Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ it as something which is basically natural and valuable but which needs to be tended carefully, in the same way that fire is natural and valuable but needs to be handled with care.

      My workshop participants showed very clearly that the two parental styles of dealing with anger had been a poor preparation for their future life. Both groups were frightened of anger. Those who had grown up in a family where anger was unrestrainedly expressed were frightened of anger because they saw it as unpredictable, dangerous and destructive. Those who had grown up in a family which pretended that they did not feel anger were frightened of anger because it was a silent, unpredictable, hidden danger. Being frightened of anger for whatever reason prevents a person from developing flexible and adaptive ways of dealing with it. Some people deny that they ever get angry, but they find themselves plagued with inexplicable fears and with headaches or stomach and bowel disorders. Other people are aware that they are angry but they are so frightened of their anger and feel so guilty about being angry that they cannot express their anger in any effective way. If we cannot deal sensibly with anger we have difficulty in all our relationships, and if we see anger as always being wicked and unworthy we condemn ourselves as being wicked instead of understanding how anger is a necessary defence which can hold us together when events and other people threaten to annihilate us as a person.

      In the first three years of their life babies learn a great deal about those aspects of the world which are dangerous and about how they can defend themselves against these dangers, including how to deny their fear and how to deny those aspects of themselves which the people around them will not accept. Adults usually treat babies with some degree of tolerance, but when babies turn into toddlers and then into children, much of this tolerance is withdrawn. As children we discover that, whatever childhood is, it is not the happiest time of our lives.

The Perils of Childhood

      In 1621, Robert Cleaver and John Dod, in their book A Godly Form of Household Government, advised parents:

      The young child which lieth in its cradle is both wayward and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a reat [wrong-doing] heart, and is altogether inclined to evil… If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and over and burn down the whole house. For we are changed and become good not by birth but by education… Therefore parents must be wary and circumspect… they must correct and sharply reprove their children for saying or doing ill.⁷

      Cleaver and Dod were making explicit the model of the child which is still very prevalent in our society today. This is the model of the child being intrinsically bad. The Christian image of the child being born in sin is an example of this model. If children are seen as being intrinsically bad then their upbringing must be concerned with inhibiting, controlling and moulding the child. Many educational systems are based on this model, including the educational system, which sets a national curriculum and demands that every child must be educated totally in terms of this curriculum. However, there is another model of the child which we can use, that of the child being intrinsically good. This second model is implied in our word ‘education’, which has its root in ‘leading into the light’.⁸ Alas, most children become victims of an education based on the idea that children are basically bad and have to be inhibited, controlled and moulded. The belief that children are not actually people but objects to be used by adults is still very prevalent in most societies, including our own.

      This idea is part of the tradition that the child’s point of view is of no importance, that the parents’ point of view must prevail, that the parents must teach the child everything of value and that the child must sacrifice himself for the parents. This is an essential part of our culture, for this is what the Bible teaches. As the psychoanalyst Alice Miller has described it:

      It is always the Isaacs whose sacrifice God demands from the Abrahams, never the other way around. It is daughter Eve who is punished for not resisting temptation and not suppressing her curiosity out of obedience to God’s will. It is the pious and faithful son Job whom God the Father continues to mistrust until he has proved his faithfulness and subservience by undergoing unspeakable torments. It is Jesus who dies on the Cross to fulfil the words of the Father. The Psalmists never tire of extolling the importance of obedience as a condition of each and every human life. We have all grown up with this cultural heritage, but it could not have survived as long as it has if we had not been taught to accept without question the fact that a loving father has the need to torment his son, that the father cannot sense his son’s love and therefore, as in the story of Job, requires it.⁹

      This tradition arose out of necessity. When life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, a child was of little value. Adults, whose life expectancy might be no more than twenty or thirty years, were the tribe members who could maintain the tribe by having the skills to secure the food supply and by producing future generations of the tribe. A dependent child was a burden. The child had to be grateful for being allowed to exist - unsatisfactory babies were left to die - and had to prove his gratitude to his elders. As soon as the child was big enough to carry out some tasks, he or she had to begin working, and to work effectively the child had to learn the tribe’s rules of conduct. If the child and the tribe were to survive, then the children had to give up their desires to play and to be irresponsible, and had to learn to conform to the rules of the tribe. Physical survival of all, children and adults, depended on obedience. Even today, in most African societies the child, even when an adult, is forbidden to correct an elder, even if the elder’s ideas are leading to disaster.¹⁰

      The lowly status of children and the necessity of children learning obedience in order to survive continues to this day where families live in poverty and near-starvation. Over the past two decades, in each of the famines in Africa, aid workers from the West saw their task as that of feeding the starving children, but for many of the tribal Africans this was not their first priority. For them, the adults should be fed before the children, and this is what they did, even if it meant that the children starved.

      If the early generations of the human race had not followed the rule that children should be sacrificed in order to secure the continuation of the tribe, many of us would not be here today, benefiting from a lifestyle which does not demand that a child dies because there is insufficient food or that a child has to begin working as soon as its little hands can carry a burden or its little legs can toddle. In the West we no longer send five-year-olds into the factory to tend the machines, or seven-year-olds down the mine to pull the coal trucks, but we still demand that the parents’ interests are paramount. An example of this can be seen in the Family Court in NSW, Australia. The journalist Adele Horin wrote:

      A few years ago the Family Court published research on separated fathers that vividly exposed the pain and sadness many felt… But lawmakers got it into their mind a few years ago that all fathers (the neutral term is non-resident parent) had a right, and a duty, to be involved in their children’s lives, post separation - although they framed it in terms of the child’s rights. And so the Family Law Act was reformed in 1995 to shift the emphasis towards a ‘right of contact’ and ‘shared parental responsibilities’. A major study, released this week, shows how naïve the hopes that legal changes could turn bad fathers and husbands into co-operative, involved parents post-divorce, or end the war between men and women who can’t agree on the children.

      The three-year study, based on interviews with judges, solicitors, parents, counsellors and written judgements, is sobering reading. It shows that the reforms have created an environment where the concern for fathers’ rights has increasingly taken precedence over concern with children’s rights.

      It shows also the futility of СКАЧАТЬ