Buddy
The Living Force
While I'm waiting on a few important books to arrive, I wanted to post what's been on my mind lately - this talk by Gabor Maté. If anyone is interested and takes the time to read or watch, their feedback would be appreciated!
Hold on to your kids: Why parents need to matter more than peers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_akH6Cin6E
The video is an hour and 16 minutes long, so for those who prefer to read or skim text, the following can be read like a list of comments and points. Some of it may not be exactly word-for-word because I transcribed meaning from memory in a couple of places due to getting tired of backtracking.
From the Youtube page:
"This presentation is hosted in partnership with: The Thunder Bay District Health Unit, Lakehead Public Schools, Special Education Advisory Committee and North of Superior Counselling Programs. The Presentation Title is "Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers" and is presented by best selling author Dr. Gabor Mate."
Hold on to your kids: Why parents need to matter more than peers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_akH6Cin6E
The video is an hour and 16 minutes long, so for those who prefer to read or skim text, the following can be read like a list of comments and points. Some of it may not be exactly word-for-word because I transcribed meaning from memory in a couple of places due to getting tired of backtracking.
From the Youtube page:
"This presentation is hosted in partnership with: The Thunder Bay District Health Unit, Lakehead Public Schools, Special Education Advisory Committee and North of Superior Counselling Programs. The Presentation Title is "Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers" and is presented by best selling author Dr. Gabor Mate."
Anti-bullying programs don't work. If something isn't working, perhaps we should consider that the way we are approaching it is wrong. And how we approach a problem depends very much on how we perceive it. In North America, the usual approach to behavioral problems is behavioral. The kid acts out and we punish him, i.e., with timeouts, tough love, logical consequences or something.
When you hear the phrase "act out" what do you see in your mind's eye? For most of us trained in this culture, we see a kid being rude - or something - but it doesn't mean bad behavior; the phrase has a very specific meaning. When a child acts out, he is portraying, in behavior, something that he doesn't have the language to say in words. So, in the game of charades, you have to act out because you're not permitted to use words. Also imagine you're in another country where you don't speak the language. You'd have to act out that you're hungry, or tired, or whatever.
Maybe we should consider the possibility that our children's behavior; their (so-called) oppositionality, the rudeness, the difficulty learning from negative experience, their bullying, their precocious sexuality - all the stuff that they do - isn't what we normally think of as "acting out". It is that they are trying to express in behavior, what they haven't got the language for. So our job is to understand what is being acted out and to respond to the message; and not to try and suppress the message, but to respond to it creatively. That's really the essence of this talk. The behavioral approach doesn't let you do that. The behavioral approach says to stop the bad behavior (punishment) and reward the good behavior (reward). That's it.
In North America, the other main thing is that childhood has been heavily medicalized. We are diagnosing our kids with all kinds of problems. There are millions of kids being given stimulant medications for ADHD, and hundreds of thousands of children getting anti-psychotics such as Respiratol or Seroquel - medications that we give to adult psychotics to control their hallucinations and paranoia - and we're giving this to kids to control their behaviors. We're diagnosing all these kids with ADHD, Aspergers, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Oppositional Defiant Disorder; and we're medicating them. We've made a medical problem out of it.
Now I'm going to tell you right now...that not only is there no such thing as Oppositional Defiant Disorder - not even in theory can there even be such a thing - and why that is the case I will show you later. The drugs are a step forward only in this sense: that, at least, diagnosing a kid with a disorder is not blaming him. At least we're not blaming him or punishing him for the behavior. As for helping him - it's a very strict and limited way of helping him.
The only way to understand people really, is not through the lens of medical diagnosis and not through the lens of behavior control but through, what has been called a bio-psycho-social approach. And that is an understanding that human beings, especially children, develop within a context.
A child is a manifestation of his or her environment and not an independent, isolated entity:
Quote from a Buddhist teacher:
"When we see a well-behaved child, we may understand the source and reason for the behavior is the ground that nurtured him - his community and his family. It is even more important to see the interdependently co-arising nature (everything co-arises in connection with everything else and the child is a manifestation of his or her environment and not an independent, isolated entity) of a child who is cruel. Just as with good behavior, the reasons for child cruelty can be found in his family, society, school, friends and ancestors.
If we do not shine the light of interdependent co-arising on the child's character to see how problems relate to his life in his environment and relationships, we get angry and afraid and we blame him. We must do our best to understand his interdependent self-nature in order to understand him, accept him, love him and help him transform."
So the real issue is to understand the circumstances that give rise to children's behaviors and not just to respond to the behaviors themselves.
This principle of interdependent co-arising does not just apply to a child's behavior - it applies to human life - from the beginning to the end of life.
Three backing examples were offered. In one, studies showed that children born to mothers who were highly stressed or depressed were born with asthma. The relationship can be seen in the prescriptions for the child's asthma. The body's stress mechanism is overwhelmed so we have to give them extra hormones (like adrenaline and cortisol derivatives that relax the bronchial musles and open up the air tubes) to keep the airways open. Why do children born to mothers who are stressed and depressed have to be given extra stress hormones to relieve breathing distress? The emotional states of parents do so much to program the physiology of the children.
Ex 2: The number of childhood visits for mental health disorders in Windsor Ontario went up 50% in 2009. Why? Well it's an auto making town heavily hit by the economic crisis. When the parents get stressed, the children get stressed and then the kids get diagnosed and medicated. The brain develops under the impact of the environment. If we're seeing a lot more stressed parents, we're going to see a lot of kids whose brains reflect the early stressors in their environment.
Midlife: a study of 500 Australian women who had breast lumps were psychologically evaluated before biopsy or before biopsy results came back. What was found was that if a woman had a major stress related episode prior to the lump developing, this had zero relation to whether the lump was cancerous. Even if the woman felt emotionally isolated - the same thing. BUT, if the woman had at least one major stress related experience AND felt emotionally isolated, the lump was 9 times more likely to be cancerous than not. Doctors didn't understand that. How could zero effect plus zero effect add up to 9? Well, most doctors have a narrow mindset. A stressed person has high levels of cortisol. If a person stays stressed, cortisol levels can stay high for a long time. High cortisol levels stress the immune system and can therefore allow a breast lump to become cancerous. (15:41)
At the end of life, studies have shown that elderly couples who've been together a long time - when one gets sick or whatever, the other tends to suffer as well.
So, it's all about relationships between people. Immune systems are hooked into each other. That's who we are as human beings - we are deeply connected with each other - from the beginning of life at conception to the end.
Attachment: the connection of one human being to another. Childhood is when we are the least independent and the most vulnerable - and where attachments are the most important. Attachments are essential to life. We are wired for it.
Children who've been abused and who have detached for self-protection - to protect against the pain of loss - can't be taken care of. First you have to connect with them.
The human brain cannot abide an attachment void, though it is not mandatory to attach to mom and dad. Attachment comes first, then orientation: what should I look like, how I should act, etc. Your attachments are where you turn to for orientation info.
So, what's going on here is that the natural context for parenting has been eroded and we haven't replaced it with a model that works. And then, we're just responding to the consequences. So the behaviors - the acting out - instead of looking at what's being acted out, we're just trying to stop the consequences. It's like giving an asthmatic a cough medicine because they're coughing so much; so you just suppress the cough but what have you done for the inflammation? Nothing, and that's the problem with the behavioral approaches.
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What's being acted out in the case of troubled children's behaviors? Loss of proper relation to adults.
Khrishnamurti: "Action has meaning only in relationship and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict." (So, just try and understand: Without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict.) The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than a search for any plan of action.
1) attaching through the senses.
There is a well known doctor - Furber - who advocates interval visit training with crying infants. Called "Furberizing", the method calls for letting a child cry for 5 min, show up so he can see he's not abandoned or whatever, then leave again. Next visit should be about 7 1/2 min later. Increase these intervals until the child sleeps through the night.
The child of 15 has no recollection that he was allowed to cry w/o being picked up, or whatever. He has no recollection because the structures in the brain, or brain circuitry for recollection isn't developed until about 1 to 1/2 years of age. But there is another kind of memory - implicit memory - that is there even before birth where the emotional template or emotional pattern of your earliest experiences in your relationships are programmed into your brain. And that comes back later. You don't recall it, but you remember it. The memories are in your body and in your emotions, but there is no recollection. That's called implicit memory.
What is the implicit memory of an infant who wasn't picked up when he cried? The implicit memory is that relationships are unreliable. The world is indifferent. There is no help.
That's the kind of stuff we're structuring in the kid's brain when we don't pick them up.
A 9 year comes home from school and barely gives you any attention, yet gets on the phone, email or whatever and starts talking to the people she just spent 7 or 8 hours with. What's wrong? If your spouse did that, what would a friend advise? For you to give them a time-out? Practice tough love or some other behavioral control? Or would the friend suggest that you don't have a behavior problem, you have a relationship problem. The child is not consciously being rude or giving you the cold shoulder. The problem is that the attachment has been transferred to the peer group. And the attachment instinct is telling her to physically contact the people she's attaching to. IOW, that behavior is the acting out of that attachment instinct. There's nothing conscious or deliberate about it.
2) copying, emulating, wanting to be the same as, identifying. Mature ways of attaching allow you to hold on to your independence and sense of self, but immature ways of attaching means you tend to want to identify with - to be the same as the people you're attaching to.
3) belonging and loyalty.
4) Through significance - you want to be important in the eyes of the people you're attaching to. If you want to be important to the adults in your life, you're going to behave in one particular way. But if you want to be important to the peers in your life, you're going to behave totally differently. And one way to be important is to be a bully.
We think Bullying is a behavioral problem. It's an attachment problem and more complex that that, but it has all to do with distorted attachments.
Hierarchy: What are the implications for peer orientation to parenting? Well, what does attachment do for parenting? First thing about attachment is that it creates a hierarchy. This is a natural hierarchy and you can see it with animals and certainly ought to see with human beings. A hierarchy goes like this:
I'm the one with the responsibility
I'm the one with the burden
I'm the one with the commitment
I'm the one with the experience
I'm the one with the knowledge
I'm in charge.
You don't have to say it. It's just there. It's a natural hierarchy. When a person's being taken care of, there's a natural hierarchy of dominance. For example, you dominate an infant in the sense that you are the one who decides what happens. The infant doesn't decide anything. He can tell you of his needs by crying, but you're the one that decides what's going to happen. There's nothing wrong with that - it's just a natural hierarchy.
So, with peer orientation, you still have the responsibility, the burden, the commitment and everything else, but you don't have the authority. To a kid, it's completely unnatural, for someone who they are not attached to, to be telling them what to do. Since you can't have primary competing attachments, when you have a peer attachment you have an attraction here and a repelling force there like the bipolarity of a magnet. You can have many attachments as long as they're not competing with one another.
In a divorce where the parents are competing with one another and for the child's attention, the child cannot attach to both of them so his brain is in a huge quandary. To protect himself from this, he may detach from both of them. Either way, there's a substantial loss. But that's because the brain can't handle competing primary attachments. That's why in the event of divorce, there should be no undermining of each other and no competition for the child's love otherwise you're putting him in a completely impossible situation.
When we lose attachment with our kids, we lose the natural hierarchy and this hierarchy is what gives us the authority to raise the kids. A parent who complains that her child was good at 9 or 10 years old then went bad is simply misunderstanding the attachment problem. The bad news is that the child was never good in the first place. The good news is that the child is not bad now. All that's going on is that the kid was well attached to the adults and wanted to be good for them, now she's attached to the peer group and wants to be good for them and doesn't give a damn what the adults want. It's an attachment problem - a relationship problem, not a behavioral or moral problem.
So, the child starts resisting your authority and the experts come along and say things like: you gotta be tough, lay down the rules, etc. and it kinda appeals because you want that control back, but you find that the more you push them, the more they push back. Then they're diagnosed as "oppositional defiant disorder". They're being oppositional right? It looks obvious enough, but can you see what's wrong with this picture? If I have a broken foot, would it still be broken if none of you were here right now? If I had a virus or viral disorder, would I still have it if I were alone in the room right now? Of course I would. But I could not be oppositional if I were here by myself. If that doesn't hit home, then when you get home, lock yourself in a room by yourself and try to oppose someone. If you succeed, send me an email because I want to know how you did it. Oppositionality, by definition, implies a relationship. So, instead of diagnosing kids, why don't we look at the relationships?
Oppositionality is demonstrated to be a natural response to any sense of coercion. You can call it 'counter will': a natural force that acts as counterweight to any force acting upon us. It follows the "equal and opposite counter force" that you hear about in nature. This is a natural resistance to coercion and there's a reason for it. [Does a hand demonstration with an audience member] Why would you automatically oppose what I am doing? Because you can't allow yourself to be pushed around. To be a separate, self-respecting individual, you have to be able to resist coercion.
This may begin happening around 1 1/2 years. The kid begins saying that awful word "no". Everything is "no". The parent thinks their cute, cuddly kid has suddenly turned into a monster, but there's an agenda from nature there. Nature's agenda is that the child grow up to be an independent person and have a will of their own. But how do you develop a will when the parent's will is so much more powerful and the parent, himself, is so much more powerful? Well, you do it by opposing the parent. So, those "no's" is nature's way of building a small fence around that little child's growing, incipient little will, and behind which the child can develop his own preferences, his own meanings, his own likes, dislikes and his own understandings. So, we begin with "no" as an automatic response to coercion and as we mature we say yes to this and no to that.
"No" is a response to coercion and the more we push, the more they resist and they cannot help it. It's nature's way - nature is doing it, they aren't doing it; they cannot help it. It's not a conscious decision. Had they thought about it, they could have just dropped their arm instead of pushing the hand back; they could just walk off and do their own thing without verbalizing or physically resisting at all - they could just walk away or leave. But the natural response is to resist. It's just nature - instinct in action. In the proper context, resistance serves a good function - to maintain integrity - to hold onto our integrity as individuated, separate, self-motivated individuals.
What mitigates counter-will is relationship. When you connect with somebody, you're much less likely to oppose them. You soften. When a partner asks you for something, you're likely to comply; you may even be delighted to. Now, once the acute attachment phase has worn off, you can still love the one you're attached to, but you're much more likely to take the relationship for granted and maybe not be quite so cooperative anymore.
Even when our kids are still attached to us, there may be some oppositionality but it's manageable. When they become peer attached, all we're left with is the oppositionality, with nothing to mitigate it. And there you have the oppositional child. It's nothing to do with their innate character, it's just their relationships and how that's played out. That's what they're acting out.
BTW, this works even if you're trying to reward them. If you're trying to motivate them using rewards, what are they sensing? They're sensing that there is something you want them to do more than they want to do it themselves. If that wasn't the case, you wouldn't have to reward them would you? Hence, the reward is kind of an emotional coercion: i.e., "I know you don't want to do this, but I'll make it worth your while". In every other aspect of life but childhood, we call it bribery don't we?
An American psychologist who studied motivation said: "The truth is there are no techniques that will motivate people to make them autonomous. Motivation must come from within, not techniques. It comes from their deciding that they're ready to take responsibility for managing themselves." IOW, motivation comes from maturation. And not from any kind of coercion.
Think about it this way: You come home from work, tired, hungry, stressed, alienated. Your spouse, partner, friend says "hey sweetheart...I can see that you're tired, hungry, stressed, alienated, but I feel like having sex. So I'm going to pay you 20 bucks". I know the economy here has been hit hard, so I don't know what inducement that would be for some of you, but the normal response would be something like: "The heck with your 20 bucks. That's got nothing to do with me, it's not my needs, I don't want to do this, you want to do this. Keep your money and keep your sex for that matter."
These are the techniques we are taught to employ with our kids and all we're doing is increasing resistance.
When kids become peer oriented, what effect does that have on development? It stops it in its tracks. Because for development, we need vulnerability. A tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick. It grows where it's soft, green and vulnerable. An animal like a crab, encased in a hard shell, cannot grow inside that hard encasement. It has to moult - make itself vulnerable - make itself soft in order to grow. The same thing is true for human development.
When abused and traumatized children no longer fight and cry and resist, they become desolate. Some of them have "dead eyes". The dead eyes come from children having closed down emotionally because their emotions have become unbearable. They disconnect from their emotions because that's the only thing the brain can do. The problem is, when the emotions shut down, people stop developing. The heavily drug-addict adult, on an emotional level, functions like a 2 year old, because that's when they stopped developing.
What we're seeing in America now, is a massive emotional shutdown in the youth, even though most of them have not been abused. What happened? What happens is that what protects you as a child is nurturing relationships with protective adults. When you go to adults who get what you're saying, who really understand what you're experiencing, you can stay vulnerable. You're protected and emotionally held. Of the kids who were bullied and later committed suicide, over and over again you find that there was no adult they could talk to about what they were experiencing. They were cutoff from adults and that's what made them victims for the most part...and I'm not trying to be categorical about it, but that's what we find most of the time.
So, when you're being hurt, and you've lost your natural protection, one way to respond to that is to shut down emotionally. And how do we see the shut down now? In the drugs the kids are using, like crystal meth because it will certainly wake you up and make you feel vital and alive when you're shut down. We see it in the extreme sports in the way the kids have to risk themselves. In order to feel alive, when they're shut down emotionally. We see it in the self-cutting behaviors. There's a tremendous increase in self-cutting now. Why do people cut? There's a song by "Nine inch nails" that Johnny Cash sang on one of his last albums. It goes: "I hurt myself today to see if I could feel." When you shut down emotionally, you need to cut to see if you still feel something. Think about the blood, gore, disgusting blood-gore driven scenes in movies that our kids are watching. Why? Because it takes that much to get them a little bit excited because they're shut down emotionally.
So, what's going on? When you become peer oriented, you lose your natural shield of nurturing adults. A peer group is not a safe group to belong to. It's not safe - not because kids are cruel by nature - because they're immature. And without adult guidance, there's a lot of dissing, bullying, exclusion, and bad-mouthing and so on. A lot of pain is being inflicted on kids by one another. How do you protect yourself? Well, as long as you have adult contacts, by talking about it; when you've lost that, by shutting down emotionally. And once you shut down emotionally, you need the constant contact, videos, light shows, stimulants; all the things that can drive kids into hyperactivity and self-harming behaviors because of loss of contact and hence the emotional shutdown. And they stop developing, because as I said, to develop, they need vulnerability. So, when you shutdown against vulnerability, you stay immature.
Now, we've got generations of kids that are staying immature well into their 20's and 30's. And if you want to see how immature they're staying, look at the TV programs they're watching. It's all about exploitation. It's all about relationship and who's betraying who, competition, who's going to beat who and many of the TV programs exploit the most vulnerable. The Jerry Springer show is one example of exploiting vulnerable people to make fun of them. That's immature culture. Why? Because the culture reflects the degraded tastes of immature youth. I'm not generalizing our children, I'm talking about trends. I'm not saying all the individuals all like that but there's grades of it.
In terms of schooling and education it [peer orientation] undermines it because a sense of curiosity is needed and curiosity is vulnerable. When you're curious, you have to admit you care about something and when you care about something you can be hurt. If you're shut down against vulnerability, you don't care. And you can't admit you don't know, and you're not going to admit you don't know when you're defending yourself. So the teacher's job is made infinitely more difficult. There's more to this. There are several ways of learning, and they're all related to attachment. When you lose your attachments, (what do you pay attention to? What you're attached to).
We can't go back to tribal life the way it was or to village life like the African saying "it takes a village to raise a child". What we can do is recreate those attachment dynamics in our lives. We can recreate them by first, not fomenting and fostering peer orientation. So, if the kids have been at daycare all week, don't have sleep-overs on the weekend. Don't have play dates. Why bring the enemy into your own house? That 3 year old fiend that's going to seduce your 3 year old son - don't do that. I don't mean that kids shouldn't play with each other, but when they've spent the whole week with each other, they need adult company. Don't take peers along on vacations. Don't think that you're socializing kids by making them play with each other. Don't buy that self-esteem is based on how much your peers like you - it's nonsense.
Think about it. When your self-esteem is based on whether or not other people like you - that's not SELF esteem. Self esteem doesn't say that I'm worthwhile because other people like me. Self esteem says I'm worthwhile. That I can be my own person and if people like me that's great and if they don't like me that's too bad but I'm esteeming this person that I am. If you're building self-esteem on peer acceptance, you're building it on sand. And even when kids "get it", they still feel insecure because they know how shifting - how insecure it is.
Kids don't get socialized by playing with other kids. What's socialization? You're socialized when you have a sense of who you are and you can respect the differences and individuality of other people. That's when you're socialized. And we talk about a 2 year old being socialized? That's about maturation. Don't think you need to push your kids away and make them independent. Independence is nothing you have to work at. Independence is what happens spontaneously. Every creature in nature seeks to become independent. They have to. That's how they survive. So, independence is nature's natural agenda.
First comes the attachment relationship which is the basis for everything and stays with us all our lives, and then comes your sense of being a separate self - of individuation so that you can function as a individual and then you can respect the individual sense or separateness of others. So these are stages that follow one another. They happen spontaneously. All you have to do is meet the child's attachment needs. Individuation or independence will follow and socialization will follow.
We're far too consumed with making our kids independent - of pushing them away too early and of socializing them, but that's putting the cart before the horse. That's not how nature actually works. We just have to follow the natural agenda.
The schools need to get into the attachment game. If our kids are going to spend so much time in day-cares and preschools, we better make sure those institutions meet their attachment needs, otherwise we're just creating peer orientation factories.
Studies in the US show that kids in day-cares have higher levels of stress hormones than they do at home - except when there's a higher adult to child ratio and where there's good attachment to the adults. So the issue is not that the kids have to be at home. The issue is that children should be in places where the adults are attaching to them. So that the kids don't have to, by default, attach to their peers instead. That's the point. And if our kids are going to spend most of their time away from us, we better make sure that where they are, are places of attachment.
When we see them at the end of the day, don't assume that they are still your kids. They're not because they can't hold onto you; you have to collect them. You need to collect them before you direct them. Bring them under your wing. Spend some time enjoying them. Hang out with them. Get up 10 min early just to have a few min of fun with them instead of this crazy rush to get out the door.
Make attachment a part of your life, consciously, otherwise you're going to lose it. Family meals, family vacations - two examples that could be safe guarded for just family interaction. Don't use methods of discipline that undermine the attachment relationship. Because if, as I told you, the attachment relationship is the only ground for development, then any discipline or any method that undermines that is going to undermine the very goal to which you're committed - which is to help the development of the child.
The essence of the punitive timeout is that the child is threatened with the one thing he needs most in his life right then - his attachment to you. This threat scares him, so he behaves for a little while. What's the long term impact? Have you tried a time-out on a teenager lately? Perhaps he'll become a bit sarcastic and remark how "unspeakably tragic" that is or feign terror or whatever. He won't care, because by that time he's already shut down emotionally. He's also attached to his peer group. So don't do something that undermines your relationship. There's other ways to teach discipline that don't undermine the relationship.
The final paragraph from the book:
Who's to raise our kids? The only answer that's compatible with nature is that we, the parents, and other adults concerned with the care of children must be their mentors, their guides, their nurturers and their models. We are to hold onto our children until our work is done. We are to hold on - not for selfish purposes - but so they can venture forth. Not to hold them back, but so that they can fulfill their development destinies. We need to hold onto them until they can hold onto themselves. Thank you.
