10 Things Girls Need Most: To grow up strong and free. Steve Biddulph
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу 10 Things Girls Need Most: To grow up strong and free - Steve Biddulph страница 5

Название: 10 Things Girls Need Most: To grow up strong and free

Автор: Steve Biddulph

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Воспитание детей

Серия:

isbn: 9780008146801

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ is a rating for your situation during your daughter’s early years – give each point a rating out of five stars (5 is VERY, 1 is HARDLY AT ALL). Go slowly with this, and really think it over. When your daughter was under two:

1.How relaxed was your life?□ □ □ □ □
2.How supportive was your partner?□ □ □ □ □
3.How materially secure did you feel (housing, money, health care)?□ □ □ □ □
4.How supportive were others – grandparents, neighbours, friends?□ □ □ □ □
5.Did you bring to this task a calm, settled nature, or were you naturally nervous, jumpy or anxious (circle one)?

      very nervous and afraid 1 2 3 4 5so calm I almost fell asleep

      These questions add up to the whole picture, and so total your scores. My total ___________________

      If you have less than 10, that’s quite a stressful time. Around 15 would be about average – not too bad.

      Over 20 would be a miracle!

      For many reading this, the scoring on the last questionnaire will come as a bit of a blow, because parenthood in the modern world has been made terribly stressful, and unsupported. We may be materially very secure, but emotionally far from that. Or the reverse. Or neither.

      And there is another option. It’s possible the questionnaire is completely wrong in your case. Sometimes that can happen. You can have had a terrible time in the first year, little support, poor circumstances materially, isolated from others, and awful childhood memories of your own, and yet by sheer fierceness of your love and commitment, you just made sure her situation was nurturing, responsive and calm. Draw a circle around this sentence, just to celebrate …

       ‘I think I have overcome tough circumstances, or a terrible background of my own, and still made sure my daughter felt loved.’

      Massive admiration and love to you.

      And if not, if either way you look at it, it wasn’t an ideal start – don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame others. Allow that there may have been a stress burden, in your family and in your daughter’s early experience, which may explain some of the challenges she has. There are things you can do about these, but it begins with an honest appraisal. If the sense of being loved and secure is wobbly, then that has to be the primary focus. Even if she is ten or sixteen, repairing those babyhood feelings might still be the priority. She might really need lots of cuddles and quiet times with you each day just to settle down her autonomic nervous system which has always been set on ‘red alert’ since she was little. She can be capable, helpful, and deal with the big world, but still need to stop and fill her tank regularly until her mind learns that she really is secure.

image

       “Our daughter was adopted: she came to live with us when she was one. We don’t even know what her babyhood was like – we suspect it was pretty terrible. She had quite a lot of issues growing up. But we loved her relentlessly and patiently, and knew she needed lots of reassurance, routine, lots of cuddles, lots of building up. We had read in Steve’s books that at the age of thirteen children ‘recycle’ their babyhood, or have a second babyhood, that makes them more open to love and affection. So we babied her a lot at that age. By fourteen she was completely out of that stage, and she has been going great ever since. She’ll always be a rather intense girl, I think, but her life is going fine.”

       Mark, 48 and Amy, 42

       “When my baby was one, I had to leave China for a year to study in the US. Our baby stayed with her grandma. When I came home, it was to have a second new baby. So our relationship is quite wobbly. She was fine with her grandma, but can’t live with her now. I am not sure that my career path has been good for her, and hope I can make it up to her.”

       Guan-yin, 38

      Loving small children is natural – we have hormones like oxytocin which help us to feel melty and soft when we are around them. But that doesn’t mean that the caring role comes naturally to everyone, because though the feeling may be there, the doing of it has to be learned. If we haven’t seen or experienced how loving is done, we might actually be quite tense and awkward in expressing our love for our baby. (Sometimes a mother or father feels almost nothing at all towards their new baby, and has to start gradually by getting to know them, and being helped with outside support to do this.) Almost everyone today has gaps in their ability to love, but don’t worry about this because, rather like a fire, you can create and kindle the beginnings and it starts to take off by itself.

      There are two things that increase the capacity for love in your family. These love sources are:

       1. Slowing down your world.

       2. Getting into the river of love.

      Let’s explain what these mean …

       Slowing Down

       THE SECRET OF WHERE LOVE GROWS

      When I talk to audiences of parents, I watch and listen closely. Some ideas make people go quiet. Some make them laugh out loud. Some make the room light up with acknowledgement – of ‘Yes, that’s right!’. A good example of that last one is that HURRY IS THE ENEMY OF LOVE. When we are rushing through our lives, our interactions get more and more jarring and unsatisfying, even insensitive. The warmth and harmony between us disappears. Husbands and wives stop getting along. Parents and children annoy and irritate each other. Love is there, but it’s eaten away by not quite being attuned to each other, and so things go badly. Reaffirming closeness, understanding ‘where each other is at’, takes time. If you have children, especially small ones, then slowness is essential to love being able to grow.

      For love to exist between a parent and child (or adult and adult) they have to first feel settled and present. You have to be tuned in – to yourself, and to them.

      The sequence for making human connection is timeless. It can only go in this order. You settle down. You breathe and your shoulders relax and you sink into the chair. You begin to feel at home inside yourself. (Sometimes you realize – ‘I am really hungry’, or ‘I need a wee!’ It might be good to fix this!) Now, there is this baby, or toddler, or older child in front of you. From your feeling of OK-ness in yourself, you reach out to them. Perhaps they are fretting and anxious, or needy, or wanting to talk to you or get your help. Because you are OK on the inside, and have the time, their distress doesn’t distress you. You care about them, and are happy to help.

      So you soothe them with words or touch, and they feel that you are calm, so they start to calm down too. (Babies and toddlers can’t regulate their own emotions. Many times a day, a baby or small child will ‘freak out’ at something strange, a loud noise, a stranger, falling and hurting themselves, a frustration they encounter, not getting what they want, or just some reason you or they can’t even figure out. A lot of what we do as parents is soothing these reactions, just holding them patiently as they let those feelings abate, and letting them settle, so they find a way out of their distress. After several years of us providing this, the pathways in their mind to a calmer state will be well trodden, and they will be able to do this for themselves.) If your child is old enough to talk, of course it’s easier: you listen to their worries, or help in a practical way, but you still keep that calm sense of attention СКАЧАТЬ