An old Israeli
song goes something like this: This is my second childhood, whatever you will
give me, I’ll take; this is my second childhood, with you [my daughter]. This
is my second childhood, my heart opens. Through your eyes, my daughter, I
discover the world…through your lips words have new meaning…I can now grow up
with no fear…through your steps, I step toward the wonders of the world. With
you, life has a reason to it. I learn to love again, without thinking…due to
your tears, I will tremble as if the end of the world is coming … For me, these
lyrics capture best what childhood is about: intensity, authenticity, ripeness,
roughness, rawness.
Being a child is being alive, which means
it can be amazingly good and intolerably bad; easy like a Sunday morning and
hard as a day in a factory. No, I am not pretending to understand what it is
like to be a child (though I hope I have a better idea than imagining being a
bat…), but if I’d have to imagine then I would say: It is joy and frustration
in a constant interchangeable roller coaster. And so, for the mindful,
interacting-adult it often feels similarly intense and therefore confusing. The
difference though, is that the adult is hopefully better equipped to deal with
the intensities, and subsequently, can channel those sensations toward a
meaningful path of re-discovery of one’s lives’ essence. Additionally, being in
the company of children provides us with the opportunity to heal from our past,
and subsequently we can begin to repair our relationships, with others and
ourselves. While trying to work on negative memories, being with children also
invites us to enjoy things we forgot about: jumping in a mud-puddle, rolling on
a dirty carpet or having a cup of creamy hot-cocoa.
Granted, there are many lessons children,
especially ours, can teach us if we are willing to learn. Sorting these lessons
out, I roughly divide them to four categories: (1) Generic: Teach us about
human development and fundamental characteristics, e.g.: acquiring a language,
developing formal thinking, feelings etc. This important category
goes beyond the scope of this presentation. (2) Incidental-yet-useful, e.g.:
time management, prioritizing etc. I will not touch upon this group of lesson
either, as I find them practically important yet not as interesting as to be
presented here. (3) Psychological: teach the interacting adult about herself
and how one’s past brought her to where she is today. (4) Philosophical as in
the Art of Living: how one’s present can bring us to a more fulfilled future.
Undoubtedly, distinguishing these categories is essentially artificial, as they
are all interconnected. Nevertheless, in this paper I will focus on the last
two categories I have established, and subsequently I will conclude that
children are, by nature, psychoanalysts, coaches, and philosophical mentors. In
a sense, I am tying together three important philosophical practices:
Philosophy for Children, where the assumption is that children are
philosophical by nature, in the way they think, understand and act in the
world;[ii] Philosophical Counseling,
where it is about helping one exploring and clarifying what considered as
philosophical aspects of their lives;[iii] and The Art of Living,
where it is really about practicing
what we preach, or, how do we mesh theories with life, but also, how do we
learn to live life as if it was a fine art we can always improve at by gently
disciplining ourselves. While going over the lessons we learn from our little
teachers, it is important to keep in mind that children are not always cute and
cuddly, like all good psychoanalysts and philosophers, children can sting us
hard in order to awaken us from our dogmatic sleep into a full-blown experience
that deserved the title “life.”
I will briefly go over the main lessons:
• Individual uniqueness vs. fundamental
universalism: Self-help and parenting books are successful partially because
they target many common denominators; developmental theories are – to a large
degree – correct, again, because there are human characteristics that are in
fact universal. Nevertheless, after we intimately interact with more than one
child, we begin to understand that the “you can’t compare the children”
statement is an important one to remember, for everybody’s sake. So are we
different individuals or are we fundamentally the same? Surely all healthy
humans are born with some innate capacities, tendencies and needs, eating,
sleeping, communicating verbally, socializing, or feeling are a few. I am
talking basics here, and as far as the basics go, we are all the same. The
uniqueness can be found in our individual interpretations of those basic needs
and tendencies: What do we like to eat and how much, or do we sleep light or
soundly is what makes us unique. Comparing my son, who has been sleeping
soundly for 12 hours since he was 3 months old, to my daughter, who is one year
old and seems to be content on much less, only made me resentful and anxious,
and consequently was unfair toward her own unique needs and personality.
Learning to accept differences teaches us tolerance and respect to others, but
also to ourselves, to our unique quirkiness. This brings me to-
• Forgiveness: The other evening I was all
stressed and upset, it was late and the house was a mess. I was trying to
organize everything and tuck the baby in bed, while my all body was aching. I
was holding myself from “losing” it. Still, I raised my voice on my husband
while shutting the bathroom door behind him. A minute later, when I entered my
3 years old son’ room, he looked upset and told me to “go away.” Of course this
annoyed my even more. I left his room and went back to the kitchen to complete
what relaxes me most: cleaning and organizing. When I went back to my son, to
kiss him good night and sing our prayers, I apologized for my earlier behavior, sharing with him briefly how tired I am. “I know” he said and hugged
me, asking for more angels-songs. He was so easy to forgive and really move on
to the good. Do I have to learn to be calmer? To control my anger? Not to be
offended by a 3 years old? Absolutely. But the most important lesson for me
here was to accept myself, forgive myself and move on. To the good.
• Modelling: My old lap top had a sticker on
it: “be the change you want to see in the world,” seemingly the most reasonable
instruction, yet it is so hard, especially with children who seem to always
watch. We know for a fact that children, especially in their first years learn
from adults’ behaviors, reactions, and interactions.[iv] Therefore it is important
that we will be worthy of their imitation, that is if we want to live in a
better world, but also if we really want our guidelines to them to be authentic
rather than arbitrary orders. I often shout at my son to speak quietly…my son
doesn’t (yet) tell me I’m hypocritical, instead, he begins to screams gibberish
in a way that seems as a satire of my own behavior. If I can leave my ego
behind in those heated moments, I then realize how ridiculous my behavior
seems, let alone my double standards.
And so children push us to improve as humans, and that often includes
not only our behavior and language, but also what we eat, how we dress, or how
our environment appears.
• Mindful presence/awareness: The Tao says: “The Master gives himself up to
whatever the moment brings.” Children, don’t have the same sense of time as
adults do, not the men-made one, i.e. the one that follows the watch and the
calendar, but surprisingly enough, the young ones are yet to develop what is
supposed to be an innate sense of time. The most obvious examples are
newborns’ inability to distinguish between day and night or how toddlers
cannot postpone gratifications simply because they lack a sense of “later”
(luckily, it works both ways: When they are upset, the slightest distraction
will make them be happy again). More interesting though, are the times when our
children talk to us, and in the minute we stop listening, as opposed to adults
whom we can easily manoeuvre to think that we did, children, primarily in their
early years, will teach us – probably in the hard way – mindful presence.
Notice that as I suggested earlier, those
lessons are learnt co-jointly, for example: In order to model the right behavior and use of language, we have to be mindful and, and subsequently
become more forgiving.
• Taking care of oneself is taking care of
others: The cliché example of the airplane instruction explains this idea best.
• Flexibility: Not only do we have to become
more flexible in our plans and time-management, more importantly, a mindful
interaction with children enforces flexibility in the way we think, and
subsequently on our plans and hopes. In that sense children teach us critical
and creative thinking, enabling us to re-examine our true self. If we do not
allow them and ourselves to do so, then we become miserably imprisoned in our
old sense of self, one that doesn’t necessary fits the present one that asks to
transpire.
• Loving-kindness and discipline: in Proverbs
[13:24] we read “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Sometimes we make
decisions or take actions concerning children that are not so fun. It can be
anything from clearing a screaming baby nose to taking weekly allowances of my
13 years old step-son who left the freezer open all-night. When we do those
things, we have to ask ourselves: why do I do this? Is it because I really
think it’s important for the overall well-being of the child? Or, are there
other reasons, such as power, control, dogmatic thinking, pleasing other adult?
It’s really comes down to one thing: Do I do what I do out of loving-kindness,
even if it doesn’t necessarily feel this way at the moment?
No doubt there
are many other psycho-philosophical lessons we can learn from children: joy,
wonder, and compassion are few additional yet-to-be-developed examples.
In many cultures it is believed that
children choose their parents, that their incarnating souls choose the right
“vehicle” to arrive at this world (e.g.: the Jewish idea of Tikkun
(repair), Steiner’s idea of reincarnation, and Dorin Virtue’s Star Children).
According to these theories and others, children choose certain people as their
vehicle not only by what is right for them, but also the vehicles that need
some kind of “repair” that can be performed by the child-to-be-born. In other
words, children choose their parents (and in some case their care-givers) by
the adults’ flaws, because they come to help the adults to become better,
improved humans.
We can easily become the adults we always
wished not to be: our parents, our grumpy neighbor, or our neurotic colleague.
The thing that can liberate us from this trap while developing a true sense of
self (rather than a fake ideal), one that is authentic to who we are in any
given moment, the things that can liberate us is lots of mindful presence, will
power, deep understanding and accepting our past and the courage to
re-conceptualize our futures. Children give us the opportunities to develop
those hard apparatus.
Today it is common to hear that we are not
perfect and it is OK. While I agree that none of us is perfect, and indeed it
is more than OK, I also feel strongly about the constructive lesson we can take
from it: Do we simply relax in the “feel good” position, or do we realize that
because we are not perfect we can always strive to improve? Children, as
mentioned earlier, live in the present, and when very young they also don’t
really understand the notion of “others” as separate beings, hence they often
push our buttons, and on those times it is easy to stop being mindful (and
respectful, and forgiving….). When we realize we just did something not that
great (e.g. yelling), we can see it as an opportunity for growth, and when we
do, our lives improve not only with our children, but as a whole human.
In that sense, though we bring them to
life, they give Life to us; it is no accident that we often say “you are my
life.” But even in the most mundane way: When we have children we can’t act
recklessly, we carry responsibility toward them and therefore have to take a
good care of ourselves too, both physically but mainly mentally and
spiritually.
A common wisdom suggests that when the
student is ready the teacher appears. While we all know that once we have
children our lives will change, we don’t always comprehend the enormity of this
statement. One of my closest friends lives with her partner for almost 15
years, in what she refers to as nomadic, hippy lives and open-relationships.
She is very clear and vocal about how much she doesn’t want children. Her
partner – on the other hand - wants a child badly enough to go through the
challenging weeks of hormones injections and insemination; nevertheless, she
keeps smoking, everything, partying etc. She does it for almost four years now,
back and forth, almost as if she herself isn’t clear about how much children
will be part of her indeed-changed lives. Why am I telling this story? Surely
for some people the attempt to bring children are harder than others’. But
perhaps some of these people are not ready to become their child’s student
(clearly, I am not saying that every parent is ready, we have all too many
examples for parents who are not changing a bit in any of their bad habits).
The change is so great that I refer to it
as another stage of development, one that only if you lucky enough to be part
of, you become fully human. Allowing yourself to embrace rich relationships
with children not from an ego point of view, invite you to be at the aporia
again, but this time in a mindful way. Interacting with children from this
humble perspective, brings about a relationship that is the epitome of the
Buberian I-Thou. And if it’s true that every human interaction holds, even
momentarily, the potential to affect people, then the “I-Thou” holds the
biggest potential to transform.
In conclusion, when something as dramatic
as interacting with children on a daily basis, be it a mother or a genuinely
engaged care-giver, it ultimately transforms us, it can’t not to. If it
doesn’t, it may suggest that something in us is shut, dead. We saw the enormity
of lessons that we can learn from children that is if we are ready and willing
to learn. We saw how when interacting closely with children, suppressed
memories float back unwillingly, and in that sense interacting intimately with
children is a powerful form of psychoanalysis. We then saw how, as opposed to
psychoanalysis, who merely listen, node and scribes notes, children push us to
do something about anything and everything we feel. They don’t allow us to
simply sit in the couch and feel sorry for ourselves. And in that sense they
are coaches. Then finally, and most importantly, they are not simply tell us
that we ought to do something and then – at best – explain to us what this
thing is; they teach us by action, whether by mirroring, modelling or forcing
us in mysterious ways to where we find exactly how and what to do the thing
that will inevitably make us better-developed adults who master the art of
living. And in that sense they are wise-philosophers, masters of the art of
jumping and screaming in the puddle.
[i] Gopnik, Alison, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning
Tells us about the Mind. New York: Harper. 2000. Also: Gopnik, Alison, The
Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds tell us about Truth, Love, and the
Meaning of Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2009. Entire
volume.
[ii] Lipman Matthew, Thinking in education (2nd Ed.). New York:
Cambridge University. 2003. Entire volume.
[iii] Raabe B. Peter, Philosophical Counselling: Theory and Practice.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. 2002. Entire volume. Also: Schuster
C. Shlomit, Philosophy practice: An alternative to counselling and
psychotherapy. Westport, CT: Preager. 1999. Entire volume.
[iv] Baldwin D. Rahima, You are Your Child First Teacher.
Berkeley: Celestial Arts. 2000. Entire volume. Also: Jaffke Freya, Work and
Play in Early Childhood. New York: Steiner Books. 1997. And: Konig Karl, The
First Three Years of the Child: Walking, Speaking, Thinking. Oxford: Floris
Books. 2004
Bibliography
Baldwin D.
Rahima, You are Your Child First Teacher. Berkeley: Celestial Arts. 2000.
Gopnik Alison,
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells us about the Mind. New
York: Harper. 2000
Gopnik Alison,
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds tell us about Truth, Love, and
the Meaning of Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2009.
Jaffke Freya,
Work and Play in Early Childhood. New York: Steiner Books. 1997.
Konig Karl, The
First Three Years of the Child: Walking, Speaking, Thinking. Oxford: Floris
Books. 2004.
Lipman Matthew,
Thinking in education (2nd Ed.). New York: Cambridge University. 2003.
Raabe B. Peter,
Philosophical Counselling: Theory and Practice. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Group. 2002.
Schuster C.
Shlomit, Philosophy practice: An alternative to counselling and psychotherapy.
Westport, CT: Preager. 1999.
