D.R.B. wrote:
I hope you don't mind me widening the topic a bit, CC.
Nope, don't mind at all. I very much like reading your views. Although I agree with you, I would like to approach this from another angle.
D.R.B. wrote:
What the world needs is influential people who can change cultural attitudes to child rearing so that future parents won't make the same mistakes.
I am with you. This helps. The word needs to get out. It's just that I am getting into the habit of questioning all things in general. Sometimes influential people don't have the answers. At first their concepts may appear well founded or their intentions appear to be true but after some time, we find that their reasoning lacked wisdom and depth and in other cases we find that it was contrived and unrealistic or just plain dissociated blurbs. Although I join with ideas that will help us to evolve towards a progressive society, I still like to challenge their precepts for the sake of flushing out errors and misconceptions. This is the healthiest and most responsible thing I can do, I think.
Even when 'do gooders' say that:
'Our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs.'
I still think that they don't understand emotions. It sounds good on the surface but it's mostly pretense, although it is a step in the right direction.
The reason why I take a skeptical stance is that when you have an influential group dictating the 'new norm' it keeps the followers of that 'new way' from deciding it for them selves. They follow without conviction and no one ever grows or FEELS why this new awareness is important. Religion has survived in this manner, come up with new and nice wholesome value and let's build some rules around it. They (the followers) let someone with authority and influence take responsibility for the 'new direction'.
Those preaching social reform are in pain. But they are not willing to face it. So in their conceit they address the symptoms of society with new 'neurotic social thought' disguised with pseudo empathy and guru awareness. But under all of their pontificating is the projection of their own unmet needs. They seek short term solutions to immemorial repression.
In another thread (sorry, I don't know how to link in a nice neat way - I know how the screen gets too big when I do it), a letter to A. Miller was discussed. The person who wrote to Miller wrote a glowing thank you letter. She was grateful for her new found 'awareness' but in the letter (among other evidence of her dissociation) she communicated how still abusive she remained to her children. Preaching awareness of a symptom (abusive child rearing methods) is far from causing real enduring, sustainable healthy changes in our society.
Also, In another thread their was a discussion about Anders Kompass from the United Nations branch on human rights recommending a list of drugs that should be made cheaper in Mexico. I am sure that this official is looked upon as a 'well intentioned and aware' type of guy by the dissociated influential crusaders promoting change in cultural attitudes to child rearing so that future parents won't make the same mistakes. The reason that A. Kompass can do this is because he has no feelings. He lacks empathy. He is 'aware' but blind to the core.
from article:
They also need time. In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.
This paragraph is pure projection on the part of the authors although it is a true condition that the children are in. This assessment is intellectual and lacks substance. It's more like lip service. I hear parents talk about these same issues but they never talk about what they are doing to understand their children or how this knowledge has changed the way they interact with their child. This cultural condition is a symptom. This is the result of repression. Like I said elsewhere, repression is the mainstay of society.
You cannot change this condition because it is too powerful. It is built by repression. Repression is its cornerstone. The only way to overcome this condition is to destroy the pain that produced it. Children are smart. They are less repressed than adults. A child that is loved does not buy into this somnambulistic condition that society is in. The authors of this article are fighting against themselves unconsciously. Their repression produced it and now they project it on the children.
What we need is ideas to help people think and FEEL for themselves in a real way. If parents were to feel their pain and have empathy for themselves they would not need influential people telling them that the way that they are raising children is abusive. Society lacks empathy. Society is in pain. Pain produces repression. Repression produces superficial remedies that appear to be the elixir that society has been waiting for but only designed to hide the pain. Repression breeds dissociated, well meaning philosophies on the surface but sick decaying intentions underneath, producing an evermore repressive condition in our culture.
D.R.B. wrote:
It's too bad that only a few therapists are trying to raise a public outcry about poisonous pedagogy
.
That is why I like Alice Miller. She mostly just tells it like it is and then lets the reader decide for themselves.
It is all so complex D.R.B.