krishnamurti – parents
from Krishnamurti’s – significance of life – broken into parts: peace, parents (this page), teachers, intelligence, integration
If parents really cared for their children, they would build a new society; but fundamentally most parents do not care, and so they have no time for this most urgent problem.
[or perhaps they all care plenty and just don’t know what to do. systemic change in a world intoxicated with ie: manufactured consent ness.. is huge. it will take all of us. doing the dance together. ]
The world we have created is so superficial, so artificial, so ugly if one looks behind the curtain; and we decorate the curtain, hoping that everything will somehow come right.
We say so easily that we love our children; but is there love in our hearts when we accept the existing social conditions, …? And as long as we look to the specialists to educate our children, this confusion and misery will continue; for the specialists, being concerned with the part and not with the whole, are themselves unintegrated.
It is really extraordinary that, while people are rigorously trained to be lawyers or doctors, they may become parents without undergoing any training whatsoever to fit the for the all-important task.
..Do they want children merely for the sake of their own delight, to satisfy their own emotional needs? If so, then the children become a mere projection of the desires and fears of their parents.
Many parents encourage the child in the ways of conflict and sorrow, not only by allowing him to be submitted to the wrong kind of education, but by the manner in which they conduct their own lives; and then, when the child grows up and suffers, they pray for him or find excuses for his behaviour. The suffering of parents for their children is a form of possessive self-pity which exists only when there is no love.
If parents love their children, they will not be nationalistic, they will not identify themselves with any country; for the worship of the State brings on war, which kills or maims their sons. If parents love their children, they will discover what is a right relationship to property; for the possessive instinct has given property an enormous and false significance which is destroying the world.
As long as we want our children to be powerful, to have bigger and better positions, to become more and more successful,there is no love in our hearts; for the worship of success encourages conflict and misery. To love one’s children is to be in complete communion with them; it is to see that they have the kind of education that wil help them to be sensitive, intelligent and integrated.
[all above from Jiddu Krishnamurti, Significance of Life]
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What young people need most of all from adults is acknowledgement for who they actually are, rather than comparison with some cultural image of who they are supposed to be.. — Chris Mercogliano, In Defense of Childhood
maté parenting law et al
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on 2 needs..
Gabor Mate – authenticity & attachment
Jean Liedloff – attachment
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very resonating. very heavy. Molly Ringwald and her daughter and her mom – as shared by Cory:
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/03/molly-ringwald-and-her-10-year.html
(things we say and unintended pressure on our kids. straight from the heart and not meant to hurt.)
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let’s not wait.
we can do this. together.
a nother way: free art\ists, life
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on hunter-gatherers‘ parenting
posted by Peter on fb sept 2015 – from 2009
Have you ever noticed how we, as a society, use agricultural metaphors to talk about parenting and education? We speak of RAISING children, just as we speak of raising tomatoes or chickens. We speak of TRAINING children, just as we speak of training horses. Our manner of talking and thinking about parenting suggests that we own our children, much as we might own domesticated plants and livestock, and that we control how they grow and behave. Hunter-gatherers did not have agricultural metaphors, and their approach to parenting was very different, and much more trusting and playful, than ours. I think we have much to learn from them.
perhaps too – much to learn about property itself.. in regard to ie: agriculture..
In past essays I have talked about hunter-gatherers’ playful approaches to (a) government, (b) religion, and (c) productive work. Now, in this essay, I describe their playful approach to parenting.[1]
ie: (partial of his bullets)
- “Hunter-gatherers do not give orders to their children; for example, no adult announces bedtime.
- “The idea that this is ‘my child’ or ‘your child’ does not exist [among the Yequana, of South America]. Deciding what another person should do, no matter what his age, is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviors. There is great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to influence–let alone coerce–anyone.
- “Aborigine children are indulged to an extreme degree, and sometimes continue to suckle until they are four or five years old. Physical punishment for a child is almost unheard of.”
- “Infants and young children [among Inuit hunter-gatherers of the Hudson Bay area] are allowed to explore their environments to the limits of their physical capabilities and with minimal interference from adults.
- “Ju/’hoansi children [of Africa] very rarely cried, probably because they had little to cry about.
on this causing spoiled children.. h/g love/protect/trust…
Anthropologists commonly use the termindulgence to characterize the hunter-gatherer style of parenting, but I think the more fundamental concept here is trust. Parents indulge children’s desires because they trust children’s instincts and judgments. They believe that children know best what they need and when they need it, so there are no or few battles of will between adults and children.
part of why we think we see spoiled people and that this doesn’t work is that we believe in partial trust. but partial or regulated or specified or judgmental trust is no trust.. so we.. haven’t yet seen what people are really like…
People who are trusted from the very beginning usually become trustworthy. People treated in this way do not grow up to see life as a matter of trying to overpower, outsmart, or in other ways manipulate others.
[..]
That is the attitude that I have been describing throughout this series as the playful approach to life–the approach that brings out the best aspects of our humanity.
Play, as I have said repeatedly in this series, requires individual freedom. Play is no longer play when one person attempts to dominate another and dictate what they do.
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huge – on parenting ness
share by Bernd on fb july 2016 – written by Alison Gopnick
he shared it embedded in this share (huge/deep as well) of his:
“The climate movement made an enormous mistake. We focused all our attention on fossil fuels, when we should have been pointing to something much deeper: the basic logic of our economic operating system. After all, we’re only using fossil fuels in the first place to fuel the broader imperative of GDP growth.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-manifesto-against-parenting-1467991745
A strange thing happened to mothers and fathers and children at the end of the 20th century. It was called “parenting.” As long as there have been human beings, mothers and fathers and many others have taken special care of children. But the word “parenting” didn’t appear in the U.S. until 1958, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and became common only in the 1970s.
People sometimes use “parenting” just to describe what parents actually do, but more often, especially now, “parenting” means something that parents should do.
like – mowing the lawn ness
[..]
It’s the wrong way to understand how parents and children actually think and act, and it’s equally wrong as a vision of how they should think and act.
thinking rev in reverse ness.. and how.. there can’t be a visible structure.. even if reverse.. because then.. we stop listening.. as evidenced in silence research and langer research.. et al
[..]
For most of human history, we lived in these extended family groups. This meant that we learned how to take care of children by practicing with our own little sisters and baby cousins and by watching many other people take care of children.
a nother way.. deep enough.. away from measuring.. back to listening..
[..]
It’s not surprising, then, that going to school and working are modern parents’ models for taking care of children: You go to school and work with a goal in mind, and you can be taught to do better at school and work.
[..]
More than any other animal, we human beings depend on our ability to learn. And the current thinking is that our large brain and powerful learning abilities evolved, most of all, to deal with change.
The immediate trigger for human evolution seems to have been a period of unpredictable climate variability in the Pleistocene era. It wasn’t just that the weather got warmer or colder, but that it moved from one extreme to the other in an unpredictable way. Humans are causing climate change now, but in the evolutionary past, climate change caused humans.
On top of that, human beings were nomadic, moving from environment to environment, and, thanks to culture, each new generation could create and modify its own environment. All this meant that humans had to adapt to an exceptionally wide range of exceptionally variable environments.
[..]
Human learning contributes even more to the variability of our children. Our parental investment and commitment allow each generation a chance to think up new ideas about how the world works and how to make it work better. Childhood provides a period of variability and possibility, exploration and innovation, learning and imagination.
1 yr to be 5 ness
[..]
If “parenting” is the wrong model, then, what’s the right one? Let’s recall that “parent” is not actually a verb, nor is it a form of work. What we need to talk about instead is “being a parent”—that is, caring for a child. To be a parent is to be part of a profound and unique human relationship, to engage in a particular kind of love, not to make a certain sort of thing.
After all, to be a wife is not to engage in “wifing,” to be a friend is not to “friend,” even on Facebook, and we don’t “child” our mothers and fathers. Yet these relationships are central to who we are. Any human being living a fully satisfied life is immersed in such social connections.
[..]
Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny but to help them shape their own.
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What should parents do? The scientific picture fits what we all know already, although knowing doesn’t make it any easier: We unconditionally commit to love and care for this particular child. We do this even though all children are different, all parents are different, and we have no idea beforehand what our child will be like. We try to give our children a strong sense of safety and stability. We do this even though the whole point of that safe base is to encourage children to take risks and have adventures. And we try to pass on our knowledge, wisdom and values to our children, even though we know that they will revise that knowledge, challenge that wisdom and reshape those values.
In fact, the very point of commitment, nurture and culture is to allow variation, risk and innovation. Even if we could precisely shape our children into particular adults, that would defeat the whole evolutionary purpose of childhood.
We follow our intuitions, muddle through and hope for the best.
[..]
As individual parents and as a community, our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it is to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows.
maté parenting law
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