Miki Dedijer

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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.

Tending a good fire under any condition

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We all have a fire to tend. It burns inside of us.

A good fire is welcoming. It draws people in to hear your stories, or enjoy the comfort of your good company.

Sometimes your fire burns too strong. On days like that, your family doesn’t know whether to approach you at all. You’re giving off such impressive though forbidding heat.

On other days you just can’t seem to get it started. There’s something about the weather that makes it hard for you to kindle the ember of life into a heart-warming flame.  You have no warmth at your core. You freeze and might have to ask for help to bring your hearth back to life.

One busy day you might carelessly put a wet log onto the embers. A thick smoke blows in all directions. Nobody around that fire can sit still for very long. Some want to stay, but have to hide their faces in their hands to keep from tearing up.

Your child also has a fire within–she looks to you to teach her the art of tending it well. At the end of every day, you could ask her, “Honey, how is your fire burning? What has made it smoky today? When has it burned well?”

With time and experience, she will learn to take responsability for her own hearth. She’ll be able to tell good wood from bad, and how to stay warm under any condition.

Shoes, treasures and the true meaning of discipline

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Your child isn’t listening to you. You can’t make her do as you tell her. And that can be wildly frustrating.

There’s a choice here–do you enforce or do you yield? Enforcing is more of the same–power over, authoritarian parenting, hierarchies, right and wrong. But yielding, isn’t that giving up? Not if you take a long perspective and remember that you’re nurturing a relationship.

The root of discipline is to teach, and a disciple is your joyful follower. Let go of the demands on yourself to get things right, and on your child to do things a certain way. Open up for some levity. Look for the playful way to do this.

My boys throw their shoes off in the hallway. I fall over them in the dark. I grumble. And I’ve told them a hundred and one times to put them to the side .

Now I just hide them. Yup, if the shoes are in the way, I create a treasure hunt. Hang one shoe on the coat rack. Tuck them under the stairs. Now every time they’re heading out, and their shoes were in the wrong spot, they have to search for them.

We have a good laugh about that together. And that’s the challenge sorted. Now I can truly discipline them–and ask myself how I wish to teach them everything I want them to learn about life.

Short-term playfulness. Long-term discipline.

Nothing is good for a child’s growth

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Every child needs a healthy dose of nothing to do.

Nothing germinates their imagination, cultivates their delight, develops their relationship to self. Nothing gifts them with the discovery that their selves hold an infinity of world’s within worlds. Nothing teaches them something about life that nothing else can do.

Too much to do, too many activities, too early in life, risks distracting them from this natural growth.

It’s paradoxical, that as a father or mother we’re actually doing something by doing nothing. It’s so easy to fear that we’re not doing enough as parents. It’s easy to worry our child is falling behind. We compare ourselves to others. We sign our kid up for more lessons, classes, events, tasks. We hand him another screen, toy, book.

Stop. Don’t. Relax, and practice the art of nothing.

Spend an evening side-by-side. Light a fire in the woods and hang out. Sit by the shore and watch the waves lap the land.

Let the hours flow. Be alone together.

Robert Bly says it like this, in his poem For my son Noah ten years old

Night and day arrive and day after day goes by
And what is old remains old and what is young remains young and grows old.
The lumber pile does not grow younger nor the two-by-fours lose their darkness
but the old tree goes on the barn stands without help so many years;
the advocate of darkness and night is not lost.

The horse steps up swings on one leg turns its body
the chicken flapping claws onto the roost its wings whelping and walloping
but what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night and the dark.
And slowly the kind man comes closer loses his rage sits down at table.

So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness
when you sit drawing or making books stapled with messages to the world
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
Or we sit at a table with small tea carefully poured.
So we pass our time together calm and delighted.

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Discipline asks that you’re clear on what you value

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Discipline is teaching, and teaching works best when there’s a relationship of trust with your child.

We build trustful relationships over time. It requires consistency and clarity and good role modelling.

If like many parents you’re unsure how to discipline your child, start by getting clear on what your core values are.

Your values are who you are right now, not in an imaginary future. To understand the values you’re teaching your child, have a look at your day-to-day behavior. These questions from the late pioneer of family therapy Virginia Satir are a good start:

  • What do I teach my child about herself or himself?
  • What do I teach about others?
  • What do I teach about the world?
  • What do I teach about life and its source, about God, mystery, the unseen?

Take an evening with your partner to explore these questions and find some common ground. Then see how you can find a way to consistently model and communicate your shared values.

As you do, your family culture becomes a teaching environment for your child. Here discipline–teaching your child how to build and sustain healthy relationships–becomes a daily practice of shared growth, rather than strenous and random efforts to control your child.