More Parental Theorizing
My response to one of the comments made to my recent parenting rant got too long for the comment window.
What did I ramble on about for so long? Umm. The development of personality, the role that school plays in altering that personality and the specific personalities of my kids. So this entry is about personality then :D
To poets_hand
You never come across as lectury.
So what can I tell you?
I think Ch-- is very difficult to explain. I have frequent, deep conversations with him ... usually because he starts them. I think one part of the problem is that HE is conflicted. His answer to "what is important to you?" is directly at odds with his answer to the question "what do you want in this moment?" We all succumb to that of course, but it's kinda weird to deal with a kid who struggles with it so consciously. At one level, he gets caught up in that which feels good -- which is exactly what you'd expect from a kid. On another he suffers guilt and anxiety when he feels he's not growing or contributing. That leads him to depression. He'd rather just go with the flow but it costs him to do so. Like I said, he's hard to explain.
Have you heard of the "old soul" concept? There's something inside Ch-- that drives him. He fights against it because he wants to be like everybody else but it's as if he has a mission that gets in his way. I wouldn't necessarily say that he IS an old soul but I sometimes wonder if there isn't something to this multi-life karmic thing. Now I've gone all metaphysical on you.
I wish you could meet him and get to know him.
I thought of something hours after I first read your comment. I have come to believe that the adult personality begins to form right about the same time that language does. The ability to develop a concept of self coincides with the ability to express raw thought and sensation in an orderly way. "I use language, therefore I am." As the ability to articulate expands, the concept of Self solidifies and the personality starts to set. In the pre-school years, all that is happening at a furious rate.
Pre-school life is total immersion in a miniature but natural, multi-generational, multi-cultural society. (With any luck.) Then school starts. A still-tender personality is transplanted into an unnatural environment with a HUGE emphasis on same-age peers that features important but distant authority figures. The children learn how to become adults mostly from other children. Of course the home still influences the child but think about the ratio of active interaction at home to active interaction at school.
I think you know that I don't believe that kids have to become "socialized" in school in order to learn how to cope with the adult world. Since leaving school, have you functioned in any environment where everyone was segregated into age windows of 1-2 years? (But that soapbox lecture is only tangentially linked to what I'm trying to get to so I'll let it go.)
So. My point, and I know it's around here somewhere, is this: That young but real personality gets sublimated by the need to survive in the culture of school. I suspect you will see it somewhere between 1st and 3rd grade. Your children will change ...and some of the changes will feel somehow inauthentic.
As products of the same system, we don't think much of it unless a change is negative. Even then we just mumble about peer pressure and move on. The positives gained during the school years usually outnumber the negative consequences ... we make friends, we learn new things, we assert our independence, we discover hidden talents, etc.
Here's the rub though: I think that the basic childhood personality lurks just under the currents of school-life. And it resurfaces when we reenter the general population. I've seen it happen in my daughter ... with a vengeance. She was an outspoken, outgoing, confident, capable, self-contained child. Over the course of about 10 years of school, she became self-conscious and learned to keep her head down so as to avoid unkind and unwanted attention. I thought it was a natural development of her personality. She began to stand up and make herself heard in the last few years of high-school. Then she graduated. In the last two years I've seen her original personality come back.
That got me to thinking about what I was like as a kid vs. what I was like in school vs. who I have slowly grown into. If, when I was 7-8, I'd met my high-school self I would have wrinkled up my nose and avoided that person. If that same child-self were to meet me now, she'd recognize herself.
So. The question, for me, comes down to: Is it worth it? And that makes me wonder if there might be a better way. Remember, when I said: Pre-school life is total immersion in a miniature but natural, multi-generational, multi-cultural society. What if we skipped all those years of segregated society and instead worked on gradually enlarging our children's worlds over time?
The truth is that this is one instance where moderation doesn't seem to be the right answer. My son has two paths in front of him. He can't walk between them or run back and forth.
Shit. I didn't know when I started this that I would end up here. This isn't going to fit in a comment box is it?
What did I ramble on about for so long? Umm. The development of personality, the role that school plays in altering that personality and the specific personalities of my kids. So this entry is about personality then :D
To poets_hand
You never come across as lectury.
So what can I tell you?
I think Ch-- is very difficult to explain. I have frequent, deep conversations with him ... usually because he starts them. I think one part of the problem is that HE is conflicted. His answer to "what is important to you?" is directly at odds with his answer to the question "what do you want in this moment?" We all succumb to that of course, but it's kinda weird to deal with a kid who struggles with it so consciously. At one level, he gets caught up in that which feels good -- which is exactly what you'd expect from a kid. On another he suffers guilt and anxiety when he feels he's not growing or contributing. That leads him to depression. He'd rather just go with the flow but it costs him to do so. Like I said, he's hard to explain.
Have you heard of the "old soul" concept? There's something inside Ch-- that drives him. He fights against it because he wants to be like everybody else but it's as if he has a mission that gets in his way. I wouldn't necessarily say that he IS an old soul but I sometimes wonder if there isn't something to this multi-life karmic thing. Now I've gone all metaphysical on you.
I wish you could meet him and get to know him.
I thought of something hours after I first read your comment. I have come to believe that the adult personality begins to form right about the same time that language does. The ability to develop a concept of self coincides with the ability to express raw thought and sensation in an orderly way. "I use language, therefore I am." As the ability to articulate expands, the concept of Self solidifies and the personality starts to set. In the pre-school years, all that is happening at a furious rate.
Pre-school life is total immersion in a miniature but natural, multi-generational, multi-cultural society. (With any luck.) Then school starts. A still-tender personality is transplanted into an unnatural environment with a HUGE emphasis on same-age peers that features important but distant authority figures. The children learn how to become adults mostly from other children. Of course the home still influences the child but think about the ratio of active interaction at home to active interaction at school.
I think you know that I don't believe that kids have to become "socialized" in school in order to learn how to cope with the adult world. Since leaving school, have you functioned in any environment where everyone was segregated into age windows of 1-2 years? (But that soapbox lecture is only tangentially linked to what I'm trying to get to so I'll let it go.)
So. My point, and I know it's around here somewhere, is this: That young but real personality gets sublimated by the need to survive in the culture of school. I suspect you will see it somewhere between 1st and 3rd grade. Your children will change ...and some of the changes will feel somehow inauthentic.
As products of the same system, we don't think much of it unless a change is negative. Even then we just mumble about peer pressure and move on. The positives gained during the school years usually outnumber the negative consequences ... we make friends, we learn new things, we assert our independence, we discover hidden talents, etc.
Here's the rub though: I think that the basic childhood personality lurks just under the currents of school-life. And it resurfaces when we reenter the general population. I've seen it happen in my daughter ... with a vengeance. She was an outspoken, outgoing, confident, capable, self-contained child. Over the course of about 10 years of school, she became self-conscious and learned to keep her head down so as to avoid unkind and unwanted attention. I thought it was a natural development of her personality. She began to stand up and make herself heard in the last few years of high-school. Then she graduated. In the last two years I've seen her original personality come back.
That got me to thinking about what I was like as a kid vs. what I was like in school vs. who I have slowly grown into. If, when I was 7-8, I'd met my high-school self I would have wrinkled up my nose and avoided that person. If that same child-self were to meet me now, she'd recognize herself.
So. The question, for me, comes down to: Is it worth it? And that makes me wonder if there might be a better way. Remember, when I said: Pre-school life is total immersion in a miniature but natural, multi-generational, multi-cultural society. What if we skipped all those years of segregated society and instead worked on gradually enlarging our children's worlds over time?
The truth is that this is one instance where moderation doesn't seem to be the right answer. My son has two paths in front of him. He can't walk between them or run back and forth.
Shit. I didn't know when I started this that I would end up here. This isn't going to fit in a comment box is it?