Healthy Parenting

Why you should let your kids grow up just as fast as they want to.

............................................................................

Each of us has a right and a duty to parent the children in our lives in the best way that we can. But every child has her own destiny and your presence in her life is only a part of that destiny. We do not own our children. Our role as the authority in their lives is cancelled the moment they become capable of exercising their rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

After that, they're our equals. Any authority we have over them is false, manipulative, and unjust.

And it screws up their lives.

Unhealthy parenting: the root of all evil

I believe that lousy parenting is the root of most of society's problems. Because parenting is the way that we perpetuate cultural mythology from one generation to the next, the problems of a thousand years ago are still with us today.

Even though those problems have solutions.

I don't just blame biological and adoptive parents for the perpetuation of an unjust system that works well only for a handful of people and sucks the life energy from the vast majority of the people ever born in the last millennium. I blame the public school system and the corporate media ...who do most of our parenting for us.

A hundred generations of not growing up

The solutions to most social problems - crime, poverty, injustice, corruption, international conflict - lie in people knowing how to assert their basic human rights. But children don't know how to do this. They need authority figures to do this for them.

The problem of civilization is that a very small number of people claim authority and forces the rest of the population into a false childish state. On purpose. 

Through poor parenting, most people's development is arrested in the childhood survival stage ...for the rest of their natural lives. Our civilization keeps most of us in a childish dependency state.

Our screwed up shared belief system has been handed down from children to children for centuries. It's done in the name of safety. All tyranny grows incrementally in the name of safety. But the result is our society more closely resembles a schoolyard, complete with cliques, bullies, and meaningless competition, than a functioning, resilient community in which people can expect to do great things with their lives.

How children are supposed to grow up ...and why ours don't

Child neurological development is founded in the first six to eight years of life (on average) and thereafter new experiences are only adjustments to the foundational pattern. After another six or eight years, children are no longer children, they are young adults. During that time period, they need to have learned not only how to survive, but also how to mate and produce and take care of children themselves. I know it's hard to imagine, but sixteen-year-olds are supposed to be the hardest-working and most responsible people in the community.

Our biological programming determines that we must shift our focus at the completion of puberty. When a child has reached the neurological age of six, the basic foundation of his survival mindset is mature and his attention begins to shift toward development of complex relationships skills. Then that child needs to become so proficient at survival that he can step into adulthood and be counted on to take care of new babies.

A child's mind, brain and body will develop this automatically. No child needs to be pushed to develop in these ways. However, a traumatic experience of sufficient magnitude will arrest child development until dealt with. If a trauma is severe enough, such as can happen with physical brain injury or profound psychological trauma, a human being can even regress in development to the state at which the remaining intact areas of the mind contain the experiences necessary for that level of development.

Threats and the use of force to maintain order are products of childishness

Children (and adult children, as most people in our culture are to some extent) are not innately wicked and in need of being made to "behave properly." We're just inexperienced and undeveloped and trying to meet our basic survival needs as best we can. Childhood is our opportunity for learning how to meet our basic survival needs and how to become a contributing part of our community. When we become biological adults (after puberty), it's our birthright to have been supplied with adequate opportunities to learn these functions, to be functional adults as well. Teenagers should not only think they know everything that's important, but actually know everything that's important.

This is where most of us begin to see that something is wrong with our lives; a profound shortfall between the teenager's biological position and his mental competency is the basis for the really shitty time that adolescence and young adulthood often is. It is a rip-off be at the most healthy, physically capable period of your life but have not yet completed your essential childhood mental development. What we end up being is emotionally-disturbed adults with low self-esteem, a profound urge to do exactly what we're not permitted to do (take on giants, create amazing new projects, and screw everything that moves), and practically no contribution to our community.

While the notion of being like a child our whole lives has a romantic connotation of innocence and playfulness, none of us has the right to choose this fate for another. Every child born has a right to be emotionally, physically, and socially excellent. Parents (whether biological or adoptive) are the most important teachers that their children will ever have. When parents know how the brain and mind grow and why they grow the way they do, they are the very best teachers their children could have. But parents have to know how to parent.

Parents have two responsibilities:

Nurture: meet every survival need that your child cannot meet by himself.

• have a healthy and peaceful pregnancy, with minimal interference by emotional or physical trauma, chemicals, or noise
• do not allow infants to cry themselves to sleep or "figure out" how to meet their basic survival needs while in a stressed state
• protect children's safety in situations where they have no experience
• teach every child that their existence is important
• carry and touch young infants most of the time so that they have patterns upon which to organize their own neurological systems
• do not make children responsible for any of your needs, especially relationship needs

Structure: do not take care of needs that the child can meet by himself.

• allow a child to face consequences of failing to meet needs that he's capable of meeting (whether those consequences are natural or created by you depends on the circumstances)
• give children important responsibilities that contribute to their survival - you are neither slave nor master to your children
• be fair, honest and consistent with both negotiable and non-negotiable rules
• do not allow children to violate your rights when they are capable of respecting your rights
• do not create debt for your children
• allow your children to be better than you

Childlike innocence, curiosity, joy and intelligence are great gifts of life, but we do not get to enjoy these gifts if our childhood is interrupted with trying to meet adult requirements without the capability of doing so. Being chronologically and biologically thrown into adulthood when we aren't ready and will create most of our problems in life. It might seem contradictory, but the only way to enjoy the pleasures of childhood throughout life is to become an adult, because only adults can assert their human rights. As adults, we have our perfect parent within us, tuned into our needs for nurture and structure and making sure we get those needs met when necessary. This is the source of confidence and eagerness to do profound and meaningful things with our adult lives.

Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but it's also fair and loving. The world gives us lots of opportunities. Each of us has the potential to fix our harmed selves and to piece the human continuum back together. I encourage you to act as an enlightened witness for yourself with respect to the ways in which your own childhood needs weren't met or were taken care of when they shouldn't have been. Then become your own inner parent and find ways to correct what needs correcting.

How to raise adults

The first step in being a good parent - to your children, or to adult children that you interact with - is to not allow them to gain power through tyranny. Do not give in to your child's tantrum just to keep the peace. It teaches him that the way to get his needs met is to be a little victim for the rest of his life. 

And do not give in to government bureaucrats, whining landlords, or any other adult who uses a sad story to get you to take care of him or her. It reinforces her manipulative nature.

The first step in becoming an adult yourself is deciding for yourself to heal yourself, rather than tuning your consciousness into how to get others to be responsible for your needs. This is the only bad habit you need to break: the childish habit of turning to others to meet your needs as a first response to having a need. If you're angry at your parents for screwing up your childhood, then go ahead and be angry with them. But don't try to make them fix your life, because they're no more capable of doing so now than they were when you were a child. The hard truth is that unless you decide to do it, it will not happen.

I created MindTreeHealth because I want to be part of the growing movement toward adulthood and freedom from tyranny. In a culture where we've all been arrested in our development to some extent, I've had a lot to learn about how our minds and bodies are supposed to work. I'm still learning, but I've also become very good at helping others in the process. I help people to sort through their own childhood challenges so that they can straighten their lives out now, and I help people to set things straight with their own children, so that they and their kids can enjoy one another.  

Life is not a competition with our children or our parents. We each have our own destiny and, at a certain biological point, responsibility for our happiness is no longer in the hands of any kind of parental figure - be it actual parents, spouse, older siblings, or government agency. Choose to grow up sooner rather than later, or your misery will compound. Do you want to reach the end of your life and still be whining to get your basic needs met?

The good news is, when you do decide to become an adult, you will. Then you'll get to experience the childlike joy of having something that we all wanted when we were small children and that you might have forgotten.

We wanted to be big and strong... like you are now.