I visited my local supermarket last week
and was touched by an incident involving a toddler.
The child was in a pushchair screaming. Her
father and grandmother were accompanying her. As she continuing the cry the
grandmother and father made soothing comments to little effect. Eventually came
the silver bullet.
‘Listen honey, Daddy’s going to get you a
treat’ says Grandma.
Then after a few seconds wait: ‘Here you
are, look: a muffin!’ she exclaims.
And the child is instantly sated, content
that soon she’ll be enjoyed that sweet sugar rush.
The grandmother and father of this child
may be telling each other that they've ‘kept their child happy’. Perhaps, in
fact, they’ve simply been enabling her deepening sugar addiction.
Another approach could have been to pick up
the child from her pushchair. Perhaps the real issue was that the child was
suffering from a sense of isolation, a need for physical and emotional
connection, not the need for a muffin.
Judith Liedloff’s brilliant ‘The Continuum Concept’ shook my views on many aspects of child rearing that we consider
normal in the West. In this book, Liedloff describes the parenting practice of
the Yequana tribe in Ecuador.
She emphases the fact that young children
are in continual contact with a caregiver, how they are carried everywhere, how
they are made central to the activities of the caregiver, but, crucially, not made the
centre of attention.
She describes how the infants and children
rarely cry. She couldn’t recall a single serious argument between children in
the three years (on and off) she spent with the tribe. In essence, she describes children
who grow up feeling connected, who have their needs met on demand; who grow up seemingly
devoid of neuroticism.
In the West, we isolate our children in
cots, in pushchairs and when they cry out in despair of the deprivation, we often
simply ignore their cries or we attempt to sedate them sugar or other
distractions.
My own response as a child to these standard
deprivations (as well as significant birth trauma) was not to develop a sugar habit, but to shutdown. I didn’t cry. I
became a ‘good baby’. Later I developed other addictions to cover my pain. It has
taken many years of reliving this early pain to ‘thaw out’, through Primal
Therapy and other modalities, to heal the wounds driving my addictions.
Having re-lived this pain and become more present to my own feelings, I hope that, if
I ever were to have children, I would be more in tune with their needs. Of course, they
would be the judges of that.
Most people fortunately will never have to
re-live the pain of their early loss of connection. They will find ways to
manage their neuroses and carry on. They will never ‘go there’ and who can
blame them. But, if they become parents, they will surely, subconsciously visit
that pain on their own offspring and so the cycle continues.
