The Secret of Happy Children: A guide for parents. Steve Biddulph
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thing when he thundered out, ‘You have sinned!’ – everyone had!
‘Adults know everything; they can even read your mind.’ Such are the thoughts of a child. So when a child is told ‘You’re clumsy’, he or she becomes nervous, and is clumsy. The child told ‘You’re a pest’ feels the rejection, becomes desperate for reassurance and so does pester. The child told ‘You’re an idiot’ may violently disagree on the outside, but inside can only sadly agree. You’re the adult, so you must be right.
‘You’ messages work at both the conscious and unconscious levels. In our work we’ve often asked children to describe themselves, and they will say things like ‘I’m a bad kid’, ‘I’m a nuisance’.
Others, though, will show evidence of confusion – ‘Mum and Dad say they love me, but I don’t think they do’. Consciously they hear the words, but unconsciously they hear/see/smell the feeling behind the words.
It’s all in the way we say it. We can choose to say to children, ‘I’m angry with you and I want you to tidy up your toys NOW!’ and have no fears about lasting effects. If we say, ‘You lazy little brat, why don’t you ever do what you’re told?’ and repeat this kind of message when-ever conflict occurs, then the result will come as no surprise.
Don’t pretend to be happy or loving when you aren’t feeling that way – it’s confusing and can make children become evasive and in time quite disturbed. We can be honest about our feelings, without putting children down. They can handle ‘I’m really tired today’, or ‘Right now I’m too angry…’ especially if this matches what they have sensed all along. It helps them realise that you are human too, which has got to be a good thing.
At a large parents’ meeting I once addressed, I asked if people would call out the ‘you’ messages they remembered hearing as children. I wrote them on a blackboard and this is what we came up with:
The examples came in little rushes at first, as people’s memories were triggered, but by the end the blackboard was covered and the room was almost in a state of riot. The sense of relief and release was very evident in the large hall as people spoke aloud the words that had hurt them so long ago.
Very few people felt their parents had been deliberately destructive or malicious – it was simply that this was the way children were corrected. ‘Tell them they’re bad and that makes them good!’ Those were the Dark Ages of child-rearing: we’re just beginning to escape.
Your mind remembers everything that ever happened to you
In the 1950s people with epilepsy had a bad time because the medications we now use had not been developed. A man called Penfield found that an operation could be used to help the more severe cases. By making small cuts on the surface of a person’s brain, he could sometimes reduce or even halt the ‘electrical storms’ which cause epileptic seizures.
The interesting part – I hope you’re sitting down as you read this – is that the patients were required, for safety reasons, to be conscious, and the operation was done under only a local anaesthetic. The surgeon removed a small piece of skull, made the cuts and then put back the piece and sewed up the skin. It makes me shudder, too, but it was better than the disease!
During the operation the patients experienced something very surprising. As the doctor, using a fine probe, made tiny contacts with the surface of the brain, the patient would suddenly have vivid recollections – watching Gone with the Wind years earlier, complete with the smell of cheap perfume in the cinema and the beehive hairstyle of the person in front! When the doctor moved the probe to another spot, the person would see before him his fourth birthday party – even though he was wide awake and sitting in the operating chair. It was the same with every patient, though of course the memories were different.
Subsequent research backed up this remarkable discovery: that everything – every sight, sound and spoken word – is stored in our brain. It is often difficult to remember but nevertheless it is there, having its effect. On the wrinkled surface of our brain our life is recorded in its entirety!
Unconscious hearing is a phenomenon that you’ve almost certainly experienced. You’ve been at a party or a meeting, listening to someone near you. The room is buzzing with people talking and perhaps music, too. Suddenly, from a conversation clear across the room, you hear someone say your name, or the name of a friend, or something that concerns you. ‘Aaargh!’ you think, ‘what are they saying about me?’
How does this happen? We have discovered from research that there are two parts to your hearing: firstly, what your ears actually pick up; and secondly, what you pay conscious attention to.
Although you are unaware of it, your brilliant hearing system is filtering every conversation within range in the room and, if a key word or phrase occurs, the switchboard department in your brain ‘puts it through’ to conscious attention. You certainly couldn’t listen to all that was being said at one time but, nonetheless, a primitive filter is scanning it for important messages. We know this from many experiments and also from the fact that under hypnosis people can recall things that they didn’t consciously notice at the time!
The following situation has been reported in many parts of the world.
Late one night a petrol tanker runs out of control, careers down-hill and smashes through the front wall of a house. When rescuers enter the house they are amazed to find a young mother sleeping heavily, undisturbed by the crash. As they stand there, not knowing what to do, a baby begins to cry in the back room. The mother instantly awakes. ‘Wha…what’s going on?’
The filter in her hearing system works on as she sleeps but is checking for only one thing – the baby – and only this sound is ‘put through’ to her mind.
How does all of the above relate to children? Think of all the things that are said about children when they are supposedly not listening. Then remember their acute listening powers (a sweet wrapper at 50 metres!). We may well include the time when they are asleep for there is clear evidence that sounds and speech are taken in even as a person dreams and sleeps.
Also, there is that obvious time when a child has not yet learnt (or decided to let you know) that it can speak. The baby, for months before it speaks much, can follow much of what is intended, if not every word.
I am often amazed by parents, who have been fighting bitterly for years or are desperately unhappy for some reason, telling me, ‘Of course, the kids know nothing about it’. Children, in fact, know almost everything about everything. They may oblige you by keeping it to themselves or only show it indirectly by bedwetting or trying to murder their siblings, but they know. So, if you talk about your children, be sure you are saying what you really want to say. This, too, is a direct channel to their minds.
And why not start to use this channel to boost them by saying what you genuinely like and appreciate to others while they’re in earshot? This is especially useful at ages/stages when direct praise is embarrassing to them.
Hearing and healing
This story is told by one of my teachers, Dr Virginia Satir.
A child had just been operated on for tonsil removal and, back in the ward, was failing to stop bleeding. Dr Satir joined the concerned staff in examining the still-open cuts in the child’s throat.
On an impulse, she asked what was happening in the theatre at the time of the operation.
‘Oh, we’d just finished a throat cancer operation on an old lady.’