This blog post details the Choices for Children conference presentation delivered at the 2010 Australian Women’s Health Network conference in Hobart, Tasmania, on Thursday 20 May. ©2010 Kristina Brenner and Themis Thomas.
The reason we have chosen today’s topic is due to our passion about children’s healthy development into adults. We are concerned about the harm that is being done by the exploitative ways in which most facets of society set us up to be slaves to a false illusion of wellbeing. Safety and security is being sold to us externally by way of media, advertising, marketing and mass grooming.
As we proceed through our presentation today, we invite you to create your own meanings from the words we offer. We aren’t providing many specific examples because we want this presentation to resonate with as many people as possible. It’s important that you find your own individual way to relate this to your personal or professional lives.
SAFETY
Family, relationships, passion, nurturing and caring form the basis of healthy human interaction. In fact, studies have shown that it is a matter of life or death for babies. Human interaction is the foundation upon which our sense of safety and security is built.
Our survival depends on this sense of safety and wellbeing. And because of this dependence, we are vulnerable to the things we think are providing it to us.
Some human interactions are healthy and genuine, and we are correct to integrate them into our sense of being. They offer the nurturing and emotional nourishment required for growth. However, other times we may accept what is offered to us even though it is only a pretension of care.
When care is not forthcoming in a healthy way, we are still compelled to accept it. Sometimes we cannot distinguish between genuine and artificial intentions – regardless of whether we are children or adults.
When we speak of the difference between genuine and artificial, we mean that genuine actions are truly in the best interests of the receiver. Artificial actions, when looked at honestly, only serve the needs of the giver, while under the pretext that it is beneficial for the receiver.
When someone is the recipient of artificial actions, external safety is implied in the transaction, but the inner safety is not felt, and a confusion occurs. This causes a hypocrisy that a child is not able to make sense of, and a split develops in the psyche, directly related to feelings of safety and security. The child thinks that they should feel safe, but they don’t experience it. How this split manifests varies depending on the individual and other contributing factors that create our identities, yet the common factor about how this split manifests in a personality is this: a person’s locus of power becomes external, and therefore dependent, rather than internal and autonomous. An example of someone with an external locus of power might be a woman who only feels attractive when men tell her she is pretty. The woman is giving others the power to determine how she feels about herself.
Now we’ll do a little experiment: Put yourselves in the mind’s eye of a child and assume that we have your best interests at heart. You feel safe and cocooned, and your learning brain is open and receptive. Keep imagining you are an innocent and curious child as you read the next slide.
SEX
The same way that some of you may have experienced an incongruence when the slides switched from ‘Safety’ to ‘Sex’ is the incongruence that is experienced when a child is exposed to adult messages too early in their development. It is the compound effect of the exposure to such adult messages, with only a child’s cognition available to work the messages out, that creates an unconscious confusion. This subtle type of inner confusion, between what a child intuitively knows doesn’t feel quite right, yet the external environment insists is normal, potentially creates a sense of unsafety. Natural, healthy childhood development and open learning capacity is thwarted; replaced instead by a child prematurely adapting themselves to a false adulthood.
When there is adult hypocrisy, or confusion between a child’s feelings and the environment, the child struggles with the enormous conflicts between autonomy and dependency; authenticity and falsehood; love and abuse; and so on. They feel a need to reconcile them in order to return to their experience of safety, to be okay again. However, because these experiences are impossible to reconcile, the only way a functioning human child can make sense of the felt hypocrisy is to pretend that their conflicting experiences are in fact one and the same. Abuse becomes seen as love, falsehood becomes seen as authenticity. Children internalise these new false realities and develop patterns where they continue to do so in the future because it’s the only way that they can deal with the confusion. It becomes more and more natural to accept the false realities as who we are, because to name the hypocrisy threatens one’s survival.
POWER
A child’s development depends on the adult, just as your present experience here today is dependent on our output. Look at the way in which we summoned you to adopt a child’s state of mind during our slide switch from ‘Safety’ to ‘Sex’. You could say that when we did this, we asserted our power over you. This may be likened to the power that the environment of adulthood has over the growing, fresh innocence of a child’s developing mind. Explicit or implied positions of authority dictate how people should be and feel, and just because of someone’s position of power, there is an automatic obligation, almost, to simply do what they say. Some examples:
- Advertising, in many different ways, gives the message that ‘If you only have these clothes, car or makeup, you will find true love, happiness and even freedom’.
- As an example of teacher/student power: Earlier this month a news report described a situation in America where a teacher auctioned off the worst performing students to other students, sold as slaves for a day in order to reenact Roman slavery. The practice went unquestioned by students until a mother chose to complain. Even though badly performing students were being actively targeted and discriminated against, and students felt uncomfortable about it, they still complied with the teacher.
- To show the power that adults hold in parental relationships: There is currently a trial in Australia being undertaken against a mother who forced her 13 year old daughter to engage in sex acts with a truck driver in exchange for petrol. Despite repeated incidents of abuse at her mother’s facilitation, the daughter still wants her mother’s unconditional love, and can’t accept her mother’s role in the abuse that happened to her.
For us, it was this type of manipulative power over innocent child development that inspired the creation of the Choices for Children Committee at the start of 2009. The committee is made up of community members and workers who are jointly acting against the sexualisation and exploitation of children. We are a small group and we don’t engage in large scale political or legal action; rather, our purpose is to empower individuals to make differences in their lives through small, local actions. These may be carried out in the community, in someone’s social circle, or in one’s own family. The committee’s philosophy is underpinned by the ‘ripple effect’ – in that we believe that small personal changes can have a positive follow-on effect and inspire others to make similar changes in their lives. Thus, wider change is created not only through mass action but through the impacts of personal change.
As you may have noticed from our earlier examples, power can be used in many ways. Power can be used unthinkingly by adults in their privileged positions, with negative consequences.
But alternatively, power can be used consciously by responsible adults to create opportunities and good options for children to choose from, and thus it helps them learn to trust their own decisions. It is important to realise that we cannot escape our power positions as adults, yet what we can do is make a choice about how we use them.
CHOICES
Adults need to show children that in many situations, they always have a choice to think, feel and respond in ways that are true to themselves. We’re not advocating that children set their own rules, disobey curfews or take on the responsibility of keeping themselves safe. What we are encouraging is that adults give children permission to question.
Children benefit from learning that they can question other people’s behaviours, their own behaviours, and any constraints that are being imposed upon them. In many cases these constraints will be motivated by a genuine concern for a child’s wellbeing, however in some cases a child would do well to question an adult’s actions, because the actions might not necessarily be in the child’s best interests. Developing a sense of critical thinking and questioning will help build children’s autonomy, identity, independence and self esteem. Showing children that they have a choice to question and think for themselves will help them to shift from having an external locus of control, which is often unavoidable when they are still little, to an internal one, which is a preferable state for both young people and adults to be in.
This issue does not stop at childhood. We all have choices, all the time, and we all deserve to feel as if we do. This is something that’s easy to forget when we are caught up the rat race, stuck on the treadmill of life, inundated with stress or pressure.
That’s not living, it’s just survival. Life doesn’t have to be this hard, if only we stop to realise there is another way: CHOICE.
But at the same time that we realise we have the potential for choice and change, we must also accept that we are good enough exactly as we are. This might feel like a paradox, but as adults we can actually reconcile these two ideas and hold them at the same time.
Once we know this, it can change us in an instant.
When the feeling of being good enough has been accepted internally, we stop having the need for an agenda or a point to prove, and we stop using our power over others to try and reassure ourselves that we are good enough. In terms of how this relates to children, we want to highlight especially that adults’ feelings of being good enough can have a ripple effect and help to create this same feeling in the children who they interact with. Adults who feel good enough about themselves during their interactions with children are truly acting in the best interests of the child. This is because an adult who feels that they are good enough will not be acting to get only their own needs met. If you recall our earlier discussion regarding the genuine and artificial, what we’re talking about now is genuine love – love without strings attached.
LOVE
Love speaks for itself, and today we are ending our offering on this high vibration. Love gives children a ‘fair go’, a chance to get on with healthy development without interference or distraction.
If we are conscious about every choice we make, every word we say to children, every word we say to each other, we are capable of feeling an absolute freedom to choose every response in any situation. Instead of being REACTIVE (coming from a place of fear) we become RESPONSIVE (which comes from a true space inside, one of love).
What do we mean by LOVE? We mean making courageous decisions, despite the knowledge that sometimes, the recipient of your response will be unappreciative; the result may be loss of some sort; or you will look like the ‘baddie’. But these are all just internal ego fears, our personal triggers.
Making courageous decisions is love… because you are genuinely acting in the best interests of the child or situation, despite any primal, internal ego fears. When we feel the scare, and are still able to consciously CHOOSE the way in which we will respond, we are acting from an energy of love. We are RESPONDING, rather than REACTING, and in responding, we allow healthy room for learning, absorbing, and growing. Call it what you will: true, authentic, genuine, pure – when you respond to any situation from a conscious place, regardless of the impulses inside your body, you are allowing yourself the freedom to choose.
This speaks to the core of today’s presentation, and to the core of our chosen name for our committee: CHOICES for CHILDREN is not only about making choices for little people, it’s about modelling to future generations through our own actions that they have a capacity to choose their own responses in every situation, and thus choose how they live their own lives.
So for those of you that have interactions with children, we want to end by reminding you that you hold great power and potential in the actions you choose. Please choose responsibly. But even if you don’t have the opportunities in your environment to facilitate good choices for children, then we ask that you leave this presentation with newfound appreciation of how choices can be used in your personal lives as adults. The power of choice in human interaction and relationships can enrich all of our lives, offering great opportunities for freedom, authenticity and joy.
