Miki Dedijer

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Place is your child’s close relative

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A friend of mine grew up in the inner city, a world of asphalt, concrete, steel and the growl of combustion engines.

Outside his apartment a solitary lime tree sprung from the pavement. Every day he’d climb that tree. He says he perched there for what seemed like most of his childhood, watching the world unfurl around him.

Your child needs a place she knows like my friend knew that tree.

She needs to be home in a locality, rooted to earth, snuggled up alongside other life, wrapped up in the myths and songs that have sprung up from a hard-earned love of the land.

This was once common knowledge, that we honor the beings that inhabit our place as we do our child’s closest relatives.

The Maori word whenua, means both afterbirth and land.

The placenta is the firmament of a child’s first home in the womb of the mother.

Birth delivers her into the embrace of place, her new womb and lifelong relative.

Making humans who serve life

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There was a time in your ancestry, either within living memory or well beyond depending on your particular lineage, when a child was raised not to be all that she could be, but to serve life.

Raising a child like that takes a lot of cultural savvy. The songs, the stories, the games, the rituals, the traditions, values or ceremonies all foster an understanding of what this service entails. The watershed moment comes at adolescence, when the initiators pull childhood from under the child’s feet, to make room for the adult to emerge, ready to serve.

All this, and a lot more, is to make humans who know how to obey life as a part of life, a welcome if troublesome sidekick, not the main act. A human like that doesn’t emerge on her own. She has to be made by those who know what is required of a human in a world that wasn’t made for us alone.

Here there is little requirement for a child to develop autonomy, mastery, control, efficiency or individuality. These self-serving qualities, when left untempered or glorified, are anathema to life itself. They rupture the relationships on which the child, the parents, and the fabric of the community depends. They also endanger the web of natural relations on which the village depends.

Cultures that still know how to make humans, and remember why they must be made, gather around the shared task of fostering qualities that affirm the demands of life itself. You’ll find that in these communities, to the extent that they still remain intact, quite a few characteristics occur again and again from one earth-based lineage to another.

Here parents are intent on preserving their child’s love of life, their sense of awe and excitement. Children are taught to be respectful, generous, thankful, humble, attentive, helpful. And they come of age in a community which through its actions, models these qualities day-by-day, from one generation to the next.

Short-cut to an embrace

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It’s hard to embrace your screaming child.

Often because your child isn’t receptive when he’s enraged. Or maybe because you don’t feel very loving.

That’s a hard place for a parent, knowing that right now you don’t feel affection. All you want is to match your kids anger with some of your own.

Arguing doesn’t make it much better. Trying to understand doesn’t make it better. Words don’t necessarily help. Yelling certainly doesn’t help.

Get good at finding the shortest path from here to enveloping your child in an affectionate embrace.

Find that short-cut, and you’ve also found the quickest way to restore your relationship.

R.I.P. love

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Drama doesn’t fan passions, it kills love.

When every joint decision becomes a battle, you all lose. Bills, vacations, renovations, investments, bedtimes, discipline, meals. It gets too exhausting to put on the armor every time you have to reach an agreement.

Sooner or later, one of you surrenders, and the other claims victory. And the family suffers.

You can be the one to start the peace process. Practice separating your sense of self-worth from the decision to be made.

Freedom to play

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A child expresses her love for life through play.

It’s natural.  We are born with the gifts for spontaneity, fluidity, improvisation, acceptance, creativity, presence and a delight for learning.

Given the slightest chance, children will form roving groups of peers that romp outdoors, far from the supervision of adults.

A child who loses this freedom, soon loses her love for life too. By her early tweens, the play-deprived child becomes anxious, depressed, stressed, violent or withdrawn.

The single most powerful thing we can do as parents might be to get out of the way, so our children get every chance they can to play together.

Flood the troubled child with love

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Any child gets troublesome when there’s a tear in their most cherished relationships.

She may be passive aggresive, anxious, manipulative, or fight with her sibling.

There may be nothing you can say to resolve her pain. But there may be something powerful you can do.

Flood your child with love.

When all else fails, take a time out. Announce that the two of you will spend an whole hour together, a full evening, an entire day together.

Let your child take the lead (and you decide on possible boundaries on money, safety, time). Then head out. And for the time you’re together, ditch your phone, scrap your plans, make a committment to be all in, playfully present.
Delight in your child, love her, pay attention, be curious, mend the broken bonds.

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