Julia Gippenreiter: Don't Live FOR A Child

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

How to relieve children of fears? What mistakes should be avoided? How to stop being overly afraid for your children yourself?

- To what extent should we allow scary, harsh or even cruel things into the consciousness of a child?

- I don't think it would ever occur to anyone to keep a child on horror films all the time. But isolating the child from everything negative is wrong. It happens that children experience sharp and terrible things, see monsters in their dreams that are chasing them. And they are brought up at the same time carefully, gently.

Once I was in the house of a woman whose two-year-old girl woke up all the time and screamed with fear at night. I say, "Show the books you are looking at and reading." And the mother shows different animals: this is a butterfly, this is a ladybug, and we skip the dinosaur (slams the page abruptly), because it gets scared and screams. And then, it turns out, in life: the truck rumbles outside the window - the girl gets scared, screams in panic, and her mother distracts her attention, persuades her.

What to do in such a situation? I advised her to listen to the child and at least tell her: "You are scared." She answers me, how is it, why strengthen? But this is not an amplification, but an adjustment to the child, a message that you have heard him. And so she does not trust her mother! The mother is hiding something all the time, the girl is peeping, sees that the world is scary, and the mother says: “Everything is fine. Do not be afraid!"

Mom tried to do this - and got the result. “You know,” he says, “my daughter is in the crib, the tractor is working outside the window, she shrank so much… And I say to her:“Tractor rrr, and you’re scared!” I showed her how the tractor sounds, and now she herself growls with him and is no longer afraid of him."

Look: my mother recognized her fear and voiced it, but in my mother's program this "rrr" is no longer so scary.

We are not going to raise children in fear, but we cannot hide them from life. The frightening circumstances of life must be mastered with them! Children need to experience fears, and they are even drawn to these experiences!

- Why?

- Because it is inherent in the nature of emotions. We intuitively begin to help children from the age of one: "There is a horned goat following the little guys!" The child is tense, afraid, and at the same time looks at you - is it dangerous or not? You keep him on the verge of "scary - not scary." These are archetypes, phylogenetic feelings of danger, and children learn with our help to master and overcome them.

In general, the short answer to your question is this: dose, but don't remove.

- Is it even worth introducing a child to such an artificially scary one?

- And what about fairy tales, and what about "Boy-with-a-finger and a cannibal"? And Baba Yaga? This is in our culture. It is necessary to distinguish here: there are manufacturers who make horror films for profit and multiply them, they are guided by “entering the market”. They exploit the child's craving for the ugly and often overdo it. It's also beneficial - to make money on the child's cravings not only for fluffy, graceful, soft, but also for the scary.

The manufacturer plays on two things. Firstly, to approach the distance where it is already scary, but you can still endure it. This is an invitation, a challenge … The so-called challenge! Secondly, the scary helps to express oneself: aggression, embarrassment, and discomfort. A child can not only be afraid of a monster, but also play at it, "become a monster" and growl, frighten.

If a child is drawn to artificial horror films, you need to look at what state he is in. Maybe he needs them so that he can express his aggression. However, at the same time with him, you must definitely talk and listen sympathetically.

- We try to educate the child as idealistic - kind, sympathetic, sacrificial, but the world is completely different. And it is often very difficult for open and sympathetic people to find themselves and their place in life.

- We probably need to clarify what an idealistic upbringing is. First of all, it is the laying of high values, the belief that spirituality is higher than materiality. It is also the upbringing of an integral person so that he feels his personal strength, believes in it. And this very force creates psychological comfort, while selfish people are often depressed and generally turn out to be unhappy in life. The famous psychologist Maslow described psychologically successful people, calling them self-actualizers, that is, people who actualized the internal resources inherent in a person.

Jungians describe the pure spiritual source in the child - his "self." It is important to preserve the self until adulthood, when you are looking for the integrity of your personality, do not betray your views, principles, attitudes. A person who says: “I don’t know how much they will pay me” and at the same time works with pleasure is a very happy person. This is my opinion and my experience.

When they say: he is an idealist, and he will be exploited, they will profit from him - I don't really understand who we grieve more for.

Alexey Rudakov (husband of Julia Gippenreiter, mathematician):

- We seem to be afraid of the world in a sense, trying to hide everything from the child. But he will meet with this world later!

I really like one passage from Dickens. A young man goes to London, and his mother says to him: “It's not like all thieves in London. But look after your little chest, you don't need to lead good people into temptation."

This is the answer to the same question - the world is neither good nor bad, there are very different people. There are good ones, but they can also fall into temptation. That's all.

How not to make a mistake in upbringing?

- You need to make sure that the child believes in himself, not to consider himself constantly right. How? This is a very complex and clever process. The parent should be not so much educated (education often even spoils), as wise. A wise process - you organize the child's life, and the indicator is whether he trusts you.

- Don't live for the child.

“Not for him, not for him. Letting go and letting go … Mother's anxiety: how is he there, poor? - it is you who are worried about yourself.

I'll tell you a story. The child began to go to school, near the house, but the mother was still very worried and asked him to call immediately upon arrival at the school. Then there were no cell phones, you had to call from a pay phone. And so he first called, and then stopped. Parents simply stood on their heads: "Why didn't you call again?" - "I forgot". I forgot again, I forgot again, there was no coin and everything like that. And then the mother "got it", and she said: "Petya, you are ashamed to call me every time because your classmates are there, and they laugh, they think that you are a mama's son?" He says yes, mom, that's why. And then she: “I want to apologize to you. I asked you to call not because I was worried about you, you are already big and you can worry like a knight about me! " Thus, she put him on a certain pedestal of an adult boy. Since then, he never forgot to call - he was filled with responsibility. That was a strong move.

Alexey Rudakov:

- If I were in his place, I would also forget, because sometimes it would annoy me - to take care of my mother all the time!

- This is already the next stage of development - why do I have such a mother, that you have to take care of her all the time? When a person gains his strength, he may cease to understand the weaknesses of his mother.

- How to build relationships with parents who continue to control adult children like this for a long time?

“It’s not easy for adults who have undergone this kind of upbringing aimed precisely at eating up their personality. They strangled the child all childhood, all adolescence - and now he, for example, is 35 years old. What prevents the mother from saying “no” to an adult? This is a very deep fear of childhood, “my mother will stop loving me”, and then it is reborn into the fear “my mother will have a heart attack”.

And mothers catch adult children on this. First fear, then fear for her health, then a sense of responsibility and guilt: “If I leave her now, I will be an egoist. I don't want to be selfish. And many other inhibiting considerations come to mind. Such a person needs a conversation with someone who will respond to all his fears and try to expand the circle of his consciousness. It is like knots that need to be softened and stretched so that the energy of thought, values and responsibility begins to circulate there more freely.

You can build a conversation with your mother on the recognition of her merits: “You have done a lot for me! You took care of me so well that I now know how to take care of myself. I want to tell you - and I rely on your understanding, maybe even pray like a small child - that I need to start walking freely!"

And if you can't explain, collect all your energy, move out physically, be sure, anywhere - a rented apartment, another city, a friend … Sign a contract with your mother: “I will be happy to call you regularly and thank you for giving me this freedom.

It is imperative to find positive words, to turn this "maternal grip" into a positive one. Do not fight with mom, do not give a fight, do not swear, do not blame: "You strangled me." Mom has only the concept of "care" and her fears. You need to convince her that she has already taught you to see the dangers and cope with them.