The greatest need of children today is to have real adults in their lives. Promoters of resilience often say that just one adult is enough. But we need to be clear about what we mean by ‘adult’ — for it is not a matter of qualifying merely through age. There any many adults today who seem to have remained at an adolescent stage of development. In his remarkable book The Soul’s Code, James Hillman states it uncompromisingly:
"Parents’ deficit attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world, and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call, betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the sole reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here."
This is rather provocative — very often the child does become the sole reason for our life, yet Hillman suggests this is a diversion from our real mission. To grasp this, I think we need to understand that word ‘sole’, and see that at its extreme, losing oneself in parenthood is a shortcoming. Hillman then asks a rhetorical question, before proposing his answer:
"And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make the world receptive to the daimon. To set the civilisation straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parenting task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child you must bear witness first to your own."
That Greek word ‘daimon’ has a deep psychological, even mythological significance. Hillman uses it in the sense of the individual human spirit — that seedlike essence or ‘genius’ of each person’s being that we each have a responsibility to realise — make real —more fully. Throughout his book, he makes intriguing observations about so-called adults who have not succeeded in this task of becoming, and also about those who have.
The child wants us — needs us — to fulfil ourselves. Our example will be the teacher and guide for their development, the encourager of their will to be. Of course we must endeavour to protect and nurture and succour our children. But we also have a greater raison d’être — to grow down into our own lives and establish our meaning in the world. To be, or not to be, muses Hamlet. The answer is, always, to be is to become — to continue to learn, to continue to develop…
In those thought-provoking terms used by Donald Winnicott, we could say that to be an adult is to become a facilitating environment.
~ John Allison 2009: a seed-thought for further development from the December issue of { parent-theses } journal.
"Parents’ deficit attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world, and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call, betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the sole reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here."
This is rather provocative — very often the child does become the sole reason for our life, yet Hillman suggests this is a diversion from our real mission. To grasp this, I think we need to understand that word ‘sole’, and see that at its extreme, losing oneself in parenthood is a shortcoming. Hillman then asks a rhetorical question, before proposing his answer:
"And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make the world receptive to the daimon. To set the civilisation straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parenting task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child you must bear witness first to your own."
That Greek word ‘daimon’ has a deep psychological, even mythological significance. Hillman uses it in the sense of the individual human spirit — that seedlike essence or ‘genius’ of each person’s being that we each have a responsibility to realise — make real —more fully. Throughout his book, he makes intriguing observations about so-called adults who have not succeeded in this task of becoming, and also about those who have.
The child wants us — needs us — to fulfil ourselves. Our example will be the teacher and guide for their development, the encourager of their will to be. Of course we must endeavour to protect and nurture and succour our children. But we also have a greater raison d’être — to grow down into our own lives and establish our meaning in the world. To be, or not to be, muses Hamlet. The answer is, always, to be is to become — to continue to learn, to continue to develop…
In those thought-provoking terms used by Donald Winnicott, we could say that to be an adult is to become a facilitating environment.
~ John Allison 2009: a seed-thought for further development from the December issue of { parent-theses } journal.
