My parents didn’t teach me to think. They taught me to follow rules.
They wanted the best for me. They knew that badness existed in the world and tried to find ways to quantify it and box it up so help me navigate.
Unfortunately many of these ways involved me just doing as I’m told. Had I followed my parents advice, I would probably be more successful. They forgot one thing. They had to make me a successful human who would listen to advice from them, first.
In fact, had they focused on building a successful human instead of a blind follower, they will have found that I could instead of one who had been given a secret code to handful of doors and told me not
How do you build a successful human then? Well if you look under up secure attachment you’ll find some suggestions that will work quite well. Add in a general urge to learn how your little human works and help them manage the body they were born with. Don’t forget explicitly teaching them how to manage emotions? Then your precious crotchfruit will be able to handle any emotions thrown their way. Much better than learning ways to avoid the nasty emotions to begin with.
To fully engage in such an experiment, my parents needed to trust me. My parents had trust issues. Both of them. Neither of them trusted me at all. My childhood is full of examples of me either proving them wrong or trying to. No, they didn’t trust me with a bargepole and they only had two of us so they had to make sure we turned out half decent.
If I had learned to think for myself from my parents, I would have listened to them when they told me more about the world. But by the time I was old enough to learn, I was also old enough to resent. And those two things cancelled each other out.
I wonder how many children I teach struggle with the same discontent in their minds.
FaerieFalls 