Mothering and parenting

Mother gets the blame for everything. This may seem unfair. So much therapy or psychoanalysis teaches people to express their long buried hatred of their mothers that this has become a kind of tragic joke. In defense even of harmful mothers, it must be admitted that women with children do not have an easy time. Only forty years ago they were bullied by their male doctors into thinking that it would damage the child's character if they picked it up except for feeding at predetermined intervals. It is not easy to buck authority, especially since child rearing is invested with so much responsibility and anxiety. The modern tendency is for everything, from birth to bottle to daycare center, to be completely mechanized. In some primitive societies, which we mistakenly see as idyllic, nothing much is mechanized, but mothers are prevented by envy and ritual from handling their infants with any special tenderness. In many societies, the very real emotions of the infant are not recognized. The fact that they are needs means that they can be misinterpreted as merely mechanical needs for the right temperature, the right food, the right amount of sleep. All this is surely an extension of the downplaying of emotions among adults, except for certain ritual occasions, and since the mother is the main transmitter of society's values in the early months of childhood, it is she who later gets the blame for the whole problem.

The fact remains that there are specific needs of young infants (up to the age of about three), and especially the need to be nursed at the breast, which can only be satisfied through the mother, or failing a mother, a mother substitute. This means that the mother—meaning the mother's own organism, the skin of her body, the way she moves, the sounds of her voice, her emotional responsiveness—becomes the initial reference point for all subsequent emotions. She is ground zero, as it were, the place where all emotions are first experienced and take off from. Many studies have shown that a baby deprived of its mother in the early months is actually deprived of its emotions. After initial phases of protest and despair, all that remains is detachment.

Again, there is no question of Emotional First Aid as such. But the mother's satisfaction of the child's needs can be seen as a kind of prototype. With adults, EFA provides the kind of support that a child needs from its mother. A mother's acceptance of the infant's needs means acceptance of the infant's emotions.

But mothers are surrounded by social pressures to reject the infant's needs. The conventional wisdom is that responses should be conditional, not unconditional, or that the child should have token access to the breast (i.e. at certain times only) rather than unrestricted access. It is as if there is a fear that given complete freedom, the child will completely devour and consume the mother. Indeed, if the mother is not strongly supported by her mate and the rest of her family, she may feel this way. Not all are strong enough, or have support enough, to be completely accessible.

When the mother is completely accessible, it turns out that she is not devoured after all. The child becomes fully satisfied, emotionally as well as physically, and a pulsation of contact and withdrawal imposes itself. (This is similar to EFA with adults; no matter what intense emotions are being expressed, though it seems they will continue for ever, they will always be resolved if there is an adequate response.) This process was called by Reich 'self regulation,' and was the basis of the child education methods of A. S. Neill at Summerhill. As Neill continually had to point out, self regulation means 'freedom but not license.' An organism that is self regulating does not in fact make excessive demands on others, although at times it may certainly make strong demands that cry to be met.

At the primary level, of needs demanding satisfaction and diminishing after being satisfied, in a pulsation of contact/with-drawal and attachment/detachment, all emotional self regulation begins with the contact with the mother. If she can be present and alive in her own organism, her child will develop a capacity for contact and an emotional liveliness.

By the time the father figures prominently in the child's emotional life, the child is more independent, and emotional expression has become somewhat different from the simple expression of needs. The child now experiences loss and frustration consciously in the sense that the child is aware of being able to satisfy its own needs at times, and is therefore more aware of the implications of being satisfied or denied by others. Relationships become more complex. Parenting, whether by mother or father, becomes a constant balancing act between self regulation of the child and parental regulation in the interests of health and protection. Some sort of EFA, or at least emotional awareness, becomes useful.

Self regulation and emotions

There is no space here to take into consideration all approaches to parenting. It will be assumed that most readers of this book have some respect for self regulation in children, since an interest in Emotional First Aid would seem unlikely in a person who was dedicated to methods of disciplining or indoctrinating children.

EFA as so far explored is consistent with self regulation in that it encourages the organism to seek its own emotional direction, and tries to remove some of the blocks, rather than suggesting directions for the organism to take. But we all want to protect our children, and there is a strong temptation to keep them safe from harm by directing them. This section will note some commonly expressed problems in this area.

Sibling rivalry. Whether to interfere in battles between children concerns many parents, and has been one of the most common questions at classes on EFA. Since sibling rivalry is an element in the development of the killjoy condition of envy, this may offer a clue as to how to resolve it. It seems to depend usually on feelings of deprivation by one of the children concerned. The first EFA measure must be to identify how the child is unhappy, what the child wants— especially from the parents. This may seem a tangential approach, but may resolve the underlying issue.

In the heat of battle between siblings, emotions run so high that it is tempting to put a stop to the conflict completely. This kind of interference (although obviously legitimate in the case of impending injury) tends to lead to a build up of resentment, and later explosions when the parent is out of the way. The other extreme, of encouraging some kind of controlled showdown between the warring children, is not advisable. One child is usually stronger than the other and will always win. This is distressful enough for the younger or weaker child without being reinforced by a staged confrontation that the adult watches. This is an example of how guidelines for EFA with children 'must be different from those with adults. For a child, the adult is a figure of huge power. A major 'Don't' for adults in the EFA of children must be: Don't manipulate children.

Although sibling rivalry is a classic situation where the adult is tempted to use power to resolve the issue, it might be best to realize that for all children their parents are a more important emotional reference point than their brothers or sisters. The needs expressed in the sibling rivalry are in the last analysis needs for some sort of contact or attention from the father or mother. Sibling rivalry can therefore best be resolved in a child's talks with the parents when the other child is absent, not about the rivalry, but about the child's needs.

Frustration. Life is full of frustrations for children, and parents are the instruments of the frustrations. This is sometimes reasonable, in the interest of protection, and sometimes unreasonable. It is not wrong to say no to a child. But if the child reacts angrily, it is wrong to condemn the reaction. In other words: Don't frustrate frustration.

Respect and condescension. It is hoped that the examples of childhood and adult emotional behavior presented in this book will demonstrate that at the level of the basic emotions there is no difference between adults and children. Most of us know this theoretically. But we forget it because we are bigger. A child's rage does not seem so deep as ours because it is often about something that, to us, seems trivial. But it is better for us to forget the content and open ourselves to the expression. When a child loses a toy, the expression of grief and anger may amount to a feeling as strong as our own feeling when we have lost a job. It is the emotion, not its content, that counts. And the child may be more overwhelmed by the emotion than an adult. All this is a question of respect. Don't condescend to children.