How are you handling your childs emotional development?

I don't know that I would say "you are needed here now". I think it puts an unnecessary burden and pressure upon him. (and things are bad enough) Like it his task to fix the world - it is not. I would go more with: we all chose to be here at this time for some reason (perhaps implying that it is a game or puzzle for us all to find out why). It is also an opportunity to teach. Teach him to observe while he is open. You have one or two years until puberty begins to hit and that open window changes. The world has always been insane, it was just easier to ignore it in the past. Share your own early realizations as a child of living in a world that makes no sense. My heart goes out to him.
Yes good point, I agree @BHelmet with putting unnecessary burdens on him with my choice of words. I felt that in hindsight too. We have had many conversations about why we think we are here. He's very switched on - I definitely need to ease off on burdening him with responsibilities. Thank you
 
So, I agree that joking about that woman would help and perhaps you and your son can find other ways in order to immunise him against this world he finds himself in. Perhaps writing or drawing could help him make sense of things if that's his way. Or building things. Something creative to counteract all that destruction?
Yes he spent the day in the garden building a fire pit with his Dad and now they've gone hunting. My husband was better than me at brushing it off as the crazy lady next door scenario which has lightened the mood for sure.
 
I'm sorry to read your story KTC and the effect on your son. Not one bit surprising with the despicable level of aggressive paramoralism that the so called leadership in Australia is spewing out on the populous each day. I get the sense from your description the woman in question was responding from the same place and the whole 'dont be one of those a bad citizen's by setting the wrong example - because then everything going on will be your fault to!'

Anyway, you mentioned emotional development being your priority but you don't say much about what your son had to say about what went on and his own unfiltered feelings about it. I could be way off here, but were they tears of sorrow/upset or were they actually tears of rage and injustice? I ask this because I see you appear to have spent time framing the event around 'compassion' but did you give him the space and opportunity to say what he truly felt first? Maybe I've missed that but in my experience not seeking to frame a child's (and especially a boy's) first emotional responses through adult eyes too soon is really, really important. Whatever it is they feel needs parental validation, non-judgement, and the opportunity to be heard in full and acknowledged before the process of feedback and suggestion of other nuances kicks in. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that boys and their emotions is a complex area for many reasons (e.g. one simplistic way of putting it is they can often feel a huge amount - sometimes too much - without the inbuilt tools to handle it - plus they receive a lot of programming from many directions that boys are not meant to feel or show such girly stuff!) Anger is a healthy emotion - a righteous response - when channeled correctly - but we all know how quickly we learn or get told to 'turn the other cheek' or 'forgive thy neighbour' etc, and boys quickly learn from feedback that they are 'bad' to have had certain responses that are actually really necessary, healthy and require expressing and honouring. And in boys their anger emotion is a really important building block towards taking affirmative action. If it was anger (and as I say I could be well off here so ignore if I am), then he was right to be angry. Absolutely right. And he needs to know that. Otherwise he will learn to suppress and suppress and that always ends up leaving a big problem later on. Compassion is one thing but empathy another - and I think more valid and wholesome - and that comes from a form of understanding in which your own self is honoured first and also given empathy. Only then can you create the necessary and willing space in which you can see how someone else is different but has every right to be that way on their own terms also. And maybe, just maybe, he secretly thought she didn't deserve 'compassion' because he was expected to forgive and forget whilst she was the one who was clearly out of hand and taking that out on him and his new found playmates. FWIW.
 
I'm sorry to read your story KTC and the effect on your son. Not one bit surprising with the despicable level of aggressive paramoralism that the so called leadership in Australia is spewing out on the populous each day. I get the sense from your description the woman in question was responding from the same place and the whole 'dont be one of those a bad citizen's by setting the wrong example - because then everything going on will be your fault to!'

Anyway, you mentioned emotional development being your priority but you don't say much about what your son had to say about what went on and his own unfiltered feelings about it. I could be way off here, but were they tears of sorrow/upset or were they actually tears of rage and injustice? I ask this because I see you appear to have spent time framing the event around 'compassion' but did you give him the space and opportunity to say what he truly felt first? Maybe I've missed that but in my experience not seeking to frame a child's (and especially a boy's) first emotional responses through adult eyes too soon is really, really important. Whatever it is they feel needs parental validation, non-judgement, and the opportunity to be heard in full and acknowledged before the process of feedback and suggestion of other nuances kicks in. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that boys and their emotions is a complex area for many reasons (e.g. one simplistic way of putting it is they can often feel a huge amount - sometimes too much - without the inbuilt tools to handle it - plus they receive a lot of programming from many directions that boys are not meant to feel or show such girly stuff!) Anger is a healthy emotion - a righteous response - when channeled correctly - but we all know how quickly we learn or get told to 'turn the other cheek' or 'forgive thy neighbour' etc, and boys quickly learn from feedback that they are 'bad' to have had certain responses that are actually really necessary, healthy and require expressing and honouring. And in boys their anger emotion is a really important building block towards taking affirmative action. If it was anger (and as I say I could be well off here so ignore if I am), then he was right to be angry. Absolutely right. And he needs to know that. Otherwise he will learn to suppress and suppress and that always ends up leaving a big problem later on. Compassion is one thing but empathy another - and I think more valid and wholesome - and that comes from a form of understanding in which your own self is honoured first and also given empathy. Only then can you create the necessary and willing space in which you can see how someone else is different but has every right to be that way on their own terms also. And maybe, just maybe, he secretly thought she didn't deserve 'compassion' because he was expected to forgive and forget whilst she was the one who was clearly out of hand and taking that out on him and his new found playmates. FWIW.
Yeah good point @Michael B-C. I did ask him why he was crying when we got home and he said he felt bad for the woman's son. He does tend to frame things often like that. Like he feels for other people a lot. In a group situation he seems to step up as the moderator "come on guys thats not fair", that kind of stuff and I wonder if (now that you say it) that he was tearful at the beach out of anger and then got home and processed it more to feel sorry for his friend too.

I'm not certain but he wasn't keen to talk at the beach so now that I reflect he was probably angry then.

These are really important points for me as a mother to really understand how he processes things as an individual but also as a developing male.

I think maybe I do spend too much energy on pointing out things like forgiveness and love and compassion and I need to let him be in his anger (and rightly so) as you say.

Oh man it's such a learning experience being a parent. Thanks for your insights. I can really work with these.
 
I think maybe I do spend too much energy on pointing out things like forgiveness and love and compassion and I need to let him be in his anger (and rightly so) as you say.

These can be good traits for development, but they can also be destructive when they are given when not asked for. This woman wasn't asking for forgiveness and from her behavior and treatment of your son as well as her own, she has rejected basic human decency in favor of fear and backwards self preservation.

When I was looking for the excerpt about the professor from Political Ponerology, I also found this which is a perfect fit for what you described and what pretty much all thinking people are being subjected to:

Lobaczewski said:
If a person with a normal instinctive substratum and basic intelligence has already heard and read about such a system of ruthless autocratic rule “based on a fanatical ideology”, he feels he has already formed an opinion on the subject.

However, direct confrontation with the phenomenon will inevitably produce in him the feeling of intellectual helplessness. All his prior imaginings prove to be virtually useless; they explain next to nothing. This provokes a nagging sensation that he and the society in which he was educated were quite naive.

Anyone capable of accepting this bitter void with an awareness of his own nescience, which would do a philosopher proud, can also find an orientation path within this deviant world. However, egotistically protecting his world view from disintegrative disillusionment and attempting to combine them with observations from this new divergent reality, only reaps mental chaos.

The latter has produced unnecessary conflicts and disillusionment with the new rulership in some people; others have subordinated themselves to the pathological reality. One of the differences observed between a normally resistant person and somebody who has undergone a transpersonification is that the former is better able to survive this disintegrating cognitive void, whereas the latter fills the void with the pathologic propaganda material without sufficient controls.

When the human mind comes into contact with this new reality so different from any experiences encountered by a person raised in a society dominated by normal people, it releases psychophysiological shock symptoms in the human brain with a higher tonus of cortex inhibition and a stifling of feelings, which then sometimes gush forth uncontrollably.
The mind then works more slowly and less keenly because the associative mechanisms have become inefficient.

Especially when a person has direct contact with psychopathic representatives of the new rule, who use their specific experience so as to traumatize the minds of the “others” with their own personalities, his mind succumbs to a state of short-term catatonia. Their humiliating and arrogant techniques, brutal paramoralizations, and so forth deaden his thought processes and his self-defense capabilities, and their divergent experiential method anchors in his mind. In the presence of this kind of phenomenon, any moralizing evaluation of a person’s behavior in such a situation thus becomes inaccurate at best.

Only once these unbelievably unpleasant psychological states have passed, thanks to rest in benevolent company, is it possible to reflect, always a difficult and painful process, or to become aware that one’s mind and common sense have been fooled by something which cannot fit into the normal human imagination.
 
I fear my child is missing out on being a kid and is being forced to grow up so quickly. We have a lot of fun and joy in our life, we are active, outdoors people but the emotional toil is so much more than what I had to deal with at that age. Will our children be damaged or will they be warriors? What do you think?
I am the uncle of a dozen nieces and nephews in France, not to mention those of my half-sisters and brothers abroad.
The other day on the beach, after several laps, and a few dives to see how the sea anemone neighbours were doing, I came across a few tourist families on my way home.
I am always surprised by the natural ability of little children to make us smile and laugh, and that as they grow up, they need to be reminded from time to time of their own childlike nature, and for that parents must not forget the little child they were, before becoming tutors, not only to support their children, but to be a living example for them, to inspire them as much as they inspire us for a better tomorrow, in these times that are not only difficult, but also special for them.
In confidence, the child often asks for our help, and advice on their own.
Or even find their own answers, and their own lessons.
And all the while the parents "veillent au grain"/are watching over them.
A French expression, "grain" not related to plants, but to a strong gust of wind, accompanied by rain.
 
What I would like to know from forum members of children is what have your experiences been and how are you dealing with it? What has worked for you and what hasn't worked? What are you doing to help your child develop a robust emotional state and what are you doing to mitigate the damage that is obviously being pushed on them from all directions?
2 weeks back, I took my kids ( 18 and 15) out and my daughter wants to wear the mask inside the car. I tried to convince her to remove the mask and my irritated son told me "It is like installing windows 10 on Apple2( 1970 version) and it's not going to work". Leaving aside the sibling rivalry and witticism, I thought it is a good analogy. While returning home, I tried to talk some data points to my son about the contradictions in covid narration. My daughter started crying. Is the crying good or bad in this context? I don't know. If it created emotional reaction in her means some of the data points went into her. It doesn't mean she will change overnight or ever, but she knows some thing more exist than she knows.

I did ask him why he was crying when we got home and he said he felt bad for the woman's son. He does tend to frame things often like that. Like he feels for other people a lot. In a group situation he seems to step up as the moderator "come on guys thats not fair", that kind of stuff and I wonder if (now that you say it) that he was tearful at the beach out of anger and then got home and processed it more to feel sorry for his friend too.

I'm not certain but he wasn't keen to talk at the beach so now that I reflect he was probably angry then.

We need to validate their emotions, tell them It's alright to feel the way they are feeling. We can say, "It's alright feel upset with the situation, I also feel the same. Some times mass hysteria takes over the world, it will make people suffer and they will wake up. that's is how world works. This shall pass"

Kids are sharp in understanding nuances of the world, if they are exposed. Exposure to this type of quotes helps to think differently and ask what is truth.

an-error-does-not-become-truth-by-reason-of-multiplied-propagation-nor.jpg
 

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