The Firm and Gentle Art of Loving our Children

I propose tonight to develop a kind of collage of thoughts which might become guiding principles for the art of loving our children. In contemplating this art, I’ve been thinking again recently of those painted wooden Russian nested dolls — often referred to as Babushkas but more accurately called Matryoshkas — you know, the ones you can open to find another within, which you open to find another, and which you open to find another… until at last you come to the innermost one…


What reflections arise from these dolls? They are seen as metaphors for all kinds of nested experiences, but here I’m thinking particularly of the following… On the one hand, they reflect the successive generations of family — for the baby is born from the mother, who was born in turn from her mother (the grandmother), who was born long before from the great-grandmother, and so on…


The other thought relates to the image of the human being’s body and soul as layers of an onion, so to speak, pealing back to reveal the True Self.


Both seem pertinent to our exploration of the Firm and Gentle Art of Loving our Children. For it is profoundly significant that at first the dolls are closed — no one would present them to a child already opened, as the magic is in revelation. They are closed — but they can be opened up, revealing at last the one whole being. 


This is the basis of all development — enclosure and opening. Just think, if the outer doll remained closed, no development would follow. If a bud remained closed, no blossom, no seed, no future would develop. And if a mother’s womb remained closed… Or if her arms remained closed and did not release the child, there would be no further development… This is the family-process — being a container, a succession of nested places — proceeding from what Dr Donald Winnicott called a holding environment to a facilitating environment as a process of being and becoming, unfolding in time… 

~

[This is an excerpt from a talk, The Firm and Gentle Art of Loving our Children - Mindfulness and Companionship, given to parents in the Gabriel series at Kew Library, Melbourne, on Monday 14 May 2012. A full transcript can be downloaded from my website www.johnallison.com.au.

There are a number of other lectures there also, together with the last five issues of { parent-theses } journal.

I've been asked whether I might continue the journal. I'm considering this, and think it might reappear as an annual or occasional publication. To be on an email list for this, please contact me at parent.theses@gmail.com.]

Bettye Palmer

Bettye Palmer worked with mother and babies, with families, for many years - first as a home birth midwife, then a manager for maternity services in Know Private Hospital and Freemasons Hospital in Melbourne, and in recent years as the director and parenting consultant of the Gabriel Centre, and a maternal and child health nurse.
This rich and full life of service came to an end on the 2nd of June, 2011. 
Bettye was a gracious and elegant woman with extraordinary presence and empathy, as the mothers and children she worked with would warmly attest.
I have produced a commemorative issue of { parent-theses } dedicated to Bettye, which can be downloaded from my website www.johnallison.com.au.
There is an obituary, a dialogue, and article by Bettye, and a lecture-transcript of a Gabriel talk with arose out of our last journey together.

The Body Senses

West of Alice Springs, last October, Bettye and I stopped to look at the ochre-pits where the Arrernte people had gathered ceremonial ochre for generations. We walk in from the road. The experienced world amazes, always... After marvelling awhile at the vertical striations of rich and varied colour in the stream bank, we decided to go on, up the track to the ridge and its eventual juncture with the Larapinta Trail.

Walking along the stony creek bed, Bettye suddenly paused and exclaimed, “This is why I love the wilderness! It’s so enlivening to walk on these stones...”

We walked on in silence, making our way up the ridge. There’s a deep well of attention, which envelops me sometimes when I’m realising something.

Thinking the body-senses...

This is ankle-turning country, this is snake country, and I’m all alert. Sensing... Seeing and hearing, of course, but these are less important at the moment. Rather, I am living especially in the body-senses of touch, life, movement, balance... Underfoot, the stones keep my attention held there — we feel our way along the track — even my eyes are fingering the terrain, while my feet are sensing the securely embedded stone, the stone that slips and slides, the stone that’s wedged amongst the others... Thus we touch our way forward...

Bettye had already mentioned the revelation in her of the sense of life — that sense of well-being that opens awareness to the inner condition of the body. “It’s so enlivening to walk on these stones.” It’s true. A walk along a city street is much more tiring than this. We sense the body’s health in the wilderness — that it is hale and hearty.

Then there is movement and there is also the sense of movement. Without this sense we would be unable to experience and monitor our own body’s movements. Contemporary science refers here to propriocentric awareness. Walking along that creek bed, climbing that track to the ridge, I am more self-aware of being in movement than on a flat path.

And of course there’s the sense of balance. Couldn’t manage without it, clambering along that creek bed. The deep relationship between movement and balance suddenly becomes clear to me. Walking as the balance between impetus and the ability to pause — impelled out of balance, then catching oneself. Freedom is experienced in poise between impulse and constraint...

I stand and sense my feet on the stones, noticing the dynamic relationship between ball and heel, side and arch. Touch, life, movement, balance — and the essential experiences gained through these senses on the trail towards being embodied — yes, to sense the wonder of this particular homecoming. Of entering the home of the body.

As I walk on, I’m now thinking of Ghilgai, the Steiner school where I work. Of the playground, and its uneven slope... Of the steps, varied, unpredictable... It is a happy pedagogical accident that the drought, and then the rains, have eroded the hill, as we call it. The children are truly being educated in their body senses as they run about at playtime. Maybe I can relinquish my vain dream of seeing it levelled off and ‘safe’...

So much of our learning is incidental. It occurs through these incidents and instances of a good experience of being alive, registered through these body-senses in which we are mostly unconscious.

These are the senses that enable us to know our place — in the body, in the world. They are sometimes also called the ‘lower’ or ‘inner’ senses. We could call them the senses of orientation. The task in the early years of childhood is to exercise them, to live into the body through them, to know ourselves at home there. If we reflect for a moment on the lives that are lived by so many children in our society — lives spent indoors, or when outside on smooth lawns and even paths, inside cars, in front of flat screens, touching undifferentiated substances — then we will begin to recognise a childhood at risk.

The Sleep Issue

The baby’s crying.

This must be one of the worst experiences we can have — to be tired, craving a break from it all, to maybe have some sleep ourselves… And the baby’s crying.

There is another experience we might have… That wonderful silence when the baby is asleep. It comes as a gift… Then we have a dilemma — whether to rush about doing all sorts of stuff we think is important, or to rest…

This issue is about sleep and babies. About your sleep, and your baby’s sleep — because both are important aspects of a family’s well-being. There would be no books or articles about sleep — and certainly no such thing as sleep clinics — if there were no problems with sleeping. But adults increasingly report that a good night’s sleep is elusive — and then the baby comes along…

You might want your child to allow space for your needs — but babies don’t work like that. It isn’t their brief to meet your needs in this regard. The solutions however may not come out of preoccupation with the problem, but rather out of appreciating the wider world of having a child in your life. I think here of a guiding aphorism for my life, from Dag Hammarskjöld’s diary Markings:

"To say Yes to life is at one and the same time to say Yes to oneself... Yes — even to that element in one which is most unwilling to let itself be transformed from a temptation to a strength."

Parenting is exhausting, especially when a baby is not sleeping (actually, your baby will be sleeping, but perhaps not as you would wish!). But we can exhaust ourselves further through our versions of ‘no-saying’ and ‘me-saying’. There is a path towards reality that proceeds from wonder, via reverence, through an awareness of wisdom-filled harmony with the world, to self-surrender. This is a path of conscious loving, of devotion to the truth of the world. We still are likely to be tired, but renewed strength may come when we can say Yes.  

[John Allison - editorial from September issue of { parent-theses }]

The Vocation of Parenting

What is the source of all this interest in parenting? I don’t recall my own parents reading books or attending workshops to learn about being better parents (and often it showed). Until Truby King published his book Feeding and Care of Baby almost a hundred years ago it wasn’t a significant public issue. Before then, wise men and thinkers generally had a great deal to say about the significance of childhood and upbringing. For instance, we frequently credit King Solomon with the statement, “Spare the rod and spoil the child” – but in fact you won’t find that exact phase in the Bible. Rather, it is an adaptation of several Proverbs, represented most clearly by “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24). I think my father knew that one; punishment was the foundation of discipline for my generation, to the extent that this word ‘discipline’ is now often associated with those difficult experiences.

Plato said some important things, two and half thousand years ago. And then in the late 17th century, John Locke wrote about early childhood education, but his essay Some Thoughts Concerning Education was not at all a practical manual for parents. His concept of the mind as a blank slate (tabula rasa) to be inscribed upon leads us to the principles of behavioural conditioning, however. Jean Jacques Rousseau was idealising childhood in the late 18th century, and his view of the innate goodness of the child has had an important influence on modern attitudes towards childhood. But again, his writings are a philosophical rather than practical guide to daily parenting matters.

I believe that our preoccupation with parenting directly parallels the development of popular psychology; when Truby King was developing his practices, Freud and Jung were touring the United States, and suddenly the human psyche, its challenges and its development – its problems – were all the rage. And have continued to be… It was in the midst of this thrilling realisation that life is a problem that Benjamin Spock wrote Baby and Child Care; and over in England, Donald Winnicott was articulating his fruitful insights and very sensible suggestions. Since then, however, parents seem to have become increasingly uncertain about their roles and responsibilities. We could spend a lot of time considering the reasons for this… Suffice to say, some see it as a real problem, and while I agree that problems arise through the practised uncertainties and passing fads that now fill the spaces left by the demise of common sense, I’m convinced that we are wanting, needing to become conscious about what we are doing, how we go about it, and why. This is new territory, and the way through it is a creative pathway.

Rhythm and Routine

Whenever I consider the significance of rhythm in my life I find myself thinking about breathing. About day and night. The movement of seasons. The phases of the moon. Ebb and flow of the tides, the booming of waves on the rocks below a beach-house where I lived for a while (and slept so deeply). Expansion and contraction. Openings and closures. Nodes and interstices. Out-reaching, in-gathering. Letting go and letting come. These constant movements, which are also shaping and forming… And immediately I notice we have a problem in contemporary life, which seems so arrhythmic. I see this is connected with stress.

The mystery of rhythm is its relationship with form. Rhythm gives shape even to time. We can’t really talk about rhythm without recognising boundaries — rhythm measures the movement between boundaries, and also across boundaries. There is an inside and an outside — a kind of membrane that pulses with life. “Form is the envelope of pulsation” (a Tantric saying).

I note two effects of living in rhythm, in time-space. One is that I am less exhausted. The other is that the moods of my soul are given shape and definition. Boundaries. When I consider this more deeply, I am convinced that rhythm facilitates a spacious relationship to experiences, and then other things may enter and ‘speak’.

"All gratification in life is founded on the regular reappearance of external things. The alternation of day and night, of the seasons, of flower and fruit, and everything else that confronts us at regular intervals so that we may, and should, enjoy it: these are the very springs of our daily life. The more openly we avow these pleasures, the happier we are. But if these phenomena revolve severally before us and we take no part in them, proving unreceptive to these precious gifts — then the greatest evil, the most dire sickness breaks out in us, and we look upon life as the most repulsive burden."

~ Wolfgang Johann von Goethe

Rhythm and routine then are sources of health — we rest in the familiar, the repetitive. Yet routine tasks can seem a burden, especially when you feel tired (as most parents do). Where does our distaste, our hatred even, of mundane work come from? Was it when you were forced as a child to do chores? Were you made to work as punishment? Or was it because you were scolded for just not getting it right? Even though you were simply trying to be helpful, was it because you were a ‘nuisance’? Whatever happened to that little child in you who loved imitating Mummy and Daddy, enthusiastically doing what they did? Somehow, work became a chore rather than a joy. And now, how can you find your way back into the Kingdom of Good Works? Recognising that rhythm and routine is good for you may not be sufficient motivation — what can rekindle that joy, that willingness?

~ Editorial to the Winter issue of { parent-theses }

Playing, Being, Working

A child is playing and nothing else exists for her in that moment. Few adults can give such attention to their immediate situation, so willingly, for so long. And it is real work.

Play enables the child to live into a whole world. It is a world of her own making which borders on to the world we think is the real world. Through manifold creative acts the child pushes back these boundaries, to increasingly inhabit the world we know but all too often have forgotten how to understand. Play is a participatory pathway into the reality of this so-called real world.

A child playing is ordering the world. Play is an experiment into the nature of reality. Things are either obedient to her imagination, or not. Play is a brave adventure into the possibilities and limitations of things. It is the true basis of problem-solving.

A child playing is discovering her relationship to the world. The encounter refects back into her developing sense of self.

A child playing is working out real situations. Play brings these situations into a coherent narrative that makes sense. In the world of play any thing can become anything. And everything. There is nothing missing within the whole world of play. It is always as minimal and elaborate as necessary. It is what it is.

A child is playing. Our responsibility as adults is to protect and nurture this world of play, this realm in which anything is possible. Which leads to everything that works…

[The new issue of { parent-theses } on the theme of Creative Play is now available]