The Norm Report - Month 78
June 1, 2008 E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Visits: 21,800 and counting...
The result of our reliance on punishment to solve problems
is a society that now teeters on
the brink of chaos.
- Norm Lee
PUNISHMENT IS NOT DISCIPLINE IS NOT PUNISHMENT
Condensed from Chapter Five: Parenting Without Punishing
What Is Meant by "Discipline"?
Any local or national poll about childrearing or schools will show that what people want is "more discipline." What is meant is more coercion, more restrictions, more policing, more punishment, and more fear. Above all, more fear. Such mean-spirited sentiment is behind the popular notion of discipline. But it is anti-freedom, anti-children, and anti-education. For fostering self-discipline is not possible in a climate of fear.What most people mean by "discipline" is this: "Do what you're told by authority, do it without hesitation or question, regardless of what you think or how you feel; do what is expected of you, do it cheerfully because a child's duty is to please grown-ups; take your medicine, accept your punishment without complaint, because it is good for your soul and good for your character. If you fail to do what you're told, when you're told, and how you're told, there is something wrong with you. The remedy for your wrongness is to humiliate you with punishment. This will make you righteous. Now be grateful; the pain I give you shows I care about you--it's for your own good, you know.
"If you think differently, have a different vision or entertain creative ideas, if you persist in exploring your own interests and in learning in your own manner, or even (gasp) in taking charge of your own life, you will be shamed and punished until your spirit is broken, and you conform to our notion of who you should be--dependent on bosses."
Every child who is not thoroughly brainwashed and/or reduced to abject cowardice recognizes that message as the Big Lie, perpetrated on children by those who exert control over them. The pity is that such barbaric treatment is fully supported by the community. It is said to be "discipline." when in fact it is not discipline at all; it is undisciplined, unrestrained bullying, plain and simple. It is enforced submission to the arbitrary interests of those wielding the power to do so. It is "traditional discipline"--conditioning identical to that used in Roman times and by today's American Kennel Club.
Punishment kills discipline--it cannot grow and mature under threat of force. Those who think it can are too dangerous to be allowed around children; they are suited more to swatting terriers and pit bulls into blind, knee-jerk obedience, tho dog training is no longer done with whips and folded newspapers.
Discipline Is Natural, Inborn
Authoritarian types sincerely believe that discipline cannot be acquired except under compulsion, the more unpleasant the better and by brute force if necessary. Yet all around them are highly disciplined skateboarders, trick bicyclists, garage musicians, shade tree mechanics, expert chess players, and sidewalk lemonade entrepreneurs. There are pool sharks and merit-badge-earning Boy Scouts and NBA-bound basketball players, none having been punched or conned or battered into their chosen disciplines. Children are born with the drive to acquire discipline in their own way, as with all learning, and would do so even if raised by wolves. Especially so. Self-discipline is a survival skill, instinctual. Only persistent punishing can discourage its maturation.A baby begins acquiring discipline at the moment of birth, perhaps before. It is how they learn how the world works. Babies and toddlers will naturally follow the very steps scientists use to discover new truths. They examine an object, do something to it, observe what happens, reap unsatisfactory results, then try something else until they hit on the answer that produces the results they are looking for. In time there arises an eagerness to make a positive difference in their world. In the process they deepen their understanding of the world and how it wags. This is exactly the approach used by Nobel Prize-winning scientists.
Discipline is learning. It is maturing, growing up, which every child is bent on doing, as fast as he or she can do it. Discipline is developing the skills required to accomplish goals. It is working to get what they want, and to go where they want to go. Children respond easily to discipline of the team type. Even in a pick-up ball game there is a discipline structure; where rules of play are lacking, they are made up and agreed to on the spot. Aversion to discipline is not inborn, nor is sin, or badness. Resistance to force and being robbed of the right to freedom--that is inborn. A child's natural direction is to acquire the discipline necessary to be free and happy.
Adults like to see orderly progress. That way they can measure it, evaluate it, exert control over it. But self-discipline does not work that way. It begins internally, progresses in fits and starts, in leaps and plateaus, in zigzag or spiral fashion. Before indoor pools and ice rinks, there was a popular saying: "We learn to swim in the winter and skate in the summer." After a summer of trying to swim and failing, come the following spring the child jumps in and does the Australian crawl across the pond. All winter something was happening inside--call it "discipline"--that was "teaching" him or her to swim. But adults delude themselves into thinking that nothing can be learned unless it is taught, and tested at every step. They think they are "teaching" by "reinforcement"--the A's, gold stars, and praise; and by punishment--the scowls, the shaming, the ridicule, and the swats. Add to this the blind belief that a credentialed authority must teach the "content", otherwise it won't be properly learned. This is destructive, idiotic nonsense. These are the shock troops in the War Against Children.
Children incarcerated in schools need desperately to escape the compulsory life. Kids by the millions are involved after school and on weekends in disciplines the school tells them they can't master for lack of official lessons and for lack of discipline. Witness the dozens, the hundreds of games and skills that millions of kids are engaged in, from roller-blade acrobatics, rock bands and rock climbing and rock collecting, the list is endless. (The clamor is now on efforts to take control of these informal after-school activities too, on the theory that limiting freedom will reduce crime. Boys and Girls Clubs) are now enforcing homework time before allowing games.)
No one who has seen the X-Games can doubt the existence of natural discipline. No one who has seen, as I have, a 10-year-old quickly master a computer that has baffled for months one of my generation. They are drawn to them because computers give them immediate and honest answers without praise or punishment, they demand neither obedience nor worship, and they are impartial absolutely. Self-discipline grows by pleasing oneself, pursuing ones' own happiness. Authoritarian parents and schoolmasters kill discipline and destroy the spirit of freedom, then complain that there is something wrong with the child. "She's unmotivated." "He 'suffers from' a behavior problem." And the current favorite, "He's has Attention Deficit Disorder." But somehow the ADD disappears the moment school lets out.
The Key to the World
Inner discipline is self-chosen, and develops by self-direction. Within this, a child of 6, 7, or 8 chooses the rigors of ballet discipline, because she loves the beauty of it, or loves the ballet teacher, or loves her dancing mother. A boy or girl can choose the discipline of karate for their own reasons. It is a question of who does the choosing. Little success can be expected if it is imposed "for their own good." What is needed from the adult world is trust. Faith in the fundamental goodness of the child. Unless he is punished, shamed, or disrespected, he will not disappoint you. Given a passable role model, he or she will grow to be a genuine, authentic person. To demand anything other is an affront to their integrity.For discipline to develop, there must be fearlessness. And that can grow only in freedom. Discipline takes us to levels of excellence realized nowhere else. Discipline is the door to the joyful experience of living. When we see that, we take delight in our practice: Our direction is right and we are on our way, the way we ourselves have chosen. We can learn from mistakes; we cannot learn from hounding and flogging. Inner wisdom tells the child that discipline is the key to the world.
Many Disciplines, Many Kinds of Discipline
While there are many disciplines, author John Holt talks about these three kinds. At first there is the discipline of nature, of reality. Waving of arms, kicking of legs grasping at objects calls for adjusting to the laws of nature--without their being taught. When beginning to walk, the disciplines of body motion and gravity come into play. Babies must--on their own--develop the discipline needed to function in the world. It is said that if babies were taught how to walk, most of us would still be crawling around on our hands and knees. The most important things we've learned, we have taught ourselves. Play is children's serious work, that of learning and practicing self-chosen disciplines. Hold the cone upright, or the ice cream drops. Hit the nail squarely, or you can't build the doghouse. Keep the bicycle rolling, or you fall over.Next there is the discipline of culture, of society. This is the collection of customs, habits, rules, expectations and agreements that glue society--its people--into a community. Children are eager to become participants, so they watch very carefully to understand adult interaction so they can imitate it. They want dearly to do things right. And whatever is modeled for them defines what is "right." Much of this stays with them all their lives. We know now that children will do things "right" until authority punishes them, saying, "Do as I say, not as I do!" From then on, "right and "wrong" are simply rules arbitrary enforced by hypocrites. The difference between "right" and "wrong" then, depends on who's bigger, or who gets caught.
Thus enters the discipline of superior force, the brutish power of the animal realm. It is the bully, the dictator, the control freak. It is the sergeant to the private, the cop to the criminal, the school principal wielding the paddle over the cringing child. It is the mother with the strap. They all say the same thing: "Submit to my will or I'll make you suffer until you do." Under such control, the natural discipline of the child, natural morality, can be suppressed or caused to wither away in despair, along with courage, independent spirit, and all hope for a satisfying life. Just as it retards the maturation process, punishment prevents learning.
All punishment is harmful. Even the apparently innocuous "time-out" has serious effects on a small child's sense of identity, emotions, feelings of security and acceptance. It happens to millions of children, day after day. It has happened to the great majority of Americans, disgruntled and stressed-out, who are now leading lives of not-so-quiet desperation while busily destroying the dignity and spirit of their sons and daughters and classroom students. This ugliness and suffering--of adults and children alike--need not be carried over to the next generation.
Self-Discipline for Parents
Beethoven's father tried to beat him into being a concert pianist, like Mozart. But Ludwig adamantly resisted superior force. Knowing he could not create without freedom, he resolutely marched to the beat of his own drum. He learned piano because he liked piano discipline. He sought out the exquisite discipline of composition teachers like Haydn and Salieri.Hitler's father beat Adolf mercilessly to "discipline" him. The boy sought the discipline that art offered, but he was rejected by the art school. His brief time as a soldier did not provide the kind of discipline he needed. The result was that he never acquired discipline, only indulgence in his hatreds. He knew only victimization, and having had his fill of that he set out to victimize the world. (No disciplined leader would have invaded Russia with winter approaching.) The rest is history: he started the war that killed over 50 million people. Fifty million people.
Parents and teachers and life-hating types try to mold their children into inhibited, fearful, obedient inferiors who will devote their lives to duty and "don't give authoriies no trouble." Strict discipline is self-hate, projected by self-defined failures trying to win success vicariously. To them, children are property, without lives of their own. Those pathetic parents, said A. S. Neill, "were never allowed to live and love, were made to submit to humiliating punishment, and are frightened by freedom." They heartily support paddle-swinging official bullies to beat their children, schoolmasters "hired to do parents' dirty work."
The "disciplinarian" robs the child of the responsibility of developing self-discipline. He or she takes over the discipline job and forces the child to dance to authority's tune. It leaves the child with an unpleasant experience and a negative view of "discipline." It is tragic for any child to be denied the opportunity to develop self-discipline. Millions suffer needlessly because brutal and stupid parents and teachers want to be known as "strict disciplinarians". The result of our society's reliance on the punishment of superior force is a society that now teeters on the brink of chaos. -
Norm
The Norm Report - Month 77
May 1, 2008
A human being is a part of the whole
called by us 'the universe'... He experiences himself,
his thoughts and feelings,
as something separate from the rest -
a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion
is a kind of prison for us…
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening
our circle of understanding and compassion…- Albert Einstein
BUCKYHe had reached a life crisis. At age 32, after failing at everything he attempted, R. Buckminster Fuller decided he would take his own life.
One midnight in 1927 he sat on the huge cold rocks on the shore of Lake Michigan, staring into the deep dark water, and dwelt on his failures. In stature he measured only 5'2", furthermore he was neither aggressive not competitive by nature. He had been expelled from Harvard in his freshman year. He had failed repeatedly in a series of business attempts. The year before, he had done all he could, but it was not enuf to prevent his precious child from dying in her cradle. Tho a new daughter was recently born, he was still grieving and suffering deep depression.
The world was later to know "Bucky" Fuller as the internationally celebrated genius who invented of the geodesic dome plus dozens of other architectural and engineering marvels. But that night he had reached the nadir in his life: He was forced to accept that he was not destined to be even a mediocre player in the grand game of getting and spending - the role that was expected of him and all men. Broke, with no job and plagued by despair, he said to himself, "What's the point? Everything I touch turns to shit".
The year was 1927 when he sat on the hard rocks with the cold wind to his back, pondering his lousy luck and finding not a single reason to go on living. He was not even a good husband and father, he thought, and feared that his infant daughter might die, as did the first, with him helpless to prevent it. It was too much to bear, his inadequacies. He looked into the black water and thought about the burden he must be to his small family. He was a major impediment to their happiness. They were young, he reasoned. He loved them. They deserved a chance for a new start in life. His death would liberate them.
So there on the shore, with the angry waves crashing at his feet, the moment of decision had come. But before jumping, the young reader of philosophy felt he had to review and examine his most fundamental values. Each individual, including himself, he reflected, was an integral part in the unity and order of the universe. He was but a tiny fragment, but not an insignificant one. The poet John Donne had written years before that the clod of clay washed from the shore makes the continent less. As he pondered, it gradually came to him why his efforts had been in vain: He had been struggling to please his surrogate parents - who had appeared in the form of employers and institutions. How could I please a fantasy? Have I been living for an illusion? he asked. Why not start living for himself instead? If my problem stems from seeking the love and approval of fantasy parents, he decided, I must be insane.
Live for himself? Better yet, he could live for mankind. He could give up the quest for worldly success; he could stop running the treadmill race. "You must choose between making money and making sense," he said to himself. "The two are mutually exclusive." What is this obsession about reaching goals?
By first light that morning he had decided that he would go on living - but not as before: He would live as though he had died that night; he would begin a new life. Being now dead, his new life could be an experiment. No more trying to please middle management "parents". From then on, eschewing profit and gain, he would examine the question, as Ben Franklin did, "What is it on this planet that needs doing …that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for it?"
As dawn broke he had resolved to live henceforth as an employee of the Universe. All his work would be for the good of humankind. He devoted his mind and time and energy to contributing to the community where he lived by simply Being - and doing what was there to be done. Because it was no longer personal, he no longer took criticism personally. And criticism was inevitable since he was certainly an oddity, thinking like no one else on "spaceship earth", as he called it. "Why don't I simply do what needs doing here, go ahead and do it, and not sweat the results?" he asked himself. The question really became: What do I really care about? and, What is the best and simplest contribution I can give to it?
Fuller, inspired with a new and selfless purpose in life, withdrew into seclusion. When he emerged two years later, having looked deeply into himself, he had resolved to begin "the search for the principles governing the universe and help advance the evolution of humanity in accordance with them... finding ways of doing more with less to the end that all people everywhere can have more and more" Henceforth he devoted his mind and creative energy to contributing to the world community by simply Being, by trusting his Humanity, his Basic Goodness. His Inherent Wisdom. In so doing, he was touching his Basic Sanity, his Authentic Being, as old and as universal as the Teachings of Buddhism.
He was 85 when we talked, one-on-one, in 1980. He had already been presented with forty-four honorary degrees and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, yet his modesty and his compassion was profoundly impressive. In Corning, NY, that day he had dazzled us by filling the blackboard wall-to-wall with the math and equations he used to work out his geodesic and dymaxion theories, and then he told us, with disarming conviction, that each one of us could do as well. Such was his faith that, buried beneath our years of conditioning there is Basic Intelligence. We had only to peal away the layers of misinformation, illusions, and lies. Then we, too, can tap it.
In private we talked about our prospects for surviving as a world, a planet, a species. Eight years before there had been a hair-raising confrontation with U.S.S.R. over nuclear weapons in Cuba. Our beloved earth-home is in peril, he said. With unbridled nationalism and Pentagon pugnacity, what chance did we have? And with rampant capitalism exploiting and poisoning the planet, what would be left of "spaceship earth"? We ended our sober discussion with his emphasizing the urgent need for the coming generation - the People - to find ways to control and curb "the aggression of governments and the greed of corporations". Nothing less could stop it.
"Bucky" was to live only three more years.
- Norm
The Norm Report - Month 76
April 1, 2008
E-mail: norm@bmi.ne
The most positive social changes
have followed mass improvements in the way
children are treated.Robin Grille
A VISIT WITH NADINE BLOCKNadine Block is Director of The Center for Effective Discipline, a nonprofit organization which she herself founded, and which is headquarters for EPOCH-USA and the National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools. (More info on www.stophitting.org).
Nadine has been an elementary school teacher, a school psychologist, and Regional Director and Legislative Chair of the National Association of School Psychologists. She served as the Governmental Relations Manager of the Ohio School Psychologists Association for 13 years. She has written for many national magazines and professional journals about the mistreatment of children, and presented at numerous child abuse conferences. Since 1988 she has received nine major awards for her work, almost all of which has been without remuneration.
She has been debated, interviewed, and badgered in over fifty media venues: magazines, newspapers, radio, TV - including all the major TV networks' morning shows - and from Larry King Live to Hannity & Comb, from Family Circle Magazine to Philadelphia Inquirer, from NY Times to LA Times. Nadine co-chairs EPOCH-USA with Dr. Robert Fathman, a clinical psychologist in Columbus, Ohio. She founded and chairs SpankOut Day, USA - “Raising Good Kids Without Hitting”, an annual event now recognized internationally on April 30th. Her husband, she says, is "an elder law attorney who is an Ohio conservative and calls me his 'Wisconsin Communist ' for her crusading efforts to improve the plight of victimized children. She is grandmother of 10 children under age 13, and does aerobics, yoga, and weight training.
NORM LEE: You were instrumental in 1985 in getting a bill passed to allow Ohio school districts to ban CP, and in 1989 a law to make schools collect data on the corporal punishment inflicted. What have you done lately?
NADINE BLOCK: I'm very proud of helping. ATLA (trial lawyers) get civil immunity for paddling injuries out of George Bush’s first Leave No Child Behind legislation (see NY Times May 11, 2001). I am currently leading a coalition of 48 organizations seeking a complete ban on school corporal punishment in Ohio public schools (HB 406) http://www.stophitting.com/disatschool/proclamation-from-ohio-citizens
NL: How did you first get interested in cp of children?
NB: I was told to be a witness to a paddling by a principal. I was the building school psychologist. He told me to sit down and then proceeded to hit a 9 or 10 year-old boy. I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. I think I was shocked. I guess that was my first questioning of it as an institutional practice. I grew up in Wisconsin - I never saw paddling.
NL: So you were moved to take action?
NB: I didn’t really get incensed about it until I started attending meetings with a little group of folks about 1983/84--they had just started meeting about banning corporal punishment in Ohio. I was representing the Ohio School Psychologists Association as their lobbyist (I worked for them part time and in the schools part time). Bob Fathman’s daughter had been hit and he was one of the folks there so that’s how Bob and I met and started working together. Also attending were a couple of folks from Children’s Hospital in Columbus who were incensed over the number of kids coming into ER with paddling injuries. A hospital social worker took color photos of the injuries and wrote little stories about why the children were paddled. It was horrifying.
Russ Miller, executive director of the League Against Child Abuse (it was then the NCPCA state office), became a leader in the group. He got some funding in 1986 through the Ohio Children’s Trust Fund to open an office to educate the public and go after a ban and he asked me if I would be the executive director of this group – and that began the Center for Effective Discipline. I thought it would be fun to do, and I already had lobbying experience. In the early years I was paid, but later, when I had to look for money to pay myself, I decided that I enjoyed working so much I didn’t need the money
NL: So the ban on CP in Ohio schools - how long did that take? Did you face hostility?
NB: I worked for nine years to get the ban bill passed in OH – all the major education organizations fought it so we had to settle for a limited ban in 1993. I got mentally toughened by experiences like being called a liar in committee by opponents and by nasty political tricks. I was thrown out of a representative’s office for carrying a weapon. I had taken a paddle with me as I usually did when visiting legislators. The Rep called it a "weapon" and threw me out. But he failed to see it as a weapon against children: A couple weeks later he voted to keep such weapons in the classroom. It's sad to hear so many inane excuses by lawmakers and education folks for hitting kids…I’ve learned to pick my battles with those folks and I have been comforted and calmed by knowing we will always win.
NL: I know what battling ignorance is like. In eleven years here I still get anonymous calls accusing me of voodoo (teaching yoga) and viewing Internet porn (I suggested a search of "spanking" to see the sexual connection). And angry editorials threatening to spank me. Do you get that?
NB: I sometimes get telephone calls with a belligerent introduction “ARE YOU A CHRISTIAN?” But I usually end up with a fairly comfortable relationship with those folks because my response is “I guess you are concerned about discipline. So am I”.
NL: Do you remember when you first developed compassion for those suffering?
NB: I was taught and saw modeled in my parents that you need to do something about the plight of the less fortunate, not just talk. It’s probably in my genes and in a cultural inheritance of growing up in a Wisconsin German Catholic community in the 1950s. I remember adults as being stern with children but I don’t think there was much hitting of children. As a school psychologist, I was always interested in helping children who didn’t fit the mold – children with disabilities and gifted children. The children who don’t fit in are the ones who are hit most often. I don’t believe hitting children is fair morally or under the law and I see them as a poorly protected class of citizens.
NL: How were you treated as a child? Were you spanked?
NB: I only remember one spanking by my father for supposedly lying – I guess I remember it because I was spanked for something I shouldn’t have been reprimanded for. That cut into my Wisconsin “fairness” gene. My parents had better ways of punishing us – weeding the garden (at least an acre or so it seemed) and lots of work on the dairy farm if we argued with one another or were disobedient. We (five children) would weed the garden grumbling about our parents’ punishment and talk about how we were going to pack sandwiches and run away to the woods. My parents are still living – in their 93rd year, married 73 years and living on their own fairly comfortably.
NL: What challenges do you find in making advances against CP?
NB: I think the biggest challenge is having to live with the snail’s pace of social change. Adah Maurer mentored many of us and educated the public on the effects of school corporal punishment through her publication "The Last Resort". She was an optimist. She forecasted that all school corporal punishment would end by the year 2,000. With 29 states banning it, we aren’t close to that even now. Since her death in 1998 only two states have banned it. I can see Adah scowling and wondering why we aren’t getting the job done! It’s tougher getting it banned today. Most of the states that still allow it have a strong history of support for beating children, and their state legislatures are loathe to take this issue on. We’ve had a very conservative political environment not favorable to this issue.
NL: What have you found to be the most effective approach to defeating CP?
NB: Change has taken place more rapidly in banning corporal punishment through regulations for child care, foster care, and institutional settings. Almost all states have banned it in those settings. Government employees in regulatory agencies have been more likely to read and react to research on this issue than state legislatures. So why all of the grousing about bureaucrats? I say “Hooray for bureaucrats!!” Check out laws in different setting on our website: http://www.stophitting.com/laws/stateLegislation.php
Patience and stubborn persistence are effective. We have strengths of research and moral support for a ban on our side. I’ve seen a great deal of change in my own state of Ohio where 68,000 kids were struck in the mid-1980s. No districts banned corporal punishment. In 2006-07 only 270 children were struck 473 times. Only 17 districts (out of 611 public school districts and about 250 charter schools) reported paddling that school year. That’s nice, but that’s 270 children too many. Attitudes are changing. Some Ohio legislators who fought corporal punishment bans twenty years ago are now “reformed”. I get fewer inane arguments from proponents of corporal punishment. The paddling aficionados are aware that the old arguments won’t hold and they stick to the “community values” argument. It's the same as the “local control” argument; a cynical response when you have no other arguments to offer.
It's important to write letters to newspaper editors challenging articles supporting corporal punishment. It's important to keep getting bills to ban its use introduced in statehouses of paddling states. It's important to encourage citizens to get corporal punishment banned in their local districts. When a majority of local districts ban corporal punishment, it is easier to get a state legislature to ban it. States banning corporal punishment of children in public settings are now beginning to see legislation restricting or banning its use in homes. That's the human rights challenge for children in the 21st century. We will win! Times they are a-changing … but slowly.
NR: SpankOut Day will soon be here (April 30th). When and why did you begin this movement?
NB: I initiated SpankOut Day USA April 30th in 1998 for EPOCH-USA in order to bring widespread attention to the need to end physical punishment of children and to provide information about non-violent discipline alternatives. I created and oversee a mini-grant program that gives non-profits, churches and schools support for informational programs that teach effects of physical punishment and alternatives. See: http://www.stophitting.com/spankOut/2008SpankOutDayEvents.php
NR: I know you've traveled much of the world, including China. What did you learn there about school CP?
NB: My first husband and I started a family textile import business in China in 1982-83, as the wave of importing began. Since there were no private businesses in China, we negotiated with the Chinese government for textile contracts. As a school psychologist, I was interested in Chinese education and providing for individual differences of children. I visited a Chinese school in Beijing and talked with teachers through an interpreter about their work. I asked them if they had children with behavior problems. They did not. If their children misbehaved, they said, parents lost their travel permits and sent back to the countryside. The incentive, while hardly to be condoned, seemed to work.
NR: And you've traveled to many other countries as well.
NB: I’ve been on every continent except Australia and Antarctica - for both work and pleasure. One of the most interesting pleasure trips we took involved a visit to tribes in the Sepik River Basin in New Guinea. These are still hunter-gatherer communities. They were believed to have been cannibals until the 1960s. One of the Rockefellers disappeared in that area during that time. Their coming of age rite of passage still involves scarification and sometimes death and one-half of the children do not live to age 10. I prefer “soft adventure” travel – although some of it hasn’t been quite as “soft” as I expected. We were in Nairobi the day of the embassy bombing in 1998. I have seen the Moai on Easter Island, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Timbuktu in Mali, Marrakech in Morocco, Petra in Jordan, the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania, the Taj Mahal in India, burning orange lava streams flowing down Mt Etna at 4 am, Tunisia during Ramadan, and the ruins of Machi Picchu. Last summer we played golf at the legendary St. Andrews Course in Scotland.
Thank you, Nadine.
- Norm
The Norm Report - Month 75
March 2, 2008 E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Norm Lee's website: http://www.nopunish.net
In 5 years: 20,500 visits & counting.
No one has a right to
sit down and feel hopeless.
There is too much work to do.- Dorothy Day
JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE - PART TWO(For Part One, go to website, click on "Archives" & select Norm Report 74 - Feb 08.)
Idea 1.: Following conception and birth our genetic make-up keeps changing - by gradually shifting from reptilian brain to cognitive brain - until at least age eleven, maybe twelve. Then the brain does a "fine tuning", rejecting any extra neural ties in either the reptilian brain or the intellectual brain, depending on how the child is treated. Progress must proceed from neural connections in the survival brain to the connections to the growing intellectual brain. An abused child, needing to protect himself, cannot grow intellectually as a safe child can. I.E., their life intelligence is determined by whether they feel loved/secure or rejected/abandoned.
Idea 2.: If the child has not had that love, that heart/brain nurturing, then to "undo" the damage he/she MUST, one way or another, be provided with sufficient love and acceptance. This means massive affection and love nurturing that includes verbal communication with eye contact, physical play/games, and a feeling of belonging. Only then will they have a chance of growing to be whole persons. "We must understand here that the emotional and physical are essentially the same. So many American teenagers today have been deprived of touch and love from the very beginning of their lives," Pearce said.
Idea 3.: The child whose emotional/physical-touch nurturing needs have not been met - and there are millions - looks for some alternative way to meet those needs - and find false replacements for the missing nurturing that failed them. The remedy is not so terribly difficult; it just takes "heart". In Upstate New York Ann Morrison has been working for 15 years with the worst teenage convicts in maximum-security prisons. She has found success with therapeutic activities like play-acting, music, art, etc. To her surprise, illiterate teenagers began writing their own stories, writing poetry, began educating themselves. How did that happen? Pearce says, "With great love, she went in and began quietly telling her stories, even though they had the TVs going and the usual [chaos] that teenagers do. And she was able to reach them because she was offering something that they had never had -- a mother figure, a compassionate woman friend." she gave them a love they could trust."
Idea 4.: Studies in Sweden indicate that the violence of children is simply not present in children that have sufficient imagination. The power to create images in their respective minds provides them with alternatives to violence. Ann Morrison is helping those kids to make the connection between heart and emotional brain that they had been deprived of in childhood. In a way they have done an internal makeover by reconnecting the heart-emotional brain they were deprived of as children.
Idea 5.: Unfortunately, most American children are raised on a heavy diet of television - which pretty much results in the death of imagination. Too much of it curtails the ability to create mental images of things, persons, events that are not in their experience. Over 40 years ago it was discovered that children's minds go catatonic while watching TV. The light from TV and computer screens hypnotizes, in a way, causing the brain to eventually close down. When they got wise to this, TV producers began using "startle effects" or any dramatic changes in the programs targeting children, alerting the kids to pay closer attention. "As a result," says Pearce, " what we have are periodic bursts of violent imagery in children's cartoons…" Now there are some 16 instances of violence every 30 minutes for children to feed on.
As Pearce explains it, "While the higher brain, or neocortex, knows that the images on TV aren't real, the lower, or the 'reptilian' brain does not. This means that when a child views violence on television, the reptilian brain sends a series of alarm messages up to the emotional brain, which in turn immediately contacts the heart. The moment the heart receives any indication of negativity or danger, it drops out of its usual harmonic mode into an incoherent one, triggering the release of the single most potent hormone in the human body, known as cortisol. Cortisol instantly wakes up the brain and causes it to produce trillions of neural links in order to ready the individual to face the emergency.
"Then, as soon as the heart gets the message that the coast is clear, another hormone is released to dissolve all of the new neural pathways that weren't used to make a quick, adaptive reaction to the perceived threat. The trouble with current-day children's television programming is that there's never any let-down, and the brain of the average American child, who has watched 5000 to 6000 hours by the age of five of six, is suffering a great deal of confusion as a result. The massive over-stimulus from TV is causing the brain to maladapt in ways previously thought impossible. It is literally breaking down on all levels of neural development."
Researchers in Germany found that…"When they placed the young test-subject in a natural environment that had no high-density stimuli, such as come from television, they grew very anxiety-ridden, bored and tended toward violence. The final disturbing finding of the German study is that there has been, over the same twenty-year period, a 20% reduction in the children's awareness of their natural environment."
Remember Jerry Mander's book in 1978? In "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" he presented similar warnings about the dangers to children of excessive TV watching. The research in the 30 years since then shows the TV prevents neural growth in children's undeveloped brains: their brains cannot effectively create images, that is, it tends to kill the imagination. And it's not just the program content; the very technological design deeply affects the child's - and grown-ups - physiology. Because while in nature the brain responds to reflected light, the light from TV and computers is radiant light. In brief, "the brain tends to close down in response to radiant light." That's what hypnotizes children with hours of TV watching.
Idea 6.: Problem: Since the young generation needs to be trained in the use of computers, just how can that be done without using computers? Answer: The children must first acquire the ability to use their creative minds, in a word, learn how to think. Given that, the danger is over. Piaget taught that the architecture of knowledge must be built in the first twelve years for abstract thinking to develop.
Idea 7.: Dr. Pearce teaches that adolescents, feeling inadequate and adrift in a strange world, in general can be characterized thus:
This is mid-teen years, when they turn from parents to role models or mentors, an image to provide life direction. In the U.S., too often that spiritual vacuum is filled by rock stars, fashion models, and TV actors. (And the economy depends on it.) Throughout human history this is the stage where certain ceremonies introduced children into the adult world. This lack is a serious disservice to today's youth; this is necessary to establish meaning in their lives, but it is prevented in a materialistic world. The man who invented MTV, when asked if he understood the power he had over teenagers, he said, "…we don't influence 14-year-olds, we own them."
- a feeling of great expectations of important life happenings;
- a vague feeling of being endowed with potential greatness;
- an insatiable hunger, a glass eternally only half full.
Then what hope is there? Pearce: "I don't think you can change this reality on any large-scale basis. You can only try to work around the edges and hope to reach one individual at a time. No one's going to change the overall system. All we can do is appeal to parents who have ears to hear and who are willing to take the risk of getting their children out of this madness and protect them against it.
Idea 8.: Most teenagers, prevented from developing their own interests and values, need guidance in examining who they are and what they want in life, rather that letting youth culture/entertainment culture decide for them. "Instead of spending millions of dollars trying to fix what's wrong with teens we should invest in educating people to be good parents, to love and nurture their babies and young children so they don't have huge problems later on.
"The first four years of life are the most important. In Sweden, new mothers are given three years of maternity leave. It used to be one, and now they've upped it to three so that mothers can stay home with their children. And they're giving fathers a one-year leave of absence with full pay so that both mother and father can be with their child for the first critical year… [So what can we do?] I say we can begin by preventing the damage right from the very beginning.
"There are some extraordinary things happening right now, in little pockets all over the world, examples of true coherency in a massively incoherent system. And when this global economy nightmare we've unleashed finally self-destructs -- as I think it has to -- these small pockets of coherent intelligence will then manifest themselves and provide the impetus and the wisdom for the changes necessary to create a world in which children can reach their full potential. I am very optimistic about this."#
The Norm Report - Month 74
February 1, 2008 E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Norm Lee's website: www.nopunish.net
In 5 years: 20,500 visits.
There are many terrible things in the world,
but the worst is when a child is afraid
of his father, mother or teacher.- Janusz Korczak
Wisdom From the HeartJoseph Chilton Pearce is widely known for his best-selling "Magical Child." Here are excerpts from "Expressing Life's Wisdom: Nurturing Heart-Brain Development Starting With Infants," taken as "fair use" from a Chris Mercogliano & Kim Debus interview in "Journal of Family Life," Vol. 5, No.1, 1999.
More than fifty years ago Pearce began his study of how the mind works. Focusing on how and what children learn, he found that the needs of children were and are grossly neglected in American culture: Parents and institutions fail not only emotional and intellectual needs of youngsters, but spiritual as well. He has continued his deep probing in the years since. I first met Dr. Pearce several years ago at a conference in Santa Barbara. Tho he is the most pleasant and generous of people, his original and challenging ideas - drawn from his research - not surprisingly startle his colleagues. An original thinker, his genius, it appears to me, ranks right up there with Buckminster Fuller. From the book:
Idea 1.: We can think with our hearts, indeed, the heart is the major center of intelligence in human beings. From 60% to 65% of the cells of the heart are actually neural cells, not muscle cells as was previously believed. They are identical to the neural cells in the brain… there is a "brain" in the heart, whose ganglia are linked to every major organ in the body, to the entire muscle spindle system that uniquely enables humans to express their emotions.
Idea 2.: About half of the heart's neural cells are involved in translating information sent to it from all over the body so that it can keep the body working as one harmonious whole. And the other half make up a very large, unmediated neural connection with the emotional brain in our head and carry on a twenty-four-hour-a-day dialogue between the heart and the brain that we are not even aware of.
Idea 3.: The heart responds to messages sent to it from the emotional brain, which has been busy monitoring the interior environment of dynamic states such as the emotions and the auto-immune system, guiding behavior, and contributing to our sense of personal identity. The emotional brain makes a qualitative evaluation of our experience of this world and sends that information instant-by-instant down to the heart. In return, the heart exhorts the brain to make the appropriate response. Of course all of this is on the non-verbal level. In other words, the responses that the heart makes affect the entire human system.
Idea 4.: The heart is also a very powerful electromagnetic generator. It creates an electromagnetic field that encompasses the body and extends out anywhere from eight to twelve feet away from it. It is so powerful that you can take an electrocardiogram reading from as far as three feet away from the body. The field the heart produces is holographic, meaning that you can read it from any point on the body and from any point within the field.
Idea 5.: We now know that the radio spectrum of the heart is profoundly affected by our emotional response to our world. Our emotional response changes the heart's electromagnetic spectrum, which is what the brain feeds on. Ultimately, everything in our lives hinges on our emotional response to specific events.
Idea 6.: Children's emotional experience, how they feel about themselves and the world around them, has a tremendous impact on their growth and development. It's the foundation on which all learning, memory, health and well-being are based. When that emotional structure is not stable and positive for a child, no other developmental process within them will function fully. Further development will only be compensatory to any deficiencies. So, the first and foremost thing that must occur, if you want intelligent, successful and healthy children, is that they must have a positive emotional experience.
Idea 7.: It all begins with children feeling unconditionally wanted, accepted and loved. This is the key to the entire operation. You can have everything else: a high standard of living, the most expensive school system, the finest teachers in the world; but if the children are lacking that initial experience of being unconditionally loved by at least one person, and if they do not feel safe and secure in their learning environment, then nothing is going to happen very positively.
Idea 8.: There are only two types of learning; one is true learning and the other is conditioning. Conditioning is a fear-filled response by the older, or what we call the "hind," or "reptilian" brain. This is the reflexive, survival, maintenance brain that responds as if threatened. A form of learning does take place here, but it's conditioned learning and is intimately associated with the emotional states of hostility, anger and anxiety.
If you want true learning, learning that involves the higher frontal lobes -- the intellectual, creative brain -- then again, the emotional environment must be positive and supportive. This is because at the first sign of anxiety the brain shifts its functions from the high, prefrontal lobes to the old defenses of the reptilian brain.
TOGETHER, WE CAN STOP THE MALTREATMENT OF CHILDREN. You are invited to join the many others in pledging to interrupt the violence against children. TO SEE THE COMPLETE LIST of those vowing to STOP THE HITTING, visit Norm's website, PARENTING WITHOUT PUNISHING: www.nopunish.net. You are also invited to send us a brief anecdote describing a time you intervened on behalf of a child, and what was effective - or not.There is nothing sold here, nothing to buy. This information is Copyright 2008 by Norm Lee, and offered here free of charge. Commercial use of this material, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited. Permission is here given to forward a complete document, and/or to print complete copies for friends WITHOUT CHARGE to them. All quoting must provide source, author, and website www.nopunish.net. List addresses are never sold, exchanged or shared. If you wish to be added to the mailing list for this NORM REPORT e-letter, send name and general location (state, city, or country), with "Please subscribe" in the subject box, to norm@bmi.net.
The Norm Report - Month 73
January 3, 2008 E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Norm Lee's website: www.nopunish.net
In 5 years: 20,000 visits.It is easier to work for
the improvement of the world
than to work for the improvement of oneself,
although the world would profit immensely
if the inverse order were followed.- Ruth Nanda Ashen
A Hooda ThunkTwenty thousand visits to my modest website in only five years! Never did I imagine such. It was during Nov & Dec, 2002 that Jordan built my website for me and to get my story and "Parenting Without Punishing" "on the air". That was one "angel". The other was my son Russell, who had bought me a computer on which I could get my writings outside this valley. Jordan has been my webmaster (and dear friend and fellow insurgent) ever since. Very soon I was in contact with Alice Miller and helping her start her email discussion list-serve and participating in the Psychohistory list-serve, where I met Mady & Mitch and many others. This was, indeed, a Movement to reckon with.
My interest in childrearing reaches back to the mid-1950s, so 2008 marks well over a half century of involvement in what was then not yet a "movement". Impossible to catalog all the steps here, but it was eleven years ago I came to this valley asking myself, "What is the most valuable thing I can contribute here, in my new community? Answer: Raising consciousness in the humane treatment of children. I was not prepared for the community's reaction: the denials, the evasions, the defensiveness, the hostility, and physical aggression, even. I hardly expected to be vilified, held up to public ridicule, kicked out of the County Health Office and a number of stores, even driven from yard sales, for merely distributing Kids' Safe Zone stickers and Plain Talk About Spanking, and offering No Spanking Zone posters. My "No Spanking" t-shirts and badges brought angry attacks; it is not safe, I found, to wear the button that bears the title of my book: Parenting Without Punishing. Enraged by my STEP UP RESOLUTION, the editor of the weekly paper editorialized that if I "stepped up" to interfere with their spanking ("disciplining") their child, I would get a spanking myself.
On reporting this media resistance to the members of PTAVE and others in what had now grown to a Movement, ten or a dozen "warriors" wrote letters to the editor - explaining what has been learned about the harmful results of CP on children. None of the letters were printed, my letters were still banned (as they still are today, after five years,) but the spanking-addicted editor was dismissed - and replaced by an even more fundamentalist, closed-down religious-defensive editor of the worst order. The insight was a long time coming: that behind that wall was terror - the deep-rooted fear of parental disapproval and withholding of love. Because it was to them an attack on their own parents, who had "lovingly" battered them, and are now haunting them from their unconscious.
For several years it appeared that there was no progress at all in this valley, no changes, and none likely. Meantime several European countries banned spanking, with Sweden leading today's list of 24 countries prohibiting by law the corporal punishment of children.* (Hooda thunkit?) With the raising of public awareness via TV programs and frequent articles in magazines and large-city newspapers on the harm done to children by CP, our hard and relentless efforts on consciousness-raising is, after a half-century, at last bearing fruit.
The Way ForwardWe in PTAVE have advanced rapidly, with the pace accelerating at a rate never before imagined possible. At the helm, our immensely skilled and indefatigable leader Jordan Riak repeatedly surprises us all with his courageous and wise advances in the cause of protecting children from the onslaughts of the ignorant and disturbed. I, for one, as I reflect on the past and foresee the future, am much encouraged. Among our strengths are generosity with our time and talents, gratefulness for the meager results from huge, expensive, and thankless efforts, irrepressible loving-kindness not only for children but also for each other, and knowing that we are each tapping into our respective and collective Basic Goodness.
With the two months of the treasures and trash of getting and spending behind us now, what can we give, during 2008, to the children? What have we to offer them all year that has real value? We can give them our trust in their true nature: goodness, not sinful". Our respectful regard that they are worthy of such, not cloying "love". We can give them our best example, a model worth emulating, one shaped by self-discipline - which we can also give them. And we can model for them our Stability, as well as cheerful, fearless Openness. We can give by demonstration that while conflict may be inevitable, there are skills to resolve them without hate and violence. And we can give the children our outlook of lightness and humor, (kids love absurdity,) and the wisdom that whatever is happening, whether pain or pleasure, will surely pass.
Have a Happy New Year 2008, beloved friends and fellow suspects.
- Norm
* Countries that protect children from hitting/spanking/physical punishment, and the dates of reform: Sweden - 1979, Finland - 1983, Norway - 1987, Austria - 1989, Cyprus - 1994, Italy -1996, Denmark - 1997, Latvia - 1998, Croatia - 1999, Bulgaria - 2000, Germany - 2000, Israel - 2000, Iceland - 2003, Ukraine - 2004, Romania - 2004, Hungary - 2005, Greece - 2006, Netherlands - 2007, New Zealand - 2007, Portugal - 2007 and Uruguay - 2007.The Norm Report - Month 72
December 1, 2007
E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Norm Lee's website: http://www.nopunish.net
The best gift you can give yourself
is to lighten up.- Pema Chodron: "Start Where You Are"
This column, issued five years ago, is here updated and revised:
A CHRISTMAS CARDOne of the traditions of the "holy" season is yanking children around shopping centers and smacking them when they complain about it. The birthday of Jesus is a good time to examine this whole business of denial concerning the tragedies and suffering of children. We are so much surrounded by it that it looks normal, tho 21 countries* elsewhere have passed laws prohibiting the hitting/spanking/physical punishment of children. What makes so many of us U.S. citizens look away from the tormenting of children that occurs before our eyes?
I once stumbled by mistake into a convention of funeral directors and found the theme of the event was, "Do not turn away." When the bereaved want to speak of their grief, be there for them. It is of immense importance to funeral directors, if they wish to stay in business, to not ignore suffering.
I think part of it is the fear of involvement. There is a story, reported as true, about a man who, during a Christmas church service, suddenly started screaming obscenities, shocking everyone in the pews, not to mention the choir and the preacher. Immediately one of the elders sprang to the window to adjust the shades - until the disturbance was quelled and the man ushered out.
We cannot know exactly an artist's meaning, in literal terms. Indeed, they themselves often say they don't know. We each bring our meaning to the work being viewed. The great Flemish painter Pieter Breughel, in his "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus", shows a host of people intent on ignoring a small boy who is, incredulously, falling from the sky into the Aegean Sea.
We know from Greek mythology that the boy's father, Daedelus, had made for him wax wings to escape from Crete, and had cautioned the boy to not fly too high lest the hot sun melt the wax. The advice was ignored, and so Icarus was drowned.
What is remarkable in the painting of a this bucolic, peaceful scene is the incongruence of a small white figure plunging from the sky. That no one notices the fact gives the painting its power: it give the viewer a jolt, a shock, even. (Equally remarkable is that this picture was made about the year 1560!) People walk leisurely along the shore, oblivious of the tragedy, strollers munch their lunches, a farmer continues to plow the furrow, and vacationers on the pleasure cruise think of themselves only. Is this really what we are like? we ask ourselves. No one cares about anybody other than themselves?
In his poem, "Musee des Beaux Arts" (the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels), W. H. Auden observes:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
......In Brueghel's "Icarus", for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shown
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Auden's poem brought to my mind the times when I, busy with my shopping, have walked by and ignored the "disciplining" of a child by a frustrated Xmas shopper. But I no longer deny the "human position", the "important failure". If I am to be the person I choose to be, I cannot fail that child, I cannot pass by that opportunity to make a difference in that child, that parent, in my community. I must be the one who offers a calming voice, or raises objection, regardless of the risk, to break up that violent energy. Can I expect another "enlightened witness" to step up? My responsibility cannot be avoided, I must respond.I once thought it was a problem of education, that we are too dumb to understand our duty to the coming generation. Then I saw it as lack of vision: we are too blind to see the obvious harm being done. Now it appears to me that it is a failure of courage: we are too cowardly to acknowledge the reality that Icarus is FALLING INTO THE SEA! We are concerned with our own security, and so we meekly follow what our parents taught us: "Mind your own business!" "Don't get involved!" "Don't go looking for trouble!"
But all children are our business. They are not the property of parents, they are young members of the community, with their rights being violated with impunity before our very eyes - and no one there to defend them. Parents who "love Jesus" will justify a slapping around and brazenly cite the Old Testament's authority to do it. Yet they cannot, without effort, imagine the gentle, loving Jesus spanking a child.
Interfering is not "making trouble"; the trouble was made when the child was attacked. There are several ways to intervene, depending on the circumstance, and each way will affect a stop to the assault. If nothing else, the child will remember forever that someone cared to STEP UP when needed.
It is time we recognized that EVERY child is a Christ Child, who wants to be a Joy To The World. MAY WE MAKE PEACE IN OUR COMMUNITY THIS SEASON.
- Norm
The Norm Report - Month 71
November 1, 2007 E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Norm Lee's website: www.nopunish.net
As long as we are enslaved by our kleshas,
there will be no peace of mind,
or peace in the world.- Pema Chodron
Letting Go of PunishmentIt's about Freedom. Long after I went to war in Korea to defend political freedom, my small sons taught me about the freedom that comes inborn with the childhood package, the naturally free, untrammeled spirit. Now, for the past 40 years I have taught parents and college students how to provide for children a disciplined home life, free of punishment and other enthusiasm-killing oppression. (Click on "Parenting Without Punishing" on my website www.nopunish.net). My lifelong quest for Freedom didn't stop there; I still carried internal conflicts that bound me. At last I entered a Buddhist retreat center, and there, practicing yoga, meditating, and studying the Dharma, I found levels of freedom I hadn't known were possible.
But before that, I had learned how to bring up children without resorting to punishment. Many people have asked, "How did you have the patience to refrain from spanking your young sons?" They raised their hands in disbelief when I said they were not punished at all. Never. Horrified, they predicted futures in "correctional facilities" for the boys, and eternal hellfire for me. They were wrong, (at least regarding the boys). I realized they viewed children and their parents as natural adversaries. How sad. Hardly a wonder their homes were battlegrounds.
The psych books say that, given my violent childhood, I was more or less destined to become a child abuser (like my father), and a wife abuser (like my father). Since I was neither, I was credited by some with having the patience of a saint, and dismissed by others as a flagrant liar. Some became indignant when I told them I'm the least patient person I know; it is obvious to me that refraining from hitting children requires no patience: Only basic decency, and attention to the violence impulse is required. Anyone can do it.
Well, how does that work? Here's how I did - and anyone can - check and eliminate spanking, indeed, all punishment, from the family hearth:
- I examined values and decided on the kind of person - and parent - I wanted to be: non-violent and non-threatening. I wanted to show love and care, not verbalize it.
- I adopted a new view of child and childhood: They are born not in "sin", but with innocent Basic Goodness.
- Being a student of childhood, I viewed the two boys as my teachers, my "experts" on childhood.
- I acquired human potential training in sensitivity, and T-Group Theory in honest relationships.
- I acquired several years' training in yoga, meditation, and the study of Buddhist dharma.
So, since I did not see the boys as little beings guilty of inherited sin, I did not view my duty - (as "God") - to "fix" them, improve them, prepare them for life - and death. The Basic Goodness, the innocence, the joy, enthusiasm and love I saw in them, brought for me a happiness I had never previously known. These teachers of mine - these toddlers as gurus - how I longed to be like them! The joys, the honesty of emotions, the directness, the immediacy of the moment, the eagerness to learn and experience the world, - there was no one I preferred to be with.
In the rare instances when the temptation, or rather, the idea of punishing arose in my mind, (and that was only early on,) I recognized it as a "danger flag", and stopped, quickly thinking of alternatives. Quite literally took just a moment to silently ask myself, "How creative can I get in dealing with this situation? Since punishment is verboten, what else is possible?" What first was an internal game for me, soon developed into a practice, a principle never to violate. And I'm proud to say I never did.
For me, as a philosopher, it came to an examination of values. What do we, as adults, really treasure? What do we want? We want a peaceful world. We want an end to the horror of violence, an end to the suffering of animals and fellow humans. We want a happy home life. We want to be free of neurotic habits and mental anguish. We want freedom to be who we are, and we want love, acceptance. We also want to be involved in making the world a better, saner place. To do that, it is clear, we need to get saner ourselves. We can, in fact, create the causes & conditions of all of the above. There are known and proven methods to accomplish all of them.
Years ago I read of a Chinese sage advising that we can indeed change the world. But we can't start with the world. We must first change the nation of which we are a citizen. Before that, however, we must change the state or province we live in. Wait - that's too difficult: we must start with changing our local county. Better yet, work to make changes in this city. No, we have to begin by changing our neighborhood. Where shall we start? With our family, of course. But how? By making desirable and effective changes in myself, in my own personal, thinking mind, in the moment-to-moment details of my own mental processes. That's how.
This is, of course, the most difficult of all, which explains why it is so rarely attempted. But there is no changing the world without beginning there. There is no time to waste.
In antiquity it was discovered that all anxiety, fear and suffering disappears when we tame the wildness of our mind. We need to discipline ourselves to training our mind. This can be taught. Increasingly for the past fifty years or so, instruction has grown within reach of each of us. We can learn, by practice, to center our awareness in the Here and Now. With persistent practice, we come to discover what Buddhists call our Basic Goodness. With insight we see that we must never harm others, no matter the provocation. We see that the greatest good we can do is to care for other suffering beings with compassion, being concerned for others' welfare before our own.
We see that security is illusion, and that we have to accept living without it. Insight tells us that the antidote to our misery is to stay present, in the Now, the only Reality. We have learned that the only way to make real change in the world is to free our minds of the early orientation we were subjected to, and to grow up and take charge of our mental processes. In doing that, we see that hate, aggression, hostility and violence don't work, and that the harm we do inevitably comes back to us. Instead of solving our problems, such negativity adds more of the same misery to our lives.
What applies in the world and in the street also applies in the home, in raising children. If we are at the mercy of the wildness in our minds, we are jerked around by our emotions, our impulses. We are not free. Buddhist talk about "kleshas", the term for that impulse to anger. If we can spot that, if we can see it when it arises in the mind, even someone as full of rage as I can control it. And that is the best, the easiest, time to curb it - at the very outset. To master that is never to spank or punish again. Or abuse anyone.
Even before practicing yoga or studying Buddhist dharma I trained myself to recognize the red flag of the klesha. I had good reason to do so: I was determined that my children were not to pay the emotional price for my internal rage. That would be the same as turning those precious little beings over to the mercy of the tyrants who brutalized me years before. Unthinkable. It was A. S. Neill who first encouraged me, in his book, "Summerhill". That remarkable man - no sentimentalist, he - had total trust in the Basic Goodness in each child, no matter how crazy and wild they acted out. It was a decade later that I took training in Buddhism. But note that one needn't become a Buddhist monk to eschew punishment of children thru training the mind to spot the kleshas. Anyone can do it; try it for a few days, or a few months. But my early self-training did help prepare me for treading the Heart Path of the bodhisattva.
Until we start taming the mind, we are jerked around by our emotions. There is no freedom in being at the mercy of impulses. We can't deal with them when they are out of control. But with the right motivation, plus determination, we can stop the initial rush to lash out, long enuf to see the folly and harm in it. And the time to stop it is at the outset. The later it is, the harder it is, and later, out of reach altogether. Because negative emotions enslave us as we indulge in them, robbing us of our precious freedom. We're dragged along under the spell of rage.
With awareness we can curb that urge when it's still manageable. We pause before the trap, and take a deep breath. We're back in charge, and no child gets hurt. Pema Chodron, giving us the message of Shantedeva, the great sage of the 7th Century, said, "Treat your crippling emotions like drug pushers. Our negative emotions weaken us, cause us harm. These addictions ruin our life." If we don't "catch" the klesha tension, it could result in full-blown aggression and violence, bringing misery for ourselves and others. No child deserves that.
"As long as we are enslaved by our kleshas, there will be no peace of mind, or peace in the world," Pema said. "War, violence, child abuse will continue everywhere. But we can create the cause of peace, here - and there."
- Norm
The Norm Report - Month 70
October 1, 2007
E-mail: norm@bmi.netNorm Lee's website: http://www.nopunish.net
[When] cowering under his blows as a child,
I knew that one day he would not be able to hurt me anymore.- Monty Roberts at his father's coffin
"My father seemed only five feet tall, and the flesh had almost disappeared from his bones. I had waited for this moment most of my life. When I was ten, I knew that one day there would be a funeral, and then I could touch him. Only then could I finally shake his hand."This emotional casket-side scene Monty Roberts describes at the end of his book, "The Man Who Listens To Horses". We have learned much about Marty Roberts' brutality with horses, and more about how he viciously and frequently beat his son. The father & son had been estranged for almost all of Monty's life. Now Marty Roberts was dead.
He remembered the time, when he was a young boy, he watched with horror as his father, then the village cop, beat and kicked to death a man robbing a bar. He recalled the time his father punished a horse by tying its leg up, leaving him to suffer for hours tethered tightly to a post. Monty could not bear to see the suffering, and released the horse, planning to re-tie him before his father returned to the ranch. But he returned early, and in a wrathful frenzy, beat the boy until he feared for his life. He had never known a moment of acceptance or affection, much less love, from his father.
"For most of my life I had longed for the moment when I would stand over my dead father. This was precisely the picture I had had: he in a wooden box, me looking down on him. Through his punishments and beatings, that image had sustained me. Cowering under his blows as a child, I knew that one day he would not be able to hurt me anymore. It was a cathartic moment, and though I have shed many tears in my life, I did not shed one as I gazed into that coffin. The anger lived on, as if he had thrashed me yesterday, though that was more than forty years earlier."
Monty was not like other men and moms, who simply passed their rage on to the succeeding generation. With remarkable insight into himself he tells us how he prevented his internal violence from transferring to his own loved ones: "I knew the triggers that led to violence. I, too, have felt that anger rise in me, felt the urge to strike out at someone in my family. But I put my grip on that anger. I swore that this man in the box would be the last link in the chain of violence and anger aimed as much at humans as at horses."
Here is one of the qualities that distinguishes Monty from other survivors of abuse: Awareness of the rage within him, and the determination that the violence stops here. Tho he is famous worldwide for his genius with horses, his contribution to the literature of childrearing may prove to be, in the end, Monty Roberts' most important and enduring legacy.
Monty's approach in a nutshell"We all want a well-behaved, happy, and willing horse at the conclusion...he should not be traumatized ... Remember, let your animal be free. Do not restrict. Make it pleasant for him to be near you ... No pain. ...The point of my method is to create a relationship based on trust and confidence...The first rule of starting a horse is no pain. You, the trainer, will not hit, kick, jerk, pull, tie, or restrain ...Suggest to the horse that you would rather he did, but not that he must...Above all, stay calm." [Emphasis are Monty's]
"Hold in your mind the idea that the horse can do no wrong; that any action taken by the horse was most likely influenced by you. We can do little to teach the horse; we can only create an environment in which he can learn. Likewise with people: the student who has knowledge pushed into his brain learns little, but he can absorb a great deal when he chooses to learn... If we refuse to believe that the horse can communicate, pain can be used to train him... But pain is needless and terribly limiting..."
Monty's audiences are spellbound when he talks about communicating in the same way with wild deer in the forest. It began with rescuing and tending a doe that had been wounded by wolves. To his surprise, she responded to his "horse language" in much the same way as wild horses - and burrows, mules, and all "flight animals." In the passage of time, wild deer came to his ranch and frolicked with him on his lawn, at times walking into his kitchen, following him like a dog.
Lawrence Scanlon writes in the Afterword that Monty likes to call himself a "horse psychologist". At Cal Poly he studied human psychology, then used in the coral what he learned in class. "He had experience working with outcasts," writes Scanlon, "from wounded deer, and horses bound to the slaughter house, [then with] violent, druggy, physically abused street kids. After he and his wife Pat had three children, they began taking in the children nobody wanted, and raising them as their own."
Over the years the Roberts took in a total of 47 children, most of them age 12 to 14. Some stayed for years living like brothers and sisters to Pat and Monty's three kids. "Some had tangled with school authorities, or the law, some had been dismissed as backward, some were hooked on hard drugs or suffered from eating disorders. Most came from dysfunctional families."
Of the 47, 40 of them by Monty's count, stood on their feet after leaving and made a life for themselves. "The rest landed in jail or returned to the streets and died there." But given the afflictions they arrived with, the changes in the kids vindicated the relationship Pat and Monty built, which was not dissimilar to the approach with horses: basic kindness, gentleness, patience, trust. And this is the approach that Monty wants us, and the world, to consider.
Monty teaches horse starting"For centuries humans have said to the horses, 'You do what I tell you or I'll hurt you'. Humans still say that to each other, still threaten and force and intimidate. I am convinced that my discoveries with horses also have value in the workplace, in the educational and penal systems, and in the raising of children. At heart I am saying that no one has a right to say you must to an animal - or to another human." Just as trust has to be won with a horse, so must it be won between people and their employers, between parents and their children.
Since 1990, thousands of educators, physicians, corporate officers, and others - more than 240 firms and organizations from around the world - have come to Monty Roberts to hear what a man, known for his horse skills, has to teach about people skills. "It used to be OK to beat a child or for a husband to beat his wife...It's wrong, and not effective either," Monty tells them.
Both his corporate and childrearing philosophy is rooted in respect, and ends in expectations clearly defined: "People must be allowed to fail," he says, "but do not protect the lazy or incompetent; above all, people must be allowed to succeed and be rewarded if they meet or exceed the terms of the contract." Thus Monty's discipline is defined. He (also) hopes that in future our understanding of human-to-human interactions will take great leaps forward.
Some 790 years ago, when Genghis Khan occupied Iran, Afghanistan, & Turkestan, his horses "spoke" the language. "But no one saw it," notes Monty. "No one tried to see it...Like many who profess to love the horse - and do love the horse - the Mongols broke their young horses in the cruel, conventional way....Horses had no answer to the Khan's cruelty, they had no voice. But they did have a language...And that language has probably existed for 45 million years, virtually unchanged...The absence of communication between human and horse has led to a disastrous history of cruelty and abuse...Our loss has been considerable..."
On Monty's character, lifework & teachingsMonty's genius lies in somehow mastering himself, triumphing over his internal rage at his father, just as he mastered the art of animal communication. His saving advantage was that he had a caring mother, from whom he acquired the softer, gentler side of life. Ever hoping for reconciliation between her husband and her son, she tried, in her final years, one last time. She persuaded the old man to sit in the bleachers and watch while their son performed with a wild horse, just as he had done 20,000 times before applauding crowds, and before an admiring Queen of England. Monty carefully explained to his father every move, every communication, in this one last effort to reach him with what he'd learned. A half hour later, when the horse was saddled and being ridden around the arena, his father stomped off, muttering and snorting in disgust.
For us, Monty's application to children of what horses taught him is most significant and important. We can easily suppose that without learning to listen to horses, Monty's internal violence - passed on from his father thru him to his own three children - would have been devastating. They would have suffered beatings, plus his wife attacked and abused in his fits of rage. But Monty looked inside himself, acknowledged the violence there, and trained himself to stop it short. He learned to mindfully check the violence impulse, refusing to make his family pay the emotional price for his father's brutal treatment. I think that, among his extraordinary accomplishments, deserves most tribute.
- Norm
The Norm Report - Month 69
September 1, 2007
Email: norm@bmi.net
Norm Lee's website: www.nopunish.net
Be firm but never harsh.
Never lose your temper with a horse.
Reward him with kindness when he does what you wish.- Xenophon, Greek cavalry officer, 300 BC
Readers of John Steinbeck know that the California town he called home was Salinas. It was there that he wrote the books set in Monterey County, about Cannery Row and the lovable but ne'er-do-well bums he knew so well. It was about the time the Upright Citizens of Salinas drove John out of town for writing that "immoral" book, "The Grapes of Wrath" (which won the Pulitzer), that Monty Roberts was born.For a young boy in Salinas in the Thirties, it was exciting times. Even as a small child Monty always attended the local rodeo, with its calf roping and "bronco bustin". He was the son of Marvin Roberts, reputably the best horseman as well as the toughest man in Salinas. Best of all, his father was owner and manager of the annual event, and of a riding school as well.
Before he could walk the boy was spending full days on the horse's neck ahead of his mother as she gave riding instructions to local students. At four years old he was competing in horse shows - and was quickly spotted by a Warner Brothers representative. Soon he was doubling for Roddy McDowall in films, later for luminaries like James Dean in "East of Eden" and a hundred or so other films. Monty's father handled the business, took the money the boy earned, and kept it. ("Who buys your food? Your clothes? You owe me years of room and board!")
In his book, "The Man Who Listens to Horses", Monty describes the method his father used on horses - tough-love without the love; that is, he "broke" wild horses using total dominance, brutality, and terror. "You hurt them first, or they'll hurt you," he instructed his son. Monty later said, "My father's way of breaking horses was what I would describe as conventional - but that is to say, cruel."
The boy knew how it felt to be physically manhandled by his father, and had plenty of bruises to show for it. "He showed great tenderness to members of the family," Monty recalls, "but I never saw that side of him... I never got hugged by him. He would pass me on the street and not say hello. From the outset he turned a cold and critical eye on me. Generous with others, he demanded perfection of me. He was unforgiving and scrutinized everything I did, more often than not holding it up to ridicule. As a boy I was serious and polite, and when I look back on these times I see that I never was a child." While he respected and feared his father, he was determined he would not grow to be that kind of man.
Monty loved horses, and knew them to be gentle, lovable creatures, so breaking the spirit of those beautiful animals seemed unnecessary. As he watched his father brutalize a young stallion, born in the wild and imprisoned in a coral, the boy's stomach churned, not the least because Monty, himself, was routinely so brutalized. He was once actually chain-whipped by his raging father, and a heavy chain it was. Today, at 72, he talks in a trembling voice about his "lifetime of rejection" - starting early on by his father, who "taught discipline" thru frequent beatings.
By the time he was seven Monty was spending much time alone in the high desert of Nevada, watching thru binoculars the behavior of the herds of wild horses there, how they related to each other. He would watch for eight hours of daylight, then strained to see them by moonlight, observing how they subtly communicated by positioning their bodies. Thus, Monty very gradually learned the language of horses. He decided he would learn to relate with horses in the same way. It was from what he saw in the wild, and what he learned from practice in the breaking ring, that he developed the now-celebrated Monty Roberts "horse starting" method - the new horse-training paradigm he is now famous for.
"To destroy the willingness in a horse is a crazy, unforgivable act," he announces to the groups of horsemen and women who come to watch him do his "magic". "Inherent generosity is among the dominant characteristics of the horse, and if nurtured can grow into the most rewarding aspect of their working lives...I have marveled most at their willingness to try for me, over and over again." A method of gentleness, patience, and quiet encouragement brings cooperation, even devotion. What a novel idea!
Gone is the "breaking" of horses to saddle and rider, gone is the violence, the terror, of his father's brutal, traditional method. "My ambition was immense: to change the way humans relate to horses." He set out to form a natural bond with a wild horse. And where his father took three or more weeks of daily abuse to break a horse's spirit, Monty - in twenty minutes - has a saddle and rider on a formerly wild, now calm and cooperating horse. Because he learned the language of horses, he is open to their communications.
"Hold in your mind the idea that the horse can do no wrong, that any action taken by the horse - especially the young unstarted horse - was most likely influenced by you. Tho he hungered for his father's approval, Monty quickly saw his hostility to any suggestion that his old ways could be improved upon. On pain of violence he had to keep from his father the valuable skills he had acquired. The rageaholic would not be proven "wrong" by his son, and never accepted the revolutionary method despite the honors and fame his son earned.
Monty endured the all-but-unanimous scorn of the horsemen who grimly stuck to the traditional "breaking" of horses. Few would accept that you can communicate with a brute beast, win their trust, and teach them without whips and spurs. Horse owner John Franks wonders why Monty's way is not universally accepted and practiced. "I'm a geologist and when something new comes along in geology, we all jump on it." But in the horse world? "Everyone goes his own way, and it's hard to change a trainer who has done it his way all his life." In 1989 he was invited to Windsor Castle by Queen Elizabeth of England, herself very knowledgeable about horses. She asked Monty to show her just how he did his magic with horses. After seeing it, she suggested he write a book. So he did.
Monty's priceless gift to the world is a way of showing the horse that a saddle and rider are not to be feared, indeed, they can be enjoyed. The task is to bring the horse to its first rider without instilling anxiety and stress. "The horse is a flight animal who feels vulnerable 24 hours a day ... the same vulnerability a woman may feel when she is alone in an elevator and a burly man gets on." Monty learned on his own what Mary O'Hara wrote in "My Friend Flicka" in the voice of a rancher to his son: "A horse can tell you a lot of things, if you watch, and expect it to be sensible and intelligent. Pay attention to the little signs - the way it moves its body, the ears, the eyes, the little whinnies - that's her way of talking to you ... and it's for you to understand her. You'll learn her language, and she'll learn yours - never forget that they can understand everything you say to them."
Monty lectures widely, demonstrating his technique. "What I can do with horses is the result of long hours watching them in the wild. It's essentially a simple thing based on common sense ... It is an undiscovered language - primitive, precise, and easy to read. The silent language uses the movements of the body - 'signs' - that can be read. ... I believe this a universal 'tongue', understood not just by all wild and domestic horses, ponies, mules, and donkeys, but also by other 'flight' animals such as deer. Once learned, the language allows a new understanding between human and horse."
In "My Friend Flicka", author O'Hara has a character say, "Under the eye of a human being, an unbroken horse is in terror." As for the traditional way of "breaking" a horse: "It ruins the horse! He loses something, and never gets it back. Something goes out of him. He's not a whole horse anymore ... he is marked with fear and distrust, his disposition damaged - he'll never have confidence in a man again." From the Preface of Monty's book: "The old way: putting a horse in a corral, lassoing him, tying him to a post and then getting on him with a pair of spurs - [is] unbelievable. Now we use round pens, we teach the horse that we're not going to hurt him, that we're his friend."
Monty has "started" (he never uses the term "broken") some ten thousand horses, at his ranch and all over the world, and his gentle communication with a horse has never failed. Alone in a circular pen, Monty - without ever touching the mustang - has him trotting round and round it. Key signs come in succession: the horse cocks an ear, sticks out his tongue, and lowers his head to the ground. "I want to talk," says the horse. He is away from his herd and alone; as a flight animal his instinct tells him he's now vulnerable to predators. And Monty is offering him another herd. "When to face the horse and make eye contact, when not to, where to touch the horse first, whether to move slowly or quickly, all this Monty knows, for he has learned his equine manners and grammar", wrote Lawrence Scanlon.
Monty: "I don't do it for the people. I do it for the horse." It's not about people with horse problems, he explains, "it's about horses with people problems". It's about the horse as teacher. And it makes humans more humane. "The horse has much to teach humans about listening."
And he says, furthermore, that what he's learned has much to teach parents and teachers about dealing with children. "We can do little to teach the horse; we can only create an environment in which he can learn. Likewise with people: the student who has knowledge pushed into his brain learns little, but he can absorb a great deal when he chooses to learn."
"The point of my method is to create a relationship based on trust and confidence...For centuries humans have said to horses [and children] you do what I tell you or I'll hurt you. [But] inflicting pain does not work ...I am convinced that my discoveries with horses also have value in the workplace, in penal and school systems, and in the raising of children...."
- Norm
The Norm Report - Month 68
August 1, 2007E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Visit Norm Lee's website: http://www.nopunish.net
“It does not require a majority to prevail,
but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to
set brushfires in people’s minds.”- Samuel Adams
Why I Like the Strong-Willed Child
When I taught High School English, the best pupils I had were the school-hating malcontents. Each was what James Dobson identified as the "strong-willed" child, tho I found them the brightest, most creative, most disruptive, with the poorest grades. They were "school failures" who lacked status and had nothing to lose - except their self-respect, and that they would not give up. They were the "difficult" pupils that disturbed classes and interrupted "teaching". They deserved my respect and got it. To other teachers they were threatening. Fearing their power and lacking the skills to deal with them, teachers punished repeatedly, and wishing they would disappear, shipped them off to the principal's office. Yet, I found the rebellious kids not difficult. They were the most interesting, far more so than most "superior" pupils. The troublesome ones were, in my view, the "best" kids in terms of character, intelligence, and sanity. I found them a fascinating challenge. And I liked them.
The most "successfully bad" ones were eventually, among teachers, compared to Hitler, the very top-on-the-badness chart. But Hitler was not "strong-willed"; he was insane, a prisoner controlled by his several obsessions. What the German people needed in the Thirties were more strong-willed citizens, those who had the courage to resist authoritarianism. People like those most "rebellious" in my classes. People who had not "sold out" their integrity and souls and bought into the System.
Why has Shakespeare's "Hamlet" been at the top of the literature charts for 400 years? One reason is it asks us to consider what is perhaps life's most important question: Am I going to be - or am I not going to be - authentic? Do I choose to stand by my convictions, or to abandon my moral compass and "play along to get along"? Shall I march along in lock step, or step to the beat of my own drum? During those exciting years I liked best the "trouble-makers", the "discipline problems". Never in all my teaching years did I ever send a pupil to the principal's office to be "disciplined". Indeed, I never once punished a pupil in any way.
I think it was because I invariably saw myself in the "screw-ups". Clearly they had been mistreated, and had a level of intelligence that could not abide boredom. I could not blame them for the "misbehavior" that was plainly caused by the school's failure to meet their needs. I wanted the school to be a refuge for those unhappy, surly kids. I did not want the school to be another fascist regime pushing them around, bossing them, forcing them to comply with decisions made by their "betters" in an office somewhere.
I found I could not, unfortunately, make the school over - (tho by God I tried). But I could, and did, make my classroom a place where they were not bullied, not punished, not ridiculed, not made to feel lousy about themselves. The so-called troublemakers wanted some degree of control over their lives. In time I saw that they wanted to make some decisions, even if wrong ones, and a safe place to make them. What is a school FOR? Those who arrived battle-scarred learned - some quickly, some later - that I would not add to their grief, that I was not The Enemy. As I trusted them, they trusted me.
My feeling was that when a child is blessed with a "strong will" he should appreciate it, as a rare gift to be treasured and cultivated. That strength is a valuable asset that, applied in a positive direction, can make much needed changes in this trouble-wracked world. Historically, that quality, tho rare, is common to all who have been contributing to advancing and improving the material and spiritual conditions of humankind since history began. It is cruel and stupid to destroy it. While the hordes of Dobsons and paddle-swingers were - and are - determined to crush that spirit, to cripple that uncommon strength, I wanted to encourage and redirect it.
We were alone in the room when Chuck, the 16-year-old I would sometimes spring from jail on Monday morning, declared, "This school sucks!"
"Right!" I answered. "But it isn't smart to say it out loud." I explained: "You caught on years before I did. You already know this is an obedience school, and the Trainers are scared. This is not the time to take them on. Until we position ourselves to make a positive difference, we are wise to keep it quiet. It's cool to know what's really going on, but cooler still to avoid putting a target on our backs by mouthing off. They are now positioned to make life miserable. You have only two more years of time here: Use it to work on yourself. You have to educate yourself - no class can do it for you. Observe how the System works, and above all study and emulate those you admire. Meanwhile, as wise old Henry Fonda once said, 'When you're up to your nose in shit, it's best to keep your mouth shut.' And when you go to jail, be sure it is for a worthwhile purpose." And I gave him Henry David Thoreau's "Essay on Civil Disobedience" to read. And Martin Luther King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail".
Nelson, too, played on the edges of the law. He had a calmness I coveted, and integrity I admired even more. He lived with his dad in a shack built of Coca-Cola signs at the town landfill. No one's status was lower, nor their spelling more atrocious. When he handed in an essay that was so beautiful, and so sensitive - tho full of spelling errors - that I beamed at him and graded it "A". The principal, who the paper had somehow reached, told me he was changing the grade to an "F". I handed him a piece of chalk and said, "Do that and you're the new English teacher - because I'm out of here." He backed down. The following year when he thought he could get away with insulting me, I quit on the spot.
Each one of the "problem pupils" was rebellious in his own way, while the top-of-the-class "A" pupils seemed to be all cut of the same cloth: Boring. At times I would tell them, "Hey - you all got "A"s. Now get out of here - go to the library and read something." Wayne's handicap was being the son of the shop teacher. Without perceptible warning one day he decided to "ride" me, test me like no other had ever done. And he was good, like a chess player. He trusted me to not mention it to his father; he was most relentless, my most daunting challenge. I didn't know how to deal with him. I just knew that I would not join in a power struggle. All others in class sat silently, watching the drama.
Wayne hated reading and writing, that is to say, English was his most hated subject. I learned his one overriding interest in life was electronics. He did not know that in the U.S.A.F. I had taught pilots and crewmembers the electronic and radio systems of the B-26 aircraft. After a week of insolence I felt that Wayne's abusive remarks had to be answered or I would soon "lose it" - and that I could not let happen. One morning I covered the blackboard with an elaborate radio schematic, with its tangle of circuits, detectors, resisters, capacitors and wires everywhere - all from memory. Wayne sat bug-eyed. Pointing to one circuit, I asked, "Who knows what this is?" Wayne: "I do! It's the Colpits oscillator!"
Correct. And what is this feature here? I asked. "That provides the feedback," said Wayne happily. And I knew I had him. Then I explained about the value of feedback in talking with people, and how the listener's input can influence the outcome of a discussion. Wayne, now in his element, couldn't have been happier: English now made sense! To my last day, there was never another problem with him. His "enemy" could walk on water.
Why was I so carefully avoiding putting down the pupils assigned to me? Reason: I had decided at the outset that if I could not maintain a disciplined classroom without punishing the kids, I would seek some other line of work. In Korea, if a pilot or crew gave me a hard time, which very rarely happened, I'd simply dismiss them from class and send them back to fly a few more missions over North Korea. (A.F. regulations gave me one rank higher than everyone in class. Would you believe - for a time I held the technical rank of Major General?)
But in my English class these weren't adults. The pupils needed the space to be kids. And the more resistant and rebellious they were to authority, the more I saw myself in them. We were comrades, not adversaries. And if they did not "know" that, they felt it. They knew I liked them, could see that, even while maintaining classroom order, I enjoyed them. They knew I worked half the night preparing for them. They taught me so much about teaching and about children.
They were "undisciplined" only in the view of Authority: they refused to submit to humiliation. They had their own internal discipline, in unknowing agreement with Erwin N. Griswold, dean of Harvard Law School: "The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights." I respected their rights as children and Americans, as they embodied that motto treasured by the early patriots of New Hampshire: "Don't tread on me."
- Norm
The Norm Report - Month 67
July 1, 2007E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Visit Norm Lee's website: http://www.nopunish.net
Can you imagine
what this man would have been if
someone [had] loved him? - Henry Kissinger on Richard Nixon
Most of you know I settled in this narrow Arizona valley in 1997 and began efforts to raise to public awareness the harm inflicted on children by corporal punishment, and to suggest non-punitive ways of childrearing. While the response was, for years, under whelming to say the least, there are now, after a decade of unremitting work, signs of limited success. A principle industry here is incarceration: five prisons are in this valley bulging with several thousand inmates. Many of my neighbors work there.With George W. Bush elected twice during the past ten years, the cumulative effect of the nation's aggression and propaganda has had a visible effect. As hate levels rose in the face of designated "enemies" of the government, fear levels mounted. Orange and red threat levels alerted families of unseen danger, and xenophobic levels, already high, mounted higher.
It is tempting to adopt the curbside psychologist mode and speak in terms of "schizophrenia" and "paranoia," but it is an irrefutable fact that what passes for "normal" here is clinically a certain level of mental illness. Tho it has been identified as a national sickness, or "the sickness of the age," I have not seen it at this level in the places I've traveled in Florida, West Coast, New York, and Midwest. And certainly not in Europe. Few will deny that the levels of anxiety and fear have raised since 9/11, but nowhere else have I seen this degree of negativism, fear, pessimism, and disconnection with what is real as opposed to what is fantasy, or illusion. It appears that nearly everyone in this valley is seeking escape from the Reality of Life.
Many months ago two local children committed suicide. The local paper chose to not publish that news. Now, long after, the tragedy is vaguely mentioned in print - but only briefly and reluctantly. Secrecy is maintained on identities and circumstances. Result: Children and their parents were served only by rumor and hearsay. In the end, general explanations thru schools and churches were passed on "informally." The impression left was that the kids themselves were culpable, somehow disobeyed, and escaped punishment.
This avoidance is not an atypical response to stark reality here: Avoid and deny it as long as possible. Both were boys, one age 15 took his life, we don't know how; the other, a child of eight, hanged himself soon after. If anyone knows why the boys took their lives, they are not sharing the information. But we know that the kids were likely caught in severe depression, had come to hate life itself, and adequate concern and counsel did not reach them. Thus, the community failed the boys, and the newspaper failed the community.
There are several stories here, not least of which is the shockingly dysfunctional newspaper non-coverage, whose publisher says he feared "copycat" reaction. Others, later, called for openness, and some even urged forums on the problem of depression, its causes and antidotes. In the end, the public pushed the uncomfortable issue aside to await the next family tragedy. The event was lost in comments of "Ain't it awful." That's the state of mind in this small community in Arizona.
No less than 15 million Americans a year are afflicted by depression. Here is a disease that costs the nation $83 billion each year in treatment costs, absenteeism, and lost productivity. About 189 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written last year, and the antidepressants are not working well, according to David Rubinow, a professor and the chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A recent $35 million government study examined a very large number of patients who were experiencing symptoms of major depression such as sadness, low energy and hopelessness. They were given the usual antidepressants, and found that only half were cured. A mere medical prescription is not adequate to cure profound unhappiness in the human spirit. Professionals say depression is the cause of almost all of the 30,000 suicides annually in the U. S.
Nationally, suicide is the third leading cause of death among youth ages 15 to 24. But in Arizona it is the number one leading cause of death in that age range. Is it my imagination, or was there a time when everyone felt they were part of a community, and that communal bond insured that no member would ever feel so estranged that they'd want to kill themselves, much less assassinate others in a dramatic exit from life. The recent massacre at Virginia Tech, where Cho Seung Hui did just that, is a case in point. Cho was profoundly unhappy and lonely, had never had friends - neither in his native Korea nor in U.S. He desperately wanted a girl friend but was rejected invariably. When he could stand the depression no longer, he killed 32 people and himself.
In seeing Cho's horror story I could not help thinking of Kim Choon He, my houseboy in Korea some 56 years ago. Things were bad in Korea in 1951 and '52. From the garbage cans outside our mess tent starving Koreans scooped slime with bare hands and licked it off hungrily. It's where I learned to hate war, and committed to work toward ending it. But Kim was ever cheerful, as he was well fed as he kept my boots shined and bed made and tent clean, for which I paid him a few won from my tiny monthly pay. I helped him learn English, and after I returned to the States we corresponded. When his letters stopped I assume he was drafted into the army and sent north to fight the Chinese, but his was not a killer temperament. He had friends who truly cared for him. Cho was not so lucky, or at least was not aware he was so lucky. Counseling could have helped him recognize his incredible fortune in having fine clothes, food and shelter, wonderful teachers in a fine university and very rare life opportunity.
Jerry Kroth, of the Graduate Division of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University (CA), tells us that when Mother Teresa first came to this country, she observed that the United States was the "loneliest" country she had ever visited. This is what Dr. Kroth says of Cho's rampage: "Perhaps instead of focusing on gun control, media violence, or beefing up campus security, we should look more closely at the alienation and lack of intimacy in American life." He cites a recent Pew poll indicating that the number of Americans who have "no one to talk to about a personal issue" has more than doubled in just the last decade. "We need to direct our attention to the lonely, depressed, alienated, and emotionally discarded segments of our society. There needs to be a sincere national dialogue about psychotherapy, mental health, and the absence of love in our society which gives rise to the evil that we all are trying to come to terms with today." - Norm
The Step Up Report - Month 66
June 1, 2007
E-mail: norm@bmi.net
...parents repeatedly punished us in attempts to force us
into the imaginary mold they had prepared for us, i.e.,
what a child should be.- Alice Miller
In a May 19, 07 email from London, "Harold" asked me for parenting guidance. For privacy, I have substituted fictional names. Our conversation follows.Harold: Hi Norm. Thank you for your website - it has filled me with hope and joy just to read a small part of it. I have two daughters, Shelly and Tammy, aged 27 months and 11 months. Their mother and I have raised them without violence but have resorted to gentler forms of punishment with Shelly, putting her on the bottom step of the staircase or in her cot.
Yet I have felt unhappy and ill at ease about doing this and instinctively averse to any form of punishment.
I am sorry not to have stuck to my original feelings in this regard and to have succumbed to the societal dogma that some form of punishment is a prerequisite to the raising of children. And I am delighted and grateful to have my natural inclinations so eloquently vindicated on your website that I can wake up to what I already knew and begin to parent more appropriately.
Norm: From my view, your instincts are correct: there is NO necessity for punishing a child, ever. Shelly, at age 2yrs., is now in the midst of "breaking out" of the infancy years - the very center of attention, and practicing toddlerhood, beginnings of childhood, with its new freedoms of movement and expression. Eleven months ago, at age one and a half, the "competition" arrived - to hog the attention and affection that had been, all her life, exclusively hers. Who wouldn't be upset? Angry? Even enraged? Her tiny world - her only security - was collapsing around her. It's been a distressing, perhaps tragic, year for her. And, with her God and Goddess battling, it's getting worse.
H: Unfortunately I fear that some harm has already been done and that Shelly has also picked up on her mother's and my sometimes angry behaviour toward one another, something which we are working hard on.
N: So it is clear to you that the work to be done is on the conflicting relationship between you and your wife. Can you see that the changes must take place there, not on the child? Shelly needs to be smothered in affection & attention. Forget the carrot-and-stick approach, she is not the family collie. Love her when she's "good", love her when she's "bad" (two terms I never used with my sons, by the way.) It is most important that the conflicts not be "worked out" in the presence or the hearing of the two children. I can't be emphatic enuf here. If you can't resolve issues yourself and soon, I urge you to seek counseling. The children have already suffered too much.
H: She quite frequently physically attacks and hurts her little sister and, to date, it is for this that she is most commonly punished by being placed in her cot and left alone in her room. I hasten to add that, for the most part, Shelly is an absolute delight - happy, kind and loving toward her sister. But she still attacks her with worrying frequency.
N: The child, then, is being punished for learning and applying what her parents taught her about human relationships, how fighting is "normal". Shelly is a delight, is bright, and happy and kind - because she was born GOOD, kind and loving. But - again - Shelly learned from parents' example to attack someone vulnerable when unhappy or stressed. She is too small to attack you. So what's left? Shelly also might benefit from counseling. In London there are surely many family counselors, with sliding scale fees. Try some out and persist until you find what is comfortable and effective for your situation.
H: Clearly the long-term solution to this problem is to engender a greater sense of love, respect, toleration and calm in the home as whole. But please could you advise me on what you would consider to be the best course to take immediately following such an incident.
N: Exactly. The problem is not in changing the child, it is in changing her parents. Ask: How can we engender love, respect, toleration and calm in this home? You can treat the symptoms (pimples), but the disease (measles) is still there, doing its dirty work. If, when Shelly is in attacking mode, the baby is kept beyond her reach, there should be no more attacks. Words won't work, toddlers are not academically inclined. Change the game from a contest of wills and adversary relationship to helping mom while tending to baby's needs.
H: I feel torn by my desire not to punish and the need to defend Tammy from any further harm.
N: By all means, keep Tammy out of reach of her sister. Simply making rules, issuing orders, and enforcing them does not work. Shelly has learned to punish; the baby must be protected; further punishing Shelly will heighten her aggression. She already feels rejected, neglected. Add punishment to that, and it's traumatic.
H: Apart from anything, whilst I can guarantee to try, I cannot guarantee to be perfect in my own future behaviour. I am in early recovery from alcoholism through AA and am making great strides but struggling nonetheless.
N: None of us is perfect; we're all struggling with challenges, weaknesses, guilt feelings and failures. But we can prevent harm to our children nonetheless. I hear you making excuses for failure already, and in this you must not fail your children. No excuses. It's not that you can't, it's just that you haven't seen the problem in its true light. If the view is still dim, write to me again.
H: Shelly communication skills are limited and it just seems to me that trying to explain to her that hurting her sister is upsetting for all of us, whilst empathizing with the feelings that motivated her to do so, may not be enough to prevent recurrences if she continues to witness her mother and I in heated exchanges, as is realistically likely to happen.
N: Correct; explaining and persuading will not stop Shelly from hurting Tammy, because rationality is not the game. A two-year-old can't grasp explanations and pleas for compassion. She is driven by painful emotions. Shelly is hurting badly, and needs to find ways to relieve that hurt. She needs to cry her grief and be held and loved - by her God and Goddess. There is no other world.
H: Any advice you might be able to offer would be really helpful. With great love and enormous gratitude, Harold
The Norm Report - Month 65
May 1, 2007
The key to ending suffering and finding [domestic] peace
lies in transforming our own mind:
removing our negativity, enhancing our positive qualities,
and revealing our true nature.- Chagdud Tulku
Every one of us is trained in parenting skills - by our own parents. Our work is to retrain ourselves - and others raised by spanking parents - to disabuse ourselves and others from the earlier conditioning. Nearly everyone needs help getting past the pervasive childhood training in violence. Those of us who have done the reading need to teach others the findings of modern research in peaceful parenting. The harmful effects of maltreatment and mis-parenting are easy to underestimate; the tight grip the subconscious has on our behavior can take months and years to expose and relax. There are many ways to affect changes. Perhaps we can learn from the Buddhists, whose teachings on the relief of suffering and attainment of happiness have proved effective for many millions of practitioners for the past 2,500 years, might be of some value to Norm Report readers.
I. THE DHARMA OF PARENTINGSince the problem of suffering and increasing the happiness of sentient beings has always been the central concern of Buddhists, it seems there may be understandings here that can apply to raising the quality of family life. When we observe the conflicts and misery of those around us - in the home, locally and globally - it may seem surprising that for over two millennia the remedy for suffering and the cause of happiness has been widely known in Asia. While complete coverage of the teachings of the several schools of Buddhism is far beyond my knowledge and the scope of this Norm Report, here selected are some basic guidelines deemed useful for family life.
1. The day the child is born, there is a guru in the family. The new baby is the resident expert on children and childhood. Given that we are wise enuf to shift our thinking patterns along new lines, we can learn much from the infant "rinpoche". The first thing a child teaches us is that we must think of others before ourselves. This idea is as old as the cavalry officer's code: Take care of your horse first, yourself last. It means growing up and accepting responsibility. Here the baby's needs must be met. It is easy enuf to tell when something's wrong: the solution is to answer the baby's cries until the needs are met. Perhaps all of us have seen a "mom" ignoring a baby's screams, patronizingly explaining to us that "it's good for their lungs". Or worse, "I'm teaching her that I won't come running whenever she calls me." When a baby says he needs his mother, he's serious. And must be taken seriously.
2. Most parents suffer from delusions, myths, and old wives tales passed down from their parents. The worst delusion is that a child is "born in sin", that is, is guilty already, tho neither by commission nor omission. That is arguably the most harmful notion taught by the church. Buddhism's Good News is that a child is born with Basic Goodness, called the "Buddha nature" of the child. This change of view makes an enormous difference - perhaps a crucial one - in the potential happiness of the child. From the hateful view that the child is "bad" follows the hideous "justification" of beatings with a "rod", and an endless variation of punishments and abuse, some life threatening. In recognizing the Basic Goodness in the child, our patience increases, loving-kindness begins to characterize our outlook, and conflicts evaporate. The conflicting and violent adversarial relationship that is most often established early on in most homes is avoided by this simple change of mind.
3. Self-identity: how we view ourselves makes all the difference in whether we are happy or miserable. Most people, being victims of mal-parenting, are dissatisfied with themselves. Yet they make little - or no - effort to change themselves, or even to find out how to go about it. Instead they persist in trying to make the change in others that are more comfortable. And children are the most vulnerable, being helpless to defend themselves. Children learn nothing of value except by example of those they admire. There is no other way. With a church on every corner, preaching doesn't improve people. With a little reflection, we can see that parents CAUSE the very misbehavior they condemn and punish. Where, then, must the changes take place? Our best efforts need to be applied to changing ourselves.
II. LOVING KINDNESS, GENEROSITY, THE GOLDEN RULE1. Gratefulness and thinking of others before oneself are the first changes of mind for the neophyte Buddhist. As mentioned above, we put the child's welfare before our own: food, clothing, shelter, health, and safety. Because we have grown up, our own convenience and comfort does not matter so much any more. Consider: How aware are parents of the child's suffering? Who would imagine that it is painless for a child to have flesh sliced off his penis or her vagina? Yet, these hideous and unnecessary violent acts take place daily by the millions. Arguments defending circumcision have been obsolete and absurd since the invention of the shower. And the horrifying, excruciating torture of clitorectomy is performed by the very women who suffered it a generation earlier. "I had to endure the suffering, why shouldn't my daughter?" The serious emotional damage, the lifetime trauma caused by such victimization of boys and girls has been known for 50 years. It is time it was learned.
That corporal punishment is a counterproductive and trauma-inducing method of teaching good behavior has been known for decades. This universal problem has even been addressed by the United Nations' UNICEF, and the results of its worldwide research presented recently in General Assembly. Awareness is growing, and thus far 17 nations have passed laws prohibiting spanking and other corporal punishment, even in the home. Meantime, it is still legal to assault even small children in the public schools of 21 of these United States. Slap the face of your neighbor and it's assault; slap the face of your daughter and it's "discipline". Go figure.
2. We must act to mitigate the suffering we see around us, yes, and refrain from inflicting suffering on others. But what do we do about our own existential suffering? Or about our loss of job, or spouse, or a child's accidental crippling? Our failing health, our friends' betrayal. There is suffering in everyone's life; for two and a half millennia now Buddhists have been teaching and practicing methods to alleviate that suffering, and attain a state of happiness, if not enlightenment. This is good news: For every person reading this, happiness in this lifetime is attainable. It requires a certain understanding, and persistent practice in training the mind. Part of this Understanding, as stated, involves following the recognition of the child's Basic Goodness with consistent Loving-kindness. The child, as our Teacher, may test the patience and skill of the parent, and gradually lessons may be learned. The Teacher must never, never, be punished; that would be a notion most absurd, as well as an act most harmful - to parent as well as to child. At the end of the day, all we have to offer a child is integrity, honor, and trust. Fail that, and we fail as a parent.
3. THE LESSON OF KARMA: A harmful act, committed against child or adult, is sure to bring suffering to the perpetrator. It is axiomatic that doing harm to another is the cause of our suffering. Indeed, any harmful act or thought inevitably brings us pain in some form. The Law of the Universe sees to it that the pain and suffering we inflict on another will surely result in our own pain and suffering. There is the happy corollary: Acts of love and kindness bring the same to us. The RULE, well known but much ignored: What goes around, comes around. The bottom line: Each time we yell at a child, or spank, we pay a price for it in suffering. Better that we learn to be generous in providing comfort, and assurance for those fearful for their safety.
4. COMPASSION: We see from the above that, from a Buddhist standpoint, the motivation to stop corporal punishment includes compassion for the punisher, who will accumulate bad karma as a result of inflicting pain on the child. The child is being hurt, the adult is administering the punishment. Writes Chagdud Rinpoche in his "Change of Heart", "One is suffering now, the other will suffer in the future." Wisdom requires that we inflict no suffering at all, no punishment, and both child and parent are spared the bad karma. It is also true that good karma results in acts of love and compassion. Nowhere is that clearer than when dealing with children. They are born loving and affectionate and beautiful, easy to love and care for since they are so delightful to be around. Our task is to work on the angry and impatient subconscious demons that lurk in the dungeons of our consciousness, trapping us in delusions that make us see and treat children as enemies. We all have these dark thoughts, let's be honest. Clearly we have much to do in the way of examining our thoughts as they surface to torment us and/or delude us.
III. CHILD CONTROL AND TRAINING1. AXIOM: The child learns by parents' example. There is no other way a child learns behavior and values. It follows that the changes we want to see in the children must first be made in ourselves. Children don't need to be taught to say "please" and "thank you". Instruct