What books on parenting can teach adults
"You're just like my mom!" - the offended girlfriend told me a few years ago, and I, naturally, objected something in the spirit of “Don't drag your mom in, I have never seen her and can’t be like her in any way”. Indeed, what can be common between me and a middle-aged woman with two children who works in a very responsible job and lives two thousand kilometers from me? I was told this phrase before and after many times by close friends and a loved one, but, no matter how hard I tried, I could not connect twenty-six to six-year-olds with ten mothers of various professions and destinies, whose manner and phrases were reflected in me and terribly offended my loved ones.
Books "To communicate with the child. How?" and "We continue to communicate with the child. So?" Russian psychologist Julia Gippenreiter fell into the hands of my friends a few years ago during a local baby boom. Peers brought families, they still had small children, and everything, as usual, was at a loss as to how suddenly they became those who should know how to act in each moment. Vigorous and resolute, closed and balanced, they sooner or later found themselves in the same situations, when they had to decide not only for themselves, but also for the child, discuss upbringing with the second parent and the whole family, prohibit and allow, invent the day routine and negotiate, where the freedom of the other begins. They, like any parents, wanted the best for their child, but were afraid to act simply by intuition and avidly read why French children do not spit food and where good habits of good children come from.
So, without any hint of posterity and for the company, I read two books by Julia Gippenreiter, who explained to me better than sociologists and analysts why I often see parents screaming at their children, where in Russia 2 million orphans and half a million lonely old people came to living relatives. But the most important thing - all my own mistakes, small and significant, appeared clearly and prominently, as at the Last Judgment: in dozens of cases described in the books of Hippenreiter, I found myself and my parents as easily as myself and my colleagues, friends and friends. which it hurt at different times. It turned out that it is absolutely unnecessary to have the first child in order to ruin someone’s life and hurt a person’s self-esteem by telling him too much and not commensurate his feelings with the strength of his conviction and the desire to show character.
In this case, the story of Julia Gippenreiter, who changed her attitude to upbringing and child psychology, when she was over sixty, is somewhat reassuring. In an interview, she describes the fear and repentance that she experienced for all the mistakes regarding her own children, although for forty years of work in the USSR she was considered one of the most respected specialists with scientific authority. Better late than never - a familiar and rather lousy excuse for delayed wisdom, but it can also become a guide to action if you really want to try to communicate differently.
A child can be a wife with a broken leg, a screaming boss or a motorist crashing into you with shifty eyes
Adults and children of Hippenreiter are easily superimposed on the life experience of someone who never had children — for example, me — but this does not prevent us from crushing, educating or teaching the lives of those who never asked us about it. The child Hippenreiter is talking about is not necessarily the youngest or inexperienced, but rather weak or dependent. A child can be a wife with a broken leg and a grandfather during a tantrum, an alcoholic dad and a difficult teenager, a screaming boss and a motorist with fleeing eyes crashing into you. A child is each of us in a difficult situation, when there is not enough strength to move on, make unpleasant decisions, make sacrifices or endure unexpected hardships.
A child is when you do not know how to, and you are looking for answers from those whom you respect, but most often you scream, whine, demand, insolently, trying to attract attention to yourself. Each of us happens to be such a child from time to time, I personally was about 23 times last week, and the people around me had enough tact, intelligence and respect to calm me down. At the same time, the child is also always brave and curious (otherwise we would not learn anything), absorbing and having a built-in justice sensor (no matter what our character is, we almost always distinguish a good deed from a bad one), instantly reacting and intuitive ( most of the things we do not hesitate to do on the machine).
The search for the inner child to re-learn the rules of pleasant communication is not a constant look into yourself with a desire to discover the crybaby. And an attempt to remember that there was a time when, despite the bad weather, we still went for a walk, climbed over the fence, took on the seemingly impossible, or read the book interesting for us all night long, getting up as if nothing had happened.
It is not at all necessary to have a child to empirically understand that for relatives who live in the same house with you will only get better from a few familiar hugs a day for no reason, just like that. Or that for all the small undone cases and unwashed dishes, if they cause a lot of disagreement, you can come up with drawing boards, detailed instructions and funny stickers so that there will never be humiliating debates about who did more for another. Or that every home becomes happier if regular voluntary rituals appear in it: family dinners, joint walks and common activities for people of different ages and different professions.
But the most important thing that is said in the books of Gippenreiter and that it is so difficult to imagine for children who grew up in Soviet and post-Soviet families is the rejection of the hierarchy and the imperative mood in speech, intonation and actions. Hierarchies are not only in relation to children, but also in relation to parents, partners, friends and colleagues, who in the first place always remain people with their feelings and expectations, and secondly they are our relatives, subordinates and school friends.
A family without authoritarianism, where you yourself choose, whom you work with and whom to study, what time to come home and with whom to communicate, what to read and how to live, is an absolute luxury for most people not only of my generation. The more difficult it is not to repeat the mistakes of our parents and their parents and not to choose shoes for your boyfriend and a gift of a dream for your girlfriend, not to raise your voice in a critical situation and not to rage if you are not understood the first time. In some families, with animals, there are precedents when an animal attacks a child - and frightened parents most often lead a dog or cat to sleep. Dogs and cats are put to sleep, but the problem almost always remains.
The child within himself and others needs education, but in the right education discipline will be in second place, and love - in the first
No veterinarian will say this to the owners, but most often such stories occur in the house where the older family members find out the relationship, constantly switching to a scream, break for nothing on the most defenseless (the child or elderly relatives) and do not delimit their own areas of responsibility. Gippenreiter gives dozens of painful and such recognizable examples when we do not hear loved ones, fighting for leadership, appreciating each other and measuring everything on our own. "Shut up!", "Bring!", "Do - I said!" - the first big change and adequate response during a conflict, according to the psychologist’s assurances, begins with the rejection of regular imperative mood in the conversation.
The child Gippenreiter is a wave from which it is impossible to reconfigure, and we must learn to live on it, having fun. Of course, such a child needs education in himself and others, but Gippenreiter just says that discipline will be in second place in proper education, and love in first place. To love, and then educate, but not vice versa. My way in this case is to present a small copy of it instead of the annoying object: myself as a child with a favorite toy, a friend in a school corridor or a boss with a fishing rod on a bank of a suburban river. It’s much easier to come to an agreement with such guys than with those we became 20-30 years later.
Condemning phrases "What are you doing?" or "What are you, little! Think yourself!" beat on self-love, even if you are under thirty and you have achieved a lot. First of all, they say that a loved one whom you confided in considers himself better, smarter and more experienced than you and does not hesitate to show it. In the second - that he does not want to delve into your difficulties and waste your time on you. Hippenreiter compares all the great beginnings in our life with how we learn to walk: the cause of another may seem very ridiculous if you treat him down and do not understand what unusual efforts we are making, starting something from scratch.
Proving who is smarter and who is better at it, not only a waste of time, but also a destruction of trust: instead, people who find it difficult to agree on something can come up with a zone of joint activities where difficulties can be solved on an equal footing. Then neither the common business, nor the life, nor the joint custody of the children and older family members will be conducted on the battlefield. Unconditional acceptance, about which Gippenreiter writes, begins with the fact that you love someone close for what he is and you chose him to communicate - this is one of the most trivial statements that always comes out of our head when it comes time to take offense on friends not in the spirit or the guy who forgot about the anniversary. In the meantime, all the things that surround us once were already in the near orbit under the influence of our decisions. It is hypocritical to believe that the people and circumstances we have chosen should give us something, and it is ridiculous to demand the impossible from ourselves and those whose habits we have known for a long time, therefore we so seldom can afford the phrase “You are as always” or “I’m not interested”.
Characteristics like “you are sick” or “you are impudent” in the Gippenreiter dictionary are altogether in the list of forbidden ones: by inventing evaluative epithets for people, we again rise on a pedestal. You can not take the actions of a person or criticize them, but you can never attack the person himself and his feelings. I froze when I read it and remembered the thousand times, when instead of "I understand how difficult and bitter you are now, but let's digress for something else" said "Stop whining, well, how much you can!", And how hypocritical In principle, the first phrase seemed to me when you could say something shorter, sharper or wittier.
Actively calling their own and other people's feelings - insult, vexation, pain, disappointment, fear and jealousy - seems to be half the battle, so that there are no ambiguities, unnecessary words and petty claims. “It hurts you that you didn’t get this job”, “I’m jealous that you’ve talked to another girl all evening”, “You’re scared that I won’t be around at the right moment” - that’s really worth talking instead of that kilometer nonsense which we are setting aside, disguising our neuroses and fears. Gippenreiter despises the process of finding the guilty and insists that he always distracts from the collective solution of the problem and building relationships in which everything can be corrected. We really learn more in negotiations, not in claims and self-defense, and only our choice is to build a dubious hierarchy where we can secure a strong rear.
Forcing becomes a chore, takes root and sprouts through us towards children who can be slapped to be silent
After the dialogues of fictional parents and their fictional children, dozens of sports sections sweep before your eyes, which my friends went through the stump-deck to once again not argue with parents, lessons with tears in music school and a hundred swallowed plates of tasteless food, because you have to " so nothing remains on the plate. " Coercion is already becoming a routine when we are not even twenty, it takes root and grows through us in relation to our children, who can be slapped to be silent, or forced to eat, if you want to insist on your own, and you are in a bad mood.
Fostering others with freedom and love seems to be one of the most absurd ventures (let us be spoiled!) If I personally did not know those people who were embraced in the family eight times a day and never raised their voices to them. Their absolute minority, and they have unique abilities to empathize and listen. They will never think of saying “You are just like my mom!”, Their parents will never die in a poorhouse, and their children will not go to study at a “promising university” for an unloved specialty. Many of them, and at fifty, have a childish smile and tender look on others as children — loved, important, independent, and all capable.
Such people are most often born in exceptional circumstances, but sometimes they become themselves after long years of training. Gippenreiter compares such training in gravity and dedication with ballet: during the exercises the dancer seems to herself pretentious and tense, but after ten years the swan dance is obtained without any difficulty, and the dancer really becomes like a bird. And only she knows what it cost her.