Parenting From Depth, Part II: Children Should be Seen and...

 

Early in our Imago Parenting Course--Connected Parents, Thriving Kids--we give a quick survey of how parenting styles have changed over the years. For hundreds of years,
parenting was parent-centered, authoritarian, "because I said so", "children are to be seen and not heard." You really have to shake your head on how this approach dominated for thousands of years. Why didn't we as a species see the terrible limits of this approach sooner? Well, that will be a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that parent-centered parenting did a lot of damage on this planet, some mild and some on the level of holocaust--children treated as slaves, property, brutalized and even killed because "father knew best"in some way. Finally, after the World War II, there was a gradual shift towards child-centered, permissive parenting. "Cchildren are to be seen and not heard" gave way to, "Children are to be seen, heard and given whatever will support their 'self-esteem'". Being a baby-boomer, my experience is that I and my cohort grew up with a sometimes confusing blend of authoritarianism and permissiveness. I think this conflation of the two styles dissipated gradually over the balance of the 20th century and into the 21st.
In the last few years, a lot of parents and professionals in the field of child development have arrived at the conclusion that child-centered parenting has frequently gone too far, indulging children, allowing their scheduled activities to run the life of the household and generally being unwilling or unable to leverage a "positive no" that actually can give children a clear boundary and nurture in them a greater sense of responsibility, a sense that there are other people in the world besides themselves and a mature person makes room for those others. Now what we see, and what we in the Imago community are working towards, is parent-child centered parenting; parenting that emphasizes the relationship between the two, that sees both as catalysts for each other's growth and enrichment. Toward that end, children are to be seen, heard, felt and responded to in ways that are appropriate to the need and the developmental moment, but not over-indulged. As our workbook states: "I am in healthy connection with my child when I'm emotionally available to learn what he/she needs from a parent who is willing to take charge." One obvious example: Conscious parents know that four year olds need about a dozen hours of sleep and are best served by a bedtime around 7 in the evening, not nine, ten or eleven. They also know that it's a good idea to make sure kids burn off a lot of energy about three hours before that bedtime so that they are ready for the quiet enjoyments of bath and reading and gentle play.
My own mnemonic device for this parent-child centered approach is the Italian word cara,which means dear. I set it up this way:
C=Consistenly (consistency across situations, not constancy which is impossible)
A=Attuned, (meaning emotionally available to "get" our children's reality)
R=Responsive, (in a timely manner to the present and long-term needs)
A=Appropriate (to the developmental moment the child is experiencing)

So, being a C.A.R.A. parent means we would respond to a crying infant by picking it up, comforting it and attuning to learn what it need: Just the comfort? A diaper change? A warmer/cooler/quieter/more-or-less stimulating environment? Food? Etc. We would understand that an infant can't meet its own needs and certainly cannot regulate its own emotions. She needs us to do that for her just as she needs us to walk for her because she can't walk and speak for her because she can't yet speak and make decisions because the left side of her brain where decisions largelyt get made is, for all intents and purposes, not at all functional. But an appropriate response to a crying teenager might look very different. It might mean that we would mirror his feelings: "Oh, I can see that you are really hurting over this." Or, "You seem really angry about this. Is that what you're feeling?" It might mean we offer hugs. It might mean we let him know we're available if he wants to talk, but empower him to work it through on his own if that's his choice. Your get the picture. The bottom line is to be Consistently Attuned, Responsive and Appropriate...which includes our own needs, thus the parent-child relationship. Sometimes, especially with smaller children, it IS appropriate to drop what we're doing and come to their aid. But as a child matures, we have more choices about our proximity to her and her issues. It's important for kids to gradually get through living examples that their parents are "others" and have needs themselves and those needs will sometimes preclude an immediate response to their own. For an infant, the experience of an unmet need can be catastrophic. For a four year-old, far less so. For a fourteen year-old, still less--IF the parent has been consistent over the years in balancing (based on the child's developmental stage) the child's needs with their own. Children ARE to be seen, heard, felt, "gotten" and responded to with appropriate loving behavior; but parents are people, too, and also need to be seen, heard, felt and "gotten"...mostly by their life partners and other adults but, over time, by their children, too. When kids get that their parents are separate people, they grow up to be much more responsible contributors to culture. So there is no danger of children becoming narcissistic if they are truly seen, heard and gotten by parents who intuit or have learned through study what is appropriate at a given moment.
In my book, Real Fatherhood, there are a number of examples of good moments...and bad ones that I tried to correct as quickly as possible. Our Imago Faculty has called such errors, "beautiful mistakes" to remind us all that none of us can be perfect. In one such situation, my son was eight years old. I had been giving him an allowance of $2.00 a week, for which he did certain chores. He got very money focused because there were things he wanted. Suddenly I realized that it was a significant error to pay him to do things. After all, he and I were a family (I was a single dad at the time). We were a team. To pay him changed his status. He became an employee. Kids are not our employees. They are family members and what was appropriate for Ben was to bear his weight as a family member.
Obviously, there were chores he could not do, given his developmental moment. But he could help prepare meals, do dishes, wash the car and do yard work with me. So I self-corrected by telling him that I would no longer pay him for specific chores. He would still get his $2.00 a week so he could learn to manage money--which was the real and right purpose of an allowance. His initial reaction was to pitch a fit. "How will I make more money?" he cried at me. I held steady and let him know that he really couldn't right now. Eventually he'd be old enough so he could perhaps do things for neighbors or have a paper route. I let him cry it out. He was mad at me and he had cause. I was correcting a decision that was less than attuned to the situation at the time. He had a right to his frustration and tears. But the whole thing was over in about a half-hour. That was one of the best half-hours I ever invested in his character...and mine. Parent-child relationship!
C2012 Bob Kamm

What We Need to Feel Loved

 

In my last post, I made a correlation between what we know we need as children to feel seen, to feel felt, to feel gotten. The general answer is consistent emotional availability and timely, appropriate responsiveness from our caregivers. By appropriate, I mean a response that addresses our needs within the context of our developmental moment. In infancy, we need holding and rocking much more than we do at age four. Timeliness is critical because as babies, we don't have the capacity for patience. We cannot rationalize (the left hemisphere being largely as yet undeveloped) why it is taking Mommy so long to feed us or pick us up or warm us. For the total package of what we need, I tend to prefer the term "emotional resonance" and include all of the above in it.
We can build on this theme and go further to say that as infants in particular, we have a powerful need to be held, touched and physically cared for. We also have a powerful need to gaze into the eyes of caregivers who are gazing back at us with love. Further, we have a built in need for play, which will include touch and a variety of pleasantly stimulating facial expressions and vocalizations. Speaking of vocalizations, it is probably an infant can read its parents vocal tones with some degree of nuance. He has no words or ideas for anger, fear, sadness or happiness but the odds are, he can feel the difference and loud voices expressing a disturbed state are received as a kind of "disturbance in the force" to borrow an apt term from one of our modern myths, Star Wars. All of these kinds of interactions will tend to stimulate our brains toward optimal development on all fronts.
So doesn't it make sense that a fulfilling adult relationship would have among its core components the same experiences, recalibrated to our adult developmental moment? Sex is an adult need, but it is not the only or even our most important physical need. We also need to be held and touched in non-sexual ways that let us know we are deeply cared for and connected to our partner. We need to gaze into a face that gazes back at us lovingly. When we consider this, it underscores that even a facial expression can be violent, even though no violent action is taken. Our lover looking "daggers" at us can be deeply wounding. Or, more mundanely, their just screwing up their face, rolling their eyes or smirking in disapproval of something we think, feel, say or do. A blank stare when we need a feeling response can do violence. The utter absence of gaze due to depression can do violence. Loud voices with angry edge in them no doubt do violence to our hearts, not just our ears, whereas loud voices expressing joy do the opposite. The failure to provide a caress or hug when one is especially needed is a kind of violence, just as too much caressing and hugging can do similar damage. We also need our partners to be playful in innocent ways that are silly, fun and stimulating without teasing or sarcasm, both of which can be deeply hurtful. The absence of playfulness is a kind of quiet violence upon the spirit. So let's hear a round of applauds for grownups who can still make faces at each other and cavort to their favorite music!
It is important for us to feel and think into these ideas. If we weren't all carrying around a lot of childhood injuries, our partner's disapproval or emotional absence would not carry as much charge. But the truth is, we all do carry those some of those injuries. When Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt exhort us to rid our relationships of all negativity, we have to broaden and deepen our understanding of negativity to include how we touch, when we touch, how we look or don't look at each other and when we look or don't look, also how much we play with each other and the quality of that play. These are essential to feeling loved. Now that is the nutshell of this post. If you want some of the science, read on.
There is a growing mountain of evidence that our adult ways of being in relationships, especially love relationships, are, to a highly significant degree, elaborations of templates laid down in our brains in the womb, at birth and in the first three years of life outside the womb. The challenge for all of us in the rearing and healing arts is that there is no explicit memory of the events that were so powerful in shaping personalities--the laying down of critical setpoints for feeling /not feeling and reacting/not reacting. Douglas Watt, neuroscientist at the Neuropsychology Department, Quincy Medical Center in Quincy, Massachusetts, has called these early years before the left hippocampus begins to record explicit sequential memories (the who, what, where, when, why and how data), "unrememberable and unforgettable". They are unrememberable because of the immaturity of the left hippocampus and temporal lobe which will ultimately collaborate in recording explicit memories. They are unforgettable because they are deeply imprinted in the developmental systems as they exist at any given moment. The memories are in neurons and synapses, in brain structures, in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and, most likely, the very cells throughout our being. These memories carry enormous energy, in spite of our lack of access to them through conventional remembering using words or idea and data points. They are the early music of our lives--primal sonatas from which symphonies will later be constructed.
As infants, our brains become wired by our interactions with our caregivers and other individuals. Sue Gerhardt, in her wonderful book, Why Love Matters, does an exquisite job of detailing this, synthesizing the work of many others. She shows us how critical the quality of facial interaction is between caregivers and infant in arms, as well as the frequency and quality of being held and physically cared for, being cooed and spoken to and the speed, consistency and appropriateness of caregiver responses in satisfying a baby's needs and returning him to a state of calm and joyfulness. She writes, "...the kind of brain that each baby develops comes out of his or her particular experiences with people. It is very 'experience dependent'..."One of the most dramatic examples of this has emerged from studies of Romanian orphans. Those left in cribs and beds with practically no human interaction basically have no developed Orbital Frontal Cortex--a critical part of the brain in social relationships. What more horrifyingly eloquent testimony could we need to make the point?
Dr. Allan Schore of UCLA, tells us that the single most important stimulus to the development of an emotionally intelligent brain is the quality of facial expressions the baby experiences coming from his caregivers. Human babies are wired to read these expressions in detail for their global meanings as well as their subtle and specific nuances. When they are deprived of that interaction, or when that interaction is often scary, they develop problematic attachment and anxiety. I'm not sure it is necessary to single out caregiver facial expressions from the array of critical interactive elements, but Schore's point is important.
To put it succinctly, the quality of caregiver interactions set up a lifetime's worth of wiring in our brains before most of us can remember a single event.
This may make the possibility of transformation toward a greater wholeness in adulthood seem like a distant grail. But fortunately, we have also seen that through the slow, steady application of processes like Dialogue that bring calmness and welcome grieving, transformation can indeed happen. Pain can eventually be released even from those early imprints, albeit as physical sensations--pain in the muscles and viscera, pain that should properly be called "the pain with no name" because it does not conform to our usual vocabulary for feeling, other than to use wordslike hurt. terror and helplessness. This pain is real. I have felt it myself...and while going down into it is certainly no picnic, it can be profoundly resolving. This is generally only likely to happen after we have dealt with those issues of explicit memory first, progressing gradually backward and downward from the prefrontal cortex into the limbic system and even into the brainstem where our earliest experiences have left their marks in total body processes.
As the science advances and we are called to broaden our understanding of what emotional resonance looks like, we are also called to open to the irrefutable reality of those early hurts that, like silent children hiding in the dark corner of a classroom wait to step forward and be fully known. It is hard to imagine how a therapy will be considered valid in the not too distant future without credibly addressing these original deficits in a way that can be scientifically validated.

C2011 Bob Kamm

Parenting from Depth, Part I

 

Part of Love Over 60 is recognizing that you've raised children and you might know something about it. I was recently asked to do a piece for a small online magazine on the topic, The Troy Estefan Magazine. Should be out in the next 30 days. Here it is...and more will follow:
A lot of parents, especially new parents, would like a nice, tidy “how to” guide to get them through some of the more difficult challenges with kids. Being a parent and grandparent, I am sympathetic to this yearning, especially in light of how we all seem to be moving more at speed than at depth in our culture. But let me tell you why hunting for the best guide to parenting is not such a good idea. Parenting is a personal, creative undertaking every single day. It requires that we achieve and sustain emotional openness and attunement to our children. It requires that we be fully present. It requires we take control of the speed in our lives and wrestle it down so we can have more depth because the best parenting springs from depth, not speed.

What do I mean by speed and depth? By speed I mean the rate at which our attention shifts plus the amount of information we absorb in a given amount of time. The current popular commercial showing people in a state of information overload is satire, but not that far off. When we’re processing so many attention shifts and so much information uptake, facilitated by smart phones, laptops, tablets and desk tops, our energy gets into a kind of obsessive agitated wave-length—imagine a jagged, compressed stock chart. By depth I mean the experience of being in the moment, being patient with, curious about and attuned to your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual state and those of others, in this case, your children—imagine a nice gentle wave with the highs and lows within reasonable proximity to each other. By depth I mean connection to your deepest humanity.

To get to depth, we have to regularly have the discipline to shut down the technology for periods of time. We have to consciously control the technology and not be controlled by it. I have a client who was attending his daughter’s softball games but texting and handling email on his phone rather than watching her. After a heart to heart in a leadership retreat with me, he stopped doing that. Do you think his daughter didn’t notice? She certainly did, because he was fully present to her performance now and their after-game discussions were lively and full of specific observations and appreciations. He was tuned in to her.

While all humans come into the world with the same brain in terms of structure, each child is unique. Your child is your child, not your neighbor’s, not your parents’ and not Dr. Phil’s or Dr. Laura’s. This child is living with you with your strengths and weaknesses, living in your home with your furniture, your tastes, your daily habits, living in your village, town or city, with your ethnic or racial background, at your particular moment in your life journey, your heritage, your parents, grandparents and ancestral endowments and wounds.

Great parenting doesn’t happen from consulting an app on your phone or how a “how to” book when our baby is crying. It happens when we turn all of our gifts of attunement to our child’s world. How? By regularly learning to take a couple of deep breaths, check in with what feelings are going on inside us—confusion, fear, anger, sadness, determination, etc—and then making a conscious decision to put those to the side and pay one hundred percent attention to our child with an open heart and mind. We feel our child’s needs…which we are wired by nature to be able to do, after all!

In our best moments, we humans are brilliant feelers. Our feelings are informed by thought and our thoughts informed by feeling. So when I say “feel” I’m talking about functioning on the highest level, not being awash in emotion. If you allow yourself to really attune to and intuit your child’s needs, there is no stopping how great your parenting experience will be. Parenting is not an intellectual exercise. It demands you be engaged with your full personhood.

When my son, Ben, was a toddler, I heard a lot about how and when to toilet train him. Nobody had to tell me toilet training was important. I was the guy changing his diapers every day and I also was the guy who could feel that helping him learn to poop on the potty without in any way being shamed was the number one imperative. So what did we do? We left the door to the bathroom open when we peed and pooped. How basic is that? We let him see what we were doing, knowing full well that kids want to do what they see their parents do. We got him a little potty and put it next to the commode. One day, right at age two, he went in, sat down and pooped. We didn’t coach him to it. We didn’t really train him at all. We never decided there was a certain age by which he would have to do this. We also didn’t egg him on with exhortations like, “C’mon and give mommy and daddy a pretty present!” By keeping the bathroom door open, we kept the classroom open. He learned through observation and imitation. Of course, we took note of his accomplishment and congratulated him, but we didn’t throw a party or write his congressman. It was a good thing he’d done. It wasn’t a great thing. Over-reacting to what pleases and displeases us just raises a kid who will do the same. Isn’t that common sense?

Some parents have major anxiety over when and how to explain “the birds and the bees” to a kid. Again, if you relax into it and attune, you come to the conclusion that it’s a good idea for a little kid to see his mom and dad naked in a natural way on a regular basis. No, I’m not going to suggest you let him see you having sex. That’s ridiculous. A small child can’t understand it and would likely be frightened by it. We should always observe reasonable boundaries. Sex is between two grownups. End of discussion. So, no demonstration and no Power Point presentation. But if you’re comfortable with your bodies and comfortable with your child’s, then at some point it’s natural enough to say, “You came from Mommy’s body. You were a seed in there that Daddy helped plant by putting his penis inside Mommy. And then you grew until one day, it was just time for you to come out, you were getting so big!” There are picture books for little kids to facilitate this stuff. (Where Did I Come From by Mayle and Sanders is one example). Save your anxiety for something else. Little kids are not sexual. They’re just curious. That curiosity should be met with information expressed in a way that they can understand at their given stage of development. Being clear about what makes sense at a given age is the essence of attunement and you get there by slowing down, by controlling the pace of your life, by living at depth. And, sure, it is helpful to learn about the four major stages of development kids go through (Your Child’s Growing Mind by Healy as one suggestion). Information is always good if you fold it into your capacity for tuning in.

Another area a lot of parents seem to be confused about is when to nudge a mature child from the nest. Actually, an attuned parent is doing this from very early in the child’s life by simply encouraging her to do the things she is quite capable of doing at any given moment. When a three year-old is actively exploring the world, we take her to places that are safe to explore. We let her go a certain distance from us, maintain a line of sight. Most little kids come running back to share things with us. They want to show and tell us about their adventures. Humans are story telling creatures. It’s what we do. It’s how our brains are wired. We have memory, language, emotion and ideas. We weave them together into a life story. Allowing our children to have age-appropriate adventures without overly controlling them or giving them too much freedom is critical to their developing their sense of competency in the world and their identity.

When my son, Ben, was about three and a-half, we were spending a lot of time on some of the rustic beaches in our area of California. We explored sand dunes and tide pools and learned all about the plants and critters that lived there. One evening, we came upon a fresh water pool of water at the base of a sand dune no more than a hundred feet from the ocean. There were pollywogs in it. I was quite surprised to find pollywogs so close to the ocean. I told Ben these were very special pollywogs, very brave and probably the children of frogs who could sail the seas. He was quite taken with the idea. He picked up a stick and sort of herded the little black creatures around in the pool. I just let him do that for quite a while. Then dusk was coming on so I told him we had to go. We walked about 150 yards to the spot where we would climb up the dunes to our car.

Suddenly, Ben said, “I want to go back and see those pollywogs one last time.”

Well, it was getting late and dark and I personally was tired. So after a little discussion with him, I said, “Ben, I’m going to wait here. You can go back and see them one last time if you hurry, okay?”

He looked at me for a few seconds and then said, “But I’m scared to go alone.”

I mirrored his feeling: “You’re scared?” (It’s almost always a god idea to mirror back children’s emotional state rather than immediately jump to a solution or try to talk them out of what they feel. When you mirror first, they are more likely to experience a connection between your getting them and the solution you do come up with.)

He said, “Yeah.”

I thought it made sense for him to be scared. He was three and a-half. We were on a beach. It was getting dark. I was suggesting he walk some distance from the safety of my side to have the experience he was after. I looked around. There was a very large rock about three feet high nearby. I jumped up on it and said, “I’m going to stand here on this rock so you can make me out against the sky, even though it’s getting dark. I think you can do this on your own if you can see me.”

He liked this idea. He looked up at me and said, “I see you, Bob.” (He always called me Bob. Why? That’s another story for another day).

I said, “That’s good, Ben. Now go see those pollywogs.”

He set off walking as fast as he could, turned several times to wave at me as he went further and further. Eventually, I saw him go over a rock on the other side of which was the pollywog puddle. After a few minutes, I thought I saw him come back over and start walking towards me, but dusk was falling fast now. I held my position and called out to him. I heard his small voice respond, “I’m coming!” After a few more minutes, he walked out of the dusk. I immediately noticed how relaxed his body was. He was swinging his arms happily. He walked right to the rock, looked up at me and said, “You can come down now, Bob.”

I jumped down. “So how are the pollywogs?”

“Fine,” he said with a big smile.

“And you did that all by yourself. Was it scary?”

“No, Bob. It wasn’t scary because I could see you.”

“Well, Ben, I will always try to find a rock to stand on, so you can make me out against the sky.”

We hugged and headed up the dunes.

That’s the best story of parenting from depth I can give you.* As dusk was falling, I was tired but still present. Ben wanted to see those magical pollywogs one more time. We worked it out so he wasn’t afraid and so I didn’t have to make the walk. It’s in moments like these all through our childrearing years that we gradually show and teach our children how growing up is a natural thing; one step leads to the next until, one day they’re going much further than a hundred and fifty yards and exploring the wide world, not just a puddle filled with pollywogs.

Now I realize not everyone is fortunate enough to live on California’s Central Coast as I do. But I have clients who live in big cities who manage to take maximum advantage of the park system to gradually introduce their kids to life in the wider world as they find it. Let’s not get hung up on the physical environment. This is really about being connected to your kid. Surely, not all parenting flows as naturally as this did. But many of the challenges change from mountains to mole hills when you slow down, relax, and get to depth. That’s where you’ll find clarity and the creative joy of parenting at its best.

*This is a shortened version of this incident. The full version is in my book Real Fatherhood: The Path of Lyrical Parenting, by Bob Kamm, 2002, available through bookstores everywhere.

C 2011 Bob Kamm