities as it grows older, in order to survive. The empowered child, the well balanced and happy child will confidently move between sub-personalities almost unconsciously, provided we create and foster a supportive environment around them, making it safe for them to grow, explore and experience the world.
How do we make empowerment for children possible?
As parents, it is our responsibility to create the most supportive environment for our children to grow up in. The best way to do that is for us to be fully empowered personally first – being the best parents and teachers we can be, for them to model as they grow. Empowerment for Children comes after their parents learn empowerment for women and empowerment for men!
Children do not do as they are taught. Children do as they are shown by example and that is why they model older children, rather than anonymous characters from text books! As parents, we need to demonstrate what we want children to learn, and provide the environment where this learning is possible!
Enlightened educationalists will tell us that children learn best in a happy environment where they can experience what they are learning about. Experiential learning has become a buzz word but really, children have been doing it for thousands of generations, learning through their childhood games. We need to ensure those childhood games are possible, safe and that we can participate in them to the extent we need to, so that we can give guidance as and when the children need it.
Learning by playing
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The best way for empowerment for children to be experienced is by parents reading to children. If you have ever seen the rapt look on a child’s face as they explore a picture book with Mummy or Daddy, and the innocent questions that come from it, you will understand. As the child grows, reading more mature story books opens the child’s mind to the wider world. I remember my Dad reading “Treasure Island” to me, and another of our favourites, “Two years on Bardunyah Station”, an Australian outback cattle station where everything was larger than life. Stories such as these allowed us to create magical images of what lay beyond and enthused us with the desire to get out and explore the world, to discover our own Treasure Islands and feel the vastness of the wide outdoors. We were fortunate that we had empowered parents who understood this.
Reading to your child is empowering for them
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When the children do get outdoors, be there with them! Children’s school sports days are a great place for them to show off to Mum and Dad, if they are sporting by nature. Music recitals or dance classes are other great ways to participate in your children’s activities if they have come to love the arts. Whether or not they are the best doesn’t matter, as long as you demonstrate your involvement, and show encouragement for their efforts!
School sports day
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Is it OK for a child to fail?
Empowerment for Children can only happen when the child learns to fall over and stand up to try again! So many are nursed through childhood that when they reach teens and Mum and Dad can’t keep an eye on them every waking moment, that the first obstacle they come across flummoxes them! They need to learn from setbacks; learn to power on despite them and because of them, learning from the mistakes and picking up the lessons! Only in this way do they become ‘battle hardened’ for the sometimes hostile environments they will face as teens and young adults.
Ooops! Here comes a lesson!
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However, of critical importance is where Mummy and Daddy are when they fall, and how THEY react to their child’s failures! Empowerment for children happens when they learn from parents that it’s not the failure that matters, it’s getting the lesson and starting over that is important! If parents are critical of poor school results, poor sporting results or music recitals, then the child learns that it’s a hard world and their parents are just another part of it. If instead Parents are there to encourage and teach success habits, they learn that mistakes and failings are only stepping stones to success! They learn what we demonstrate!
This is important in another way too, because as parents we fail sometimes too, and our children know it! They recognise in us the mistakes we make, and if we judge them harshly for their mistakes, that is what they have learned to do with us. They become the most critical and unforgiving teenagers unless they learn the truth about mistakes – they are just part of the lifelong education system we are all enrolled in!
If you feel this post has contributed to empowerment for children, please share and reblog amongst your friends and associates. So many parents are crying out for empowerment for children, but don’t realise that it is within reach. Your sharing may change the life of another – everyone deserves personal empowerment and this could be the day you make a difference!
Til next time, fair winds and full sails,
Ray Jamieson
Please also refer to my other posts on Empowerment:
Empowerment through Emotional Intelligence
What would an empowered man do?
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