I am getting ready to write the 4th book in my series on the shift from a mass market institutional world to a personal and networked world. The next book will be You Don't Need a School to get an Education.
As in the other books, I will go back and look at how we all did things BEFORE we accepted that only an institution could help us. We forget that we learned to talk, to walk and to do all sorts of things before we went to school. We forget that play is how ALL young animals learn. They look at their elders, copy them and use play and experience. The adults stand back! No helicopter parents in nature.
But that is not what happens now is it? Here is Peter Gray talking about what our Hunter Gatherer ancestors did instead of programming their kids. This link takes you to an excellent article by Gray on this topic of how HG's parented and what we can learn from them.
Peter Gray, PhD-The Role of Play in the Development of Social and Emotional Competence: Hunter-Gatherers, 1950s America and Now from Ancestral Health Society on Vimeo.
Here is more from Jean Liedloff who wrote a book called theContinuum Concept.
In this book she shows us how traditional people raise children. To summarize her findings, she notes that traditional people keep their kids very close physically but they do not put them into the centre of their lives. They show their kids the adult world. In this world the adult is the centre. The child is attached and along for the ride but the hierarchy is clear. Mum's needs and her work comes first. The child witnesses all of this for the child is nearly always present.
Here are her words of advice for Western parents. (More here)
It appears that many parents of toddlers, in their anxiety to be neither negligent nor disrespectful, have gone overboard in what may seem to be the other direction. Like the thankless martyrs of the in-arms stage, they have become centered upon their children instead of being occupied by adult activities that the children can watch, follow, imitate, and assist in as is their natural tendency.
In other words, because a toddler wants to learn what his people do, he expects to be able to center his attention on an adult who is centered on her own business. An adult who stops whatever she is doing and tries to ascertain what her child wants her to do is short-circuiting this expectation. Just as significantly, she appears to the tot not to know how to behave, to be lacking in confidence and, even more alarmingly, looking for guidance from him, a two or three year old who is relying on her to be calm, competent, and sure of herself.
A toddler’s fairly predictable reaction to parental uncertainty is to push his parents even further off-balance, testing for a place where they will stand firm and thus allay his anxiety about who is in charge.
He may continue to draw pictures on the wall after his mother has pleaded with him to desist, in an apologetic voice that lets him know she does not believe he will obey. When she then takes away his markers, all the while showing fear of his wrath, he — as surely as he is a social creature — meets her expectations and flies into a screaming rage.
If misreading his anger, she tries even harder to ascertain what he wants, pleads, explains, and appears ever more desperate to placate him, the child will be impelled to make more outrageous, more unacceptable demands. This he must continue to do until at last she does take over leadership and he can feel that order is restored.
He may still not have a calm, confident, reliable authority figure to learn from, as his mother is now moving from the point of losing her temper to the point at which guilt and doubts about her competence are again rearing their wobbly heads. Nevertheless, he will have the meager reassurance of seeing that when the chips were down, she did relieve him of command and of his panicky feeling that he should somehow know what she should do.
How does this feel to you?
There is of course so much more to her work than this statement. If this intrigues you - please go here.
