It's Not Fair, Jeremy Spencer's Parents Let Him Stay up All Night!: A Guide to the Tougher Parts of Parenting - Softcover

It's Not Fair, Jeremy Spencer's Parents Let Him Stay Up All Night
I 1 Nurturing and the Baby Self A Potbellied Stove The be all and end all of earliest child development is nurturing. It's that simple. Nurturing is the base upon which all else is built. It supplies the core of the personality and the foundation of true self-esteem. I have often pictured this vital nurturing as a little potbellied stove, glowing with warmth, that sits at the center of our psychological being. With it, there is always something to fall back on, a warmth, a feeling-good about oneself. With it, a child will feel comfortable moving out into the world, a child will grow and flourish. Without that nurturing, there will be an inner emptiness that a child will be stuck forever trying to fall. At the core of that unnurtured personality will be a feeling of "not enough" rather than one of sufficiency. The personality that is then constructed upon this absence, this insufficiency, will rest upon a foundation that is not solid. Without good nurturing, children become much more vulnerable to all the ills andproblems that regularly beset humans in the course of a life. Without good nurturing, they constantly hunger to fill an emptiness that does not go away. A nice thing about children is that they seem to be pretty flexible, pretty adaptable. They seem able to get their nurturing, to grow and to thrive, from many different styles, even different "amounts," of nurturing. D. W. Winnicott, a famous child psychiatrist, spoke of "good-enough mothering," referring to the observed fact that the nurturing that children seem to need in order to develop normally does not have to be totally wonderful, and the amount of nurturing does not have to be 100 percent. Given "enough," they seem to be able to take it from there on their own. Even children who have suffered serious early deprivation do well when they are able to combine their own innate strength with good nurturing given to them later. However, there is no question that there is a bottom line. Below it, children may still come through with no major impairment, but the odds start turning against them. Fortunately, nurturing is neither complicated nor difficult to give. It is touching, hugging, talking to, paying attention to. It is ongoing loving contact. It is what we as humans do easily and naturally with our children. We love our children. We grab the back of a neck in passing, we give a big hug for no special reason, we lie down next to them and watch television, we have a child who seems too old to sit on our lap do so anyway. This wonderful love, this warm, affectionate, human contact that we all know is the best nurturing in the world. Love Attachment Nurturing also builds a primary attachment between parents and children. This attachment is inevitable and automatic, but it is not to be confused with bonding. In fact, the conceptof mother-child bonding has at times been misunderstood. From the infant's standpoint, there is no such thing as an immediate, powerful, "if you do not have it now forget it" bonding to mother at, shortly after, or even weeks following birth. The idea of bonding as some sort of crucial connection made by child to mother shortly after birth on which the success or failure of their relationship depends is pure myth. Bonding has nothing to do with the psychological development of humans, nor is it the primary attachment I'm talking about. The crucial primary attachment of nurturing develops gradually and over a period of time. Early in childhood, a child makes a special attachment to a person (or persons) who has been in the role of regular nurturer. This attachment is very special and very powerful. For once the attachment is made, that nurturing person is endowed with great power. It is only he or she who can give this most basic emotional nurturing. Others can nurture a child, but once the attachment is made, only the primary nurturer(s) can provide the special emotional nurturing that is so crucial to a child's developing a healthy sense of itself. The nurturer alone can adequately fuel the little potbellied stove at the core of a child's developing personality. Fortunately, there is even flexibility in the development of primary attachments. For example, a child orphaned suddenly at one year will suffer following his parents' deaths. But placed in a new nurturing home, most children can make a strong attachment to new parents. Given good early nurturing and continued good nurturing, the special attachment can remake itself. Once the attachment occurs, it is played out: nurturer and child responding and being responded to, loving and being loved--a mutuality of intimacy and sharing. With this early attachment, the nurturer assumes great power over a child's feelings. Parents smile and their baby is in ecstasy, they frown and their child's world is dashed. In their arms, their child iswithout worry. Parents know everything and can do anything. They keep their children fed, warm, and safe. Should their parents leave, the child frets, wanting them to return. A major theme of this book is that this primary nurturing attachment and the consequent great power that this gives to parents over their children's feelings is the single most important source of leverage in raising one's child. It is where parents find the ultimate power for child control. Parents and child are linked forever. Indeed, we all know, for better or for worse, how our parents, even when we have left home, gone on and made lives for ourselves, still have a direct line to some place deep at the center of our feelings. I'm a mature, successful woman. I can't believe how whenever I talk to her, my mother can still so easily get to me. If you understand the power of this leverage and have confidence in your own influence with your children--especially in the face of all the "I don't cares" and other disobedience you will encounter as a parent in the years to come--you will have a solid foundation for an effective system of child raising. The Move Toward Independence As the loving and being loved continue between parent and child, children gradually develop a capacity to nurture themselves, to make themselves feel good. In effect, they become able to pacify themselves when alone. We sometimes describe this as internalizing the "good parent." But, really, it is the internalization of loving and being loved. Often, young children need some kind of external object to help them, such as a thumb, a special blanky, or a teddy bear. Later they may create imaginary friends. But eventually they are able to hold the whole pacifying process inside themselves. When they are alone, they feel content and comfortable.When something happens in their lives to make them feel bad (for example, Mommy or Daddy gets mad at them for making a huge mess in the family room), they are able to fall back on something inside themselves to ultimately dissipate the bad feeling. They are not wholly dependent on Mommy and Daddy to make things feel okay. Left on their own, they can handle bad feelings. They mature. They begin to move toward independence. Normal development pushes toward maturity, independence. Yet there remains a part in children--in all of us--that does not grow up at all. The Baby Self and the Mature Self Every day seven-year-old Lance comes home from school, takes off his coat, and drops it on the floor, not three feet from the wall hook where he is supposed to hang it up. He does this every day, and every day he gets yelled at. "You can't just surprise me one time and hang up your coat when you come home?" But he never does. Not even once. Lance's classroom at school also has wall hooks for the children's coats. Every day without fail when Lance gets to school he takes off his coat and hangs it on his hook. Every day. Lance acts one way at home and another way at school. This is the way it is in real life and it's a crucial phenomenon of human psychology for parents to understand. Without it, much of child and adult behavior will never make sense. Like all of us, Lance has two different modes of functioning, which is actually like having two different selves. And in our lives, they operate back and forth like a switching of gears. I call these two selves the baby self and the mature self. At home, Lance's baby self wants what it wants now. It wants only pleasure and absolutely no fuss. Specifically, it likes to unwindand fill up with good stuff after a hard day at school. It likes to relax and feed. For example, it especially likes to sit in front of the television and eat Doritos. But let's take a closer look at the baby self. The baby self will tolerate no stress. It does not like to be bothered by anything or anybody.  
"Lance, just this once will you please hang up your coat when you get home? One simple hand and arm motion. It is not asking a lot."  
But Lance never does. When the baby self is in full sway, asking anything that it does not feel like doing is asking more than it will do. The baby self cares only about getting what it wants now.  
" I promise I will clean up my room all year if you buy me that Megaman Victory Fort."  
The baby self makes promises very easily because it recognizes no future. It feels obligated to nothing. The baby self particularly likes the word "later." When used by the baby self, "later" simply gets its parent out of its face for the time being.  
It knows no shame and is never sorry.  
"Lana, aren't you the /east bit ashamed? I caught you redhanded sneaking more lollipops and just after I said you couldn't. Aren't you sorry for what you've done?"  
Not the baby self. It's only mad that it got caught.  
It does not look at itself and it makes no judgments about itself. Doesn't Lana care that she has been sneaky and disobedient? No. The baby self does not look at itself and has no sense ofitself. It is not good or bad. It is not truthful or dishonest, smart or stupid, pretty or ugly. It just is.  
" When I'm home, I'm just me. It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter how I look. Nothing I do counts."  
It takes no responsibility for its own actions, nor does it care about the effects of its behavior on others.  
" Can't you see how upset your teasing makes your sister?" " But she was the one who came into my room."  
Including parents. A frustrated seven-year-old Kevin says, "You're the meanest mommy in the world. You are." Isn't Kevin concerned that this may hurt his mother, whom he genuinely loves? Not at that moment. All the baby self knows is that it is angry at its mother for not giving it its way and it wants to strike back. And yet later, and when looking back at his miserable behavior toward his mother, when separate from her and switching over to the mature mode, Kevin will feel remorse. And so he returns, as they often do.  
" I'm sorry, Mommy. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. Are you mad at me? I didn't mean it, Mommy. I love you. I don't like to make you feel bad."  
And the remorse is genuine. But the next time, when he does not get his way, he will be nasty all over again. For once again the baby self is back in charge. But, above all, the baby self wants Mommy and Daddy, the main nurturers, and it wants as much of them as much of the time as it can get. It is this last characteristic of the baby self--its total commitment to feeding on Mommy and Daddy--that is responsiblefor much of the most frustrating and perplexing of childhood behaviors. The Secret Behind Fussing "André, would you please take those two glasses out into the kitchen?" "They're not my glasses." "I don't care whose glasses they are. I am asking you to take them into the kitchen." "I didn't leave them there. Stephen did." "I said I want you to take those glasses into the kitchen." "But that's not fair! I didn't leave them there." "André, I don't care whose glasses they are. I'm telling you to take them out into the kitchen." "But it's not fair, I always have to do everything. Stephen's a slob and he gets away with everything." "TAKE OUT THE GLASSES!" "Don't yell at me, I didn't do anything wrong."  
The scene continued downhill from there, ending with eight-year-old André in tears running to his room.  
"You always yell at me. You always do. You always do." And his mother was left feeling furious and helpless. "You're really asking for it, André."  
The glasses remained where they were.  
When you think about it, this story makes no sense. Why didn't André simply take the glasses out into the kitchen in the first place and avoid the very unpleasant scene that followed? Why did he seem to create a long, nasty scene intentionally, when just a tiny amount of effort on his part would have avoided it? It especially makes no sense given that similar scenes had almost certainly taken place in the past. Andréknew what the outcome would be when he balked at taking the glasses into the kitchen, yet he provoked a scene that would end with his being genuinely miserable. Why--besides the unfathomable laziness of the baby self, the absolute refusal of the baby self to do any work, to experience any discomfort or stress--did he not simply take the glasses into the kitchen in the first place and "be done with it"? Parents who have been through such scenes know that often it seems more than just a matter of a child's being indescribably lazy. Their child seems to provoke the fight, and to want it to continue and to escalate. It is as if their child is after something, but it is unclear what. From the parents' standpoint, it often genuinely seems as if their child wanted a smack in the face. Why? What is the child after? Let me change the previous example. Suppose André's mother made the same request as before, but in this version the rest of the story proceeds a little differently.  
"André, would you please take these glasses from the family room out into the kitchen?" "They're not my glasses." "I don't care whose glasses they are. I am asking you to take them into the kitchen." "Oh, all right."  
André, perhaps mumbling under his breath, takes the glasses into the kitchen. What happens next? Typically, we would expect that André would go off on his own and do whatever it was he was doing or planning to do prior to his mother's asking him to take the glasses into the kitchen. Perhaps he was going to play with his action figures in his room, or go pester his brother. Over the next half hour, André probably would have engaged in some activity quite separate from his mother. Now let's return to the first version. In that example, André got the opposite of a half hour of independent activity. Whathe got instead was a long emotional scene of yelling, screaming, crying, and sulking. Rather than time spent separated from his mother, he got a substantial period of time filled with passionate interaction with her. For the baby self in Andr...