"The societies for the prevention of cruelty to babies and
children concern themselves
only with the grossest sort of abuse. Our society must be helped
to see the
gravity of the crime against infants that is today considered
normal treatment."
- Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept1
Definitions: (From Webster's Dictionary)
Antisocial:
- not sociable
- harmful to the welfare of people
Asocial:
- avoiding contact with others
- selfish
Psychopathic personality:
- a person characterized by emotional instability, lack of
social judgment, perverse and impulsive (often criminal)
behavior, inability to learn from experience; amoral and
asocial feelings; and other personality defects.
Sociopath:
- A psychopathic personality whose behavior is aggressively
anti-social.
We live in a society that is rapidly becoming a nation of
sociopaths. The root cause of this is not the loss of family
values. Neither is it the consequence of parents who are in
themselves sociopaths or emotionally disturbed individuals. The
cause, instead, is the conventional, but abnormal, ways in which
we rear our children. From the moment of birth, children are
deprived of that which humans evolved to have – the prolonged
nurturing natural to our species. We - parents, community and
government - are unwilling to make the commitment to our children
that is their birthright. We bring children into the world - but
do not accept our responsibility to be there to care for them.
In our lack of commitment to our children they are deprived of
the human attachment that is their biological and genetic
"expectation" at birth. We deny them the biological
mothering experience that is the basis for human sociability and
often, parcel their care off to strangers, who usually have even
less of a commitment to them than we do. Because our children are
not our first priority, the best some of us can give them is
"quality time". In a nation of individuals whose major
priority is "me," we perceive caring for another,
including our own children, as self-sacrifice and loss of self. We
seek more and better day-care centers but not the types of help
that could enable us to stay at home to care for our children. Nor
does our government offer financial help, as other nations do,
that allows at least one parent to be at home to care for their
infant.
The fact that new human life is not our first and foremost
priority indicates that individual human life is not our primary
value. The ways in which we respond to infants, even when we do
value them, suggests that we do not know how to convey to them
that they are valuable. We are simply not friendly to the life we
create.
Our ways of caring for infants and children are actually
sociopathic in that they are aggressively antisocial and asocial.
It is common practice to force infants to spend long periods of
time alone in their cribs, to sleep alone, and to ignore their
crying, so that they will leave us alone and learn to accept being
alone. Spanking, hitting and punishing children are widely
accepted methods for teaching children to behave. If we treated
another adult the way we commonly treat our children, we would be
subject to criminal and/or civil action. Imposing one's will on
another person is considered a crime in our society. Yet with
children, it is actively encouraged. The only conclusion is that
children are not seen as persons.
In our efforts to get children to behave in the ways we want,
we utilize methods of control which are culturally condoned forms
of violence. Based on our long-standing traditional belief that
children are a form of property, we treat them as objects to be
manipulated and molded in directions that will be comfortable for
us.
Peter and Judith Decourcy have expressed our societal
perception of children in the following passage:
In many ways we do not think of children as people with the
rights and privileges of adults. Physical punishment and
psychological harassment are considered acceptable methods of
controlling a child. Children are often punished in a variety of
unusual and ingenious ways that would not be tolerated in the
most backward adult prison, and the parents are not subjected to
social censure or legal interference. It is as if children were
objects, bits of property belonging to the parents, to be used
in any way the parents see fit.2
The strangest and most unrealistic part of our child-rearing
beliefs is that our antisocial behavior toward them is supposed to
make them become caring social beings. We are blind to the fact
that the parent-child relationship is the first and most formative
social relationship and the model for the child's interaction with
others. Our children are chiefly influenced in their development
by who we are in relation to them, not by who we think we are or
pretend to be. As Theodore Schwartz put it, "what is
important in cultural transmission is not so much what children
are taught or not taught, but the ways in which things happen to
them and the attitudes of the people around them with whom they
are interacting."3
We act in relation to our children in ways that are similar to
the psychopathic personality. In our behavior toward them, we are
frequently emotionally unstable, perverse and impulsive. By
depriving them of our love and affection, and by punishing them to
get them to behave, we behave in amoral and asocial ways
(sometimes criminal). We lack social judgement in our belief that
the way we behave toward them will make them become social
individuals. Our reluctance to change the ways we relate to our
children, even though we are continually confronted by our failure
to change their behavior, indicates that we (community and nation,
as well as parents) are unable to learn from experience. By
following our conventional infant care and child-rearing
practices, we are unwittingly training our children to become
sociopaths.
We may not in the totality of our individual lives behave like
sociopaths. Most of us are not criminals. But many of us are
sociopathic in the way we relate to our children. This is not
because we are as individuals deviants from the norm. We are the
norm. We are sociopathic parents because our child-rearing
traditions, our own life experiences as children, our culture, our
government, and many of our experts on infant and child care
encourage us to be so.
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