Wow, so much assumption on here from a little blip of a story with few details. After reading it, I know I certainly can't gauge the situation going on in that family, the boy, his classes, teachers or school. Who really knows what's going on here, because it's certainly not us!
so its ok to humiliate a child in this way? i dont need to know the minutiae of this situation to know humiliating anyone, especially a child, is degrading no matter what the circumstances.
Who am I to judge here? Obviously you feel that it's your right to judge a story based on a few words, where there is no abuse going on. Fine. Get all upset about something you can't do a damn thing about as well as know nothing about it as well. I just don't find this topic worthy of getting upset about when the whole story isn't being told.
why humiliate the kid? is that ever acceptable? to me its not. thats all im saying.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Come on parents. It's 7th grade... High school is where it really counts if you're looking to get into college. They should help him with his classes instead of wasting their time humiliating him.
Come on parents. It's 7th grade... High school is where it really counts if you're looking to get into college. They should help him with his classes instead of wasting their time humiliating him.
Well said sir - we gotta have a beer next time I'm in the states
Come on parents. It's 7th grade... High school is where it really counts if you're looking to get into college. They should help him with his classes instead of wasting their time humiliating him.
Well said sir - we gotta have a beer next time I'm in the states
http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Code-Search ... 0446673714
Some call it" genius". Others have named it "spirit", "daimon", and even "guardian angel". But while philosophers and psychologists from Plato to Jung emphasized the fundamental essence of our individuality, our modern culture refuses to accept that a unique, formed soul is within us from birth, shaping as much as it is shaped.
...Drawing on the biographies of such disparate people as Ella Fitzgerald and Mohandas K. Gandhi, James Hillman argues that character is fate and shows how the soul, if given the opportunity, can assert itself even at an early age. The result is a reasoned and powerful road map to understanding our true nature and discovering an eye-opening array of choices -- from the way we raise our children to our career paths to our social and personal commitments to achieving excellence in our time.
'...London: You're not a very popular figure with the therapy establishment.
People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture, a sense that there is some purpose that has come with them into the world.
Hillman: I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. What I'm trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.
London: You can't fix the person without fixing the society.
Hillman: I don't think so. But I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person. We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, "What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?" We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.
London: You've said that you usually write out of "hatred, dislike, and destruction."
Hillman: I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness. In the cosmology that's behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything. We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I'm an accident — a result — and therefore a victim.
London: A victim?
Hillman: Well, if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here. Or, if you look at it from the sociological perspective, I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.
London: What about the idea that we are self-made, that since life is an accident we have the freedom to make ourselves into anything we want?
Hillman: Yes, we worship the idea of the "self-made man" — otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea. We vote for Perot. We think he's a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It's unbelievable, yet it's part of that worship of individuality.
But the culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world? All of this anxiety and depression casts doubt on whether I can make it as a heroic John Wayne-style individual.
London: In The Soul's Code, you talk about something called the "acorn theory." What is that?
Hillman: Well, it's more of a myth than a theory. It's Plato's myth that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the word paradigma, or paradigm, instead of destiny. The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.
The same myth can be found in the kabbalah. The Mormons have it. The West Africans have it. The Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways — they tie it more to reincarnation and karma, but you still come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly. So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only American psychology doesn't have it.
London: In our culture we tend to think of calling in terms of "vocation" or "career."
Hillman: Yes, but calling can refer not only to ways of doing — meaning work — but also to ways of being. Take being a friend. Goethe said that his friend Eckermann was born for friendship. Aristotle made friendship one of the great virtues. In his book on ethics, three or four chapters are on friendship. In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.
London: Motherhood is another example that comes to mind. Mothers are still expected to have a vocation above and beyond being a mother.
Hillman: Right, it's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them. It's a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood — the sense that motherhood isn't itself a calling — also arises from economic pressure.
London: What implications do your ideas have for parents?
Hillman: I think what I'm saying should relieve them hugely and make them want to pay more attention to their child, this peculiar stranger who has landed in their midst. Instead of saying, "This is my child," they must ask, "Who is this child who happens to be mine?" Then they will gain a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for instances where the kid's destiny might show itself — like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one year, or an obsession with one thing or another. Maybe something very important is going on there that the parents didn't see before.
London: Symptoms are so often seen as weaknesses.
Hillman: Right, so they set up some sort of medical or psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptoms may be the most crucial part of the kid. There are many stories in my book that illustrate this.
...London: What is the first step toward understanding one's calling?
Hillman: It's important to ask yourself, "How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?" That may very well reveal what you are here for.
Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too. When you look into the archetypal nature of taxation, you realize that all civilizations have had taxation of one sort or another. Some of the earliest Egyptian writing is about tax collecting — the scribe recording what was paid and what wasn't paid.
So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.
London: What do you think of traditional techniques for revealing the soul's code, such as the wise woman who reads palms, or the village elders whose job it is to look at a child and see that child's destiny? Would it be helpful to revive these traditions?
Hillman: First of all, I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose. Second of all, I think those traditions are going on underground. Many people will tell you about some astrologer who said this or that to them, or some teacher. So it's very widespread in the subculture.
What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child's destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child. It's almost an erotic thing, like the filmmaker Elia Kazan's stories of how his teacher "took to him." She said to him, "When you were only twelve, you stood near my desk one morning and the light from the window fell across your head and features and illuminated the expression on your face. The thought came to me of the great possibilities there in your development." She saw his beauty. Now that, you see, is something different from just going to the wise woman.
London: In The Soul's Code, you tell a similar story about Truman Capote.
Hillman: In Capote's case, his teacher responded to his crazy fantasies. He was a difficult boy who threw temper tantrums in which he would lie on the floor and kick, who refused to go to class, who combed his hair all the time — an impossible kid. She responded to his absurdities with equal absurdities. She took to him. Teachers today can't take to a child. It will be called manipulation, or seduction, or pedophilia.
London: Or preferential treatment.
Hillman: Right. James Baldwin is another example. He attended a little Harlem schoolhouse of fifty kids. Conditions were appalling. His teacher was a Midwestern white woman. And yet they clicked.
You see, we don't need to get back to the wise woman in the village. We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works — you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.
London: Of all the historical figures you studied while researching The Soul's Code, who fascinated you the most?
Hillman: They all did. All these little stories fascinated me. Take Martin Scorcese, another filmmaker, for example. He was a very short kid and had terrible asthma. He couldn't go out into the streets of Little Italy in Manhattan and play with the other kids. So he would sit up in his room and look out the window at what was going on and make little drawings — cartoons, with numerous frames — of the scene. In effect, he was making movies at nine years old.
London: What about someone like Adolf Hitler, the prototypical "bad seed"? Is he an example of a destiny gone awry, or perhaps the fulfillment of some sort of twisted destiny?
Hillman: It's a puzzle. How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don't think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it's a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation — like Charles Manson. Jeffrey Dahmer had a wonderful father. His father even wrote a book saying that it was his fault that Jeffrey was the way he was. His father had strange dreams in his youth that were very similar to some of the crimes that Dahmer committed. So the father took responsibility. But he was not a bad father at all. When Jeffrey was four, they were carving pumpkins for Halloween, and Jeffrey screamed, "Make a mean face!" He would not let his father put a smile on the pumpkin's face. "I want a mean face!" he screamed. He was in a fury.
So I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those "troublemakers" early on and try to weed them out. That's very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers. But then you look at a child like Mary Bell in England, who was ten when she strangled two little boys — one three and one five. Yes, there were extenuating circumstances. She had a "bad" mother, so to speak. But to think that she would note have "flowered" if her mother had been in therapy, or that (as psychologist Alice Miller thinks) there would have been no Adolf Hitler if Hitler's family had been treated — that's just naive.
London: You've written that "the great task of any culture is to keep the invisibles attached." What do you mean by that?
Hillman: It's a difficult idea to present without leaving psychology and getting into religion. I don't talk about who the invisibles are or where they live or what they want. There is no real theology in it. But it's the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.
London: God?
Hillman: Yes, but it doesn't have to be that lofty.
London: Our calling?
Hillman: I think the first step is the realization that each of us has such a thing. And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It doesn't necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It's more a sensitivity, such as a person living in a tribal culture would have: the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.
London: When you talk in those terms, it seems to me that the boundary between psychology and theology gets a little blurry. Psychology deals with the will, and religion deals with fate. Yet this is not clearly not one or the other, but a bit of both.
Hillman: You're right. It isn't such an easy thing as the old argument of free will versus predestination. The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.
London: What is the danger for a child who grows up never understanding his or her destiny?
Hillman: I think our entire civilization exemplifies that danger. People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world.
London: Is it possible never to discover that "something else" — to turn your back on it, or to resist it and therefore "waste" your life?
Hillman: I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not. You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things.
London: It seems to me that illness and divorce an prompt you to explore some themes in life more thoroughly than others.
Hillman: Certainly. I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper. Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.
Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be. People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.
London: You write that one of the most stultifying things about modern psychology is that it's lost its sense of beauty.
Hillman: Yes, if it ever had one. Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.
London: And this has trickled down to therapists today?
Hillman: Yes. Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way — whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.
London: But doesn't psychology have more in common with medicine than the arts?
Hillman: Well, one strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy.
But when the medical becomes scientistic; when it becomes analytical, diagnostic, statistical, and remedial; when it comes under the influence of pharmacology and HMOs — limiting patients to six conversations and those kinds of things — then we've lost the art altogether, and we're just doing business: industrial, corporate business.
London: Doesn't this have to do with the fact that, at a certain point in its development, psychology adopted the reductive method in order to gain the respectability of science?
Hillman: I think you're absolutely correct. But as the popular trust in science fades — and many sociologists say that's happening today — people will develop a distrust of purely "scientific" psychology. Researchers in the universities haven't picked up on this; they're more interested in genetics and computer models of thinking than ever. But, in general, there is a huge distrust of the scientific establishment now.
London: As people rebel against the scientific approach, they often wind up at the other extreme. We're seeing many new forms of self-help and personal-growth therapies based on non-rational beliefs.
Hillman: The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along.
London: In some respects, you are a critic of the new age. Yet I noticed that a couple of reviewers of The Soul's Code have placed you in the new age category. How do you feel about that?
Hillman: Well, some reviewers have a scientistic ax to grind. To them, my book had to be either science or new age mush. It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.
My book is about a third view. It says, yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. So if you come at my book from the side of science, you see it as "new age." If you come at the book from the side of the new age, you say it doesn't go far enough — it's too rational.
London: I remember a public talk you gave a while back. People wanted to ask you all sorts of questions about your view of the soul, and you were a bit testy with them.
Hillman: I've been wrestling with these questions for thirty-five years. I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, "Can I ask you a quick question?" It's always, "a quick question." Well, my answers are slow. [Laughs]
London: You mentioned Goethe earlier. He remarked that our greatest happiness lies in practicing a talent that we were meant to use. Are we so miserable, as a culture, because we're dissociated from our inborn talents, our soul's code.
Hillman: I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world.
Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one's well-being on earth.
London: It's hard to pursue happiness. It seems to creep up on you.
Hillman: Ikkyu, the crazy Japanese monk, has a poem:
You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy
What he is saying is: Stop all that nonsense. You're really happy. Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.
13 tricky age ... could be depression nothing hides that better
than a class clown. Also hides ridicule and pain.
Also a parent who would do this is an extrovert and apples don't fall far.
A need for attention ... even negative.
Were his grades really good before? took a huge ' I don't care' drop all of a sudden?
Is the child an outcast, being bullied, have a social life within school?
Any signs of skipping class, peer pressure, perhaps new friends, drugs?
These would be warning signs that could lead to worse behavior...
with a teen ... one step ahead.
Did he just change schools ... elementary to middle school?
This can be very tough on kids this move up. He might be finding his role
in school... if he's good at it get him into the theater projects where class clowns
excel and are role models for creativity.
Also this is common, a drop of grades at puberty for boys.
They got lot on their minds ... the parents can find a positive way to make
sure some of that is schoolwork.
13 tricky age ... could be depression nothing hides that better
than a class clown. Also hides ridicule and pain.
Also a parent who would do this is an extrovert and apples don't fall far.
A need for attention ... even negative.
Were his grades really good before? took a huge ' I don't care' drop all of a sudden?
Is the child an outcast, being bullied, have a social life within school?
Any signs of skipping class, peer pressure, perhaps new friends, drugs?
These would be warning signs that could lead to worse behavior...
with a teen ... one step ahead.
Did he just change schools ... elementary to middle school?
This can be very tough on kids this move up. He might be finding his role
in school... if he's good at it get him into the theater projects where class clowns
excel and are role models for creativity.
Also this is common, a drop of grades at puberty for boys.
They got lot on their minds ... the parents can find a positive way to make
sure some of that is schoolwork.
13 tricky age ... could be depression nothing hides that better
than a class clown. Also hides ridicule and pain.
Also a parent who would do this is an extrovert and apples don't fall far.
A need for attention ... even negative.
Were his grades really good before? took a huge ' I don't care' drop all of a sudden?
Is the child an outcast, being bullied, have a social life within school?
Any signs of skipping class, peer pressure, perhaps new friends, drugs?
These would be warning signs that could lead to worse behavior...
with a teen ... one step ahead.
Did he just change schools ... elementary to middle school?
This can be very tough on kids this move up. He might be finding his role
in school... if he's good at it get him into the theater projects where class clowns
excel and are role models for creativity.
Also this is common, a drop of grades at puberty for boys.
They got lot on their minds ... the parents can find a positive way to make
sure some of that is schoolwork.
what happened?
exactly .... what happened?
0
g under p
Surfing The far side of THE Sombrero Galaxy Posts: 18,200
Yes there could be a lot more to this story that we maybe in the dark about. Not saying i would go to these lengths because i've not experienced this kind of failure from them. The worst was a drop from 3.85 to a 3.20 with too much time on Bookface and the Iphone/Ipad and i took them both away also no school parties. The grades shot back upto a 3.91 this last quarter I returned only her Iphone.
What happens if this child's grades improve would the parent's action be justified?
Peace
*We CAN bomb the World to pieces, but we CAN'T bomb it into PEACE*...Michael Franti
*MUSIC IS the expression of EMOTION.....and that POLITICS IS merely the DECOY of PERCEPTION*
.....song_Music & Politics....Michael Franti
*The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite INSANE*....Nikola Tesla(a man who shaped our world of electricity with his futuristic inventions)
There comes a time for rebellion a natural needed process.
Each child finds a different age, each child different intensity, different method.
But comes it does.
In my opinion better in high school when at home under your roof
then at college when the dollar is high and the danger greater
or once they are out on their own in the work force then fall back to the nest
feeling failure.
A parent hopefully finds the balance between freedoms and restrictions
respect and authority ... as to not truly mess up a kid's head.
A too strict parent can create an angry suppressed adult who feels
whatever they do is never good enough.... living stressed.
A too lenient parent can create a self absorbed, non achiever seeking self gratification,
thinking life is never good enough, a whole different kind of stress
but both unfulfilled.
Parenting is the knack of knowing your child ...
not knowing what you want them to be and guiding not leading.
Given a blip of info on this story, with no background, it's so easy for everyone to stick their two cents in and feel justified to judge. Count me out. That's the problem with society; we're all so quick to judge when not given the full story.
No I wouldn't embarrass my kid. But it's not my place to tell someone else how to parent, nor would I like to be judged my parenting skills. There's a lot of problems out there in the world right now, and butting our noses into every single one of them is not worth the angst.
so its ok to humiliate a child in this way? i dont need to know the minutiae of this situation to know humiliating anyone, especially a child, is degrading no matter what the circumstances.
Who am I to judge here? Obviously you feel that it's your right to judge a story based on a few words, where there is no abuse going on. Fine. Get all upset about something you can't do a damn thing about as well as know nothing about it as well. I just don't find this topic worthy of getting upset about when the whole story isn't being told.
why humiliate the kid? is that ever acceptable? to me its not. thats all im saying.
I understand what you're saying. It's not a good thing, but seeing that the article was very short, it's not worth ruffling my feathers about. That's all I'm saying.
Given a blip of info on this story, with no background, it's so easy for everyone to stick their two cents in and feel justified to judge. Count me out. That's the problem with society; we're all so quick to judge when not given the full story.
No I wouldn't embarrass my kid. But it's not my place to tell someone else how to parent, nor would I like to be judged my parenting skills. There's a lot of problems out there in the world right now, and butting our noses into every single one of them is not worth the angst.
I agree and disagree.
While it is impossible to judge an entire situation by a small snippet of a media grab, it is easy to judge that snippet. To say we need to know more about this particular situation is not correct. What more do we really need to know - the parent is humiliating his kid in public. If he was out there bashing the kid with a baseball bat would that be a time to judge? You don't humiliate your kid to get results - and risk sending them even further down. The research and real world evidence is conclusive on this. I'm not saying the guy does not have good intentions, but a dose of child psychology 101 would be helpful for this parent in this situation.
Unfortunately this is where the world is failing, we so politically correct that we wash our hands of shithouse parenting examples by saying, 'it's not my place to tell someone how to raise their kids?' Unfortunately when too many people turn a blind eye to things that are profoundly wrong - or even worse - agree with it - our entire society suffers. And the debate over the idiot who shot up his daughter's computer and then posted it on Facebook is a prime example. His actions were immature and stupid and no matter what they all said on talk shows after the fact, that is not how you teach your kids right from wrong.
We turn a blind eye at parents who feed their kids rubbish and raise kids who are morbidly obese; we turn a blind eye to parents who abuse their kids; we turn a blind eye to those who let their kids roam the streets at night; some even turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse that went on in churches and hostels. All of these things not only affect the welfare of those children, but in turn affect the health of society. Now-a-days, the 'expert' is often ignored in favour of an attitude of 'it's my right to do as I wish'. And thanks to the current right-wing anti-academia thrusts, someone who is educated and experienced is seen as 'elitist'.
Sure it is wrong to judge purely on an ignorant opinion - as many in our society do - and I'm not trying to set myself up as the world authority on everything who does no wrong - but an opinion based on tertiary and post graduate education, field experience and being one of the ones who has to try to pick up the pieces in a school of the result of this kind of dumb arse parenting - I'm going to keep judging on matters such as this.
What it comes down to is children's rights ... do they have any?
Are children only an extension of the adults who raise them?
Are their only rights those that break laws concerning heinous acts?
Many don't like the idea of more laws governing choices adults make in raising
their children.
How about establishing more rights, more voice, for those who are under age.
I have known a few teens that certainly could have used a voice in how they
were being raised and the example their adults were setting.
Speaking out, seeking help, runs the risk of that child entering a less than adequate system
that is perhaps not even the lesser evil of the two environments.
Children should stay with their adult counterparts but should have a voice and often
the adults just need a little education and the family a little help.
Its a volatile time ... teen years. Parents are accustomed to calling all the shots, controlling
behavior, molding a person from birth, even for the best parents it's hard to step back
and allow this person to grow to be independent, which includes making mistakes.
That is the hardest, seeing the mistakes made and the consequences they must learn
to be a stable and productive adult. Everyone makes mistakes and learns from them,
parent and child alike.
What it comes down to is children's rights ... do they have any?
Are children only an extension of the adults who raise them?
Are their only rights those that break laws concerning heinous acts?
Many don't like the idea of more laws governing choices adults make in raising
their children.
How about establishing more rights, more voice, for those who are under age.
I have known a few teens that certainly could have used a voice in how they
were being raised and the example their adults were setting.
Speaking out, seeking help, runs the risk of that child entering a less than adequate system
that is perhaps not even the lesser evil of the two environments.
Children should stay with their adult counterparts but should have a voice and often
the adults just need a little education and the family a little help.
Its a volatile time ... teen years. Parents are accustomed to calling all the shots, controlling
behavior, molding a person from birth, even for the best parents it's hard to step back
and allow this person to grow to be independent, which includes making mistakes.
That is the hardest, seeing the mistakes made and the consequences they must learn
to be a stable and productive adult. Everyone makes mistakes and learns from them,
parent and child alike.
absolutely children have rights...amongst all the other basic rights ALL people have, regardless of age, they have the right not to be humiliated by their parents. they have the right to be respected and theyaahve the right to be protected... even from the grown ups raising them, irrespectively of whether or not they gave birth to them. giving life does not mean owning.
in a way children are an extension of the adults who raise them.. but they are also their own people. and i think this is what the grown ups raising them have the most problem with, forgetting that they themselves were in the same position not all that long ago. there are no peolpe on earth that i respect more than my children.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
What it comes down to is children's rights ... do they have any?
Are children only an extension of the adults who raise them?
Are their only rights those that break laws concerning heinous acts?
Many don't like the idea of more laws governing choices adults make in raising
their children.
How about establishing more rights, more voice, for those who are under age.
I have known a few teens that certainly could have used a voice in how they
were being raised and the example their adults were setting.
Speaking out, seeking help, runs the risk of that child entering a less than adequate system
that is perhaps not even the lesser evil of the two environments.
Children should stay with their adult counterparts but should have a voice and often
the adults just need a little education and the family a little help.
Its a volatile time ... teen years. Parents are accustomed to calling all the shots, controlling
behavior, molding a person from birth, even for the best parents it's hard to step back
and allow this person to grow to be independent, which includes making mistakes.
That is the hardest, seeing the mistakes made and the consequences they must learn
to be a stable and productive adult. Everyone makes mistakes and learns from them,
parent and child alike.
absolutely children have rights...amongst all the other basic rights ALL people have, regardless of age, they have the right not to be humiliated by their parents. they have the right to be respected and theyaahve the right to be protected... even from the grown ups raising them, irrespectively of whether or not they gave birth to them. giving life does not mean owning.
in a way children are an extension of the adults who raise them.. but they are also their own people. and i think this is what the grown ups raising them have the most problem with, forgetting that they themselves were in the same position not all that long ago. there are no peolpe on earth that i respect more than my children.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8434132/bad-student-holds-shame-sign Parents of a US schoolboy who came home with a bad report card have forced him to stand on a street corner wearing a sign describing his failures.
Miami boy Michael Bell Jr will spent his spring break holidays holding a sign after he failed three of his classes, local TV station WSVN reported.
"Hey, I want to be a class clown. Is it wrong?" the front of the sign reads.
"I'm in the 7th grade and got 3 F's. Blow your horn if there's something wrong with that," the sign says on the back.
Both of Michael's parents were at the street corner to make sure he is safe.
His father, Michael Bell Sr, describes the punishment as a last resort.
"I don't know any other way, I'm trying to reach him," he said.
"If I don't do anything, he's going to be a statistic and I don't want him to be a statistic."
...
Who am I to say what is the best way to teach/treat someone else's kid? I mean, yeah, it may not be my methods, but I don't think my methods would apply to everyone.
Basically... I don't know the specific detail of this story... what were the F's in? Algebra or Expressive Dance? U.S. History or Byzantine Philosophy? I don't know the kid... i don't know the parents... I don't know what they've tried and waht hasn't worked. And who knows... maybe the kid is funny. I don't know.
Allen Fieldhouse, home of the 2008 NCAA men's Basketball Champions! Go Jayhawks!
Hail, Hail!!!
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8434132/bad-student-holds-shame-sign Parents of a US schoolboy who came home with a bad report card have forced him to stand on a street corner wearing a sign describing his failures.
Miami boy Michael Bell Jr will spent his spring break holidays holding a sign after he failed three of his classes, local TV station WSVN reported.
"Hey, I want to be a class clown. Is it wrong?" the front of the sign reads.
"I'm in the 7th grade and got 3 F's. Blow your horn if there's something wrong with that," the sign says on the back.
Both of Michael's parents were at the street corner to make sure he is safe.
His father, Michael Bell Sr, describes the punishment as a last resort.
"I don't know any other way, I'm trying to reach him," he said.
"If I don't do anything, he's going to be a statistic and I don't want him to be a statistic."
...
Who am I to say what is the best way to teach/treat someone else's kid? I mean, yeah, it may not be my methods, but I don't think my methods would apply to everyone.
Basically... I don't know the specific detail of this story... what were the F's in? Algebra or Expressive Dance? U.S. History or Byzantine Philosophy? I don't know the kid... i don't know the parents... I don't know what they've tried and waht hasn't worked. And who knows... maybe the kid is funny. I don't know.
Read Paul's post at the top of the page, he gives an excellent explanation, and as someone who works in the same field as Paul, I wholeheartedly agree.
As far as the specific situation in the OP, I see the father giving people permission to comment on his parenting, since he is using people in the community as unwilling participants in his (unhealthy) parenting. To not comment could even be seen as colluding with something that's hurtful to the child.
I think people, myself included, are sharing what they have learned from their parenting experiences no different than any other subject nor life experience.
Couple this with book learned methods from experts and doctors
which really help a parent cope and set a standard for good care.
The result ...
you have something valuable to share ...
though still an opinion of course.
I feel there are general rules of respect when raising children
no different then how adults interact with other adults.
I've seen and been guilty myself of not always remembering this.
Yesterday on the news it spoke of a 14 year old girl who has bought a rental property in
FL, saved her money, 6,000 and went in on it with her Mom.
I was proud of the young lady!
As the piece closed the Mom pretty much degraded her daughter on national TV
when speaking of the money she will owe for her half of the window repair.
Spoke down to her, 'what don't you get' type attitude,
the girl confused, not really understanding the scope of what she
has gotten herself into.
I felt at that moment like the young girl was property herself,
something no child should ever feel.
It is these rewind moments when if we could stand back and see what bystanders see
of the interaction between child and parent it becomes very clear what is healthy
parenting and what isn't...
Given a blip of info on this story, with no background, it's so easy for everyone to stick their two cents in and feel justified to judge. Count me out. That's the problem with society; we're all so quick to judge when not given the full story.
No I wouldn't embarrass my kid. But it's not my place to tell someone else how to parent, nor would I like to be judged my parenting skills. There's a lot of problems out there in the world right now, and butting our noses into every single one of them is not worth the angst.
I agree and disagree.
While it is impossible to judge an entire situation by a small snippet of a media grab, it is easy to judge that snippet. To say we need to know more about this particular situation is not correct. What more do we really need to know - the parent is humiliating his kid in public. If he was out there bashing the kid with a baseball bat would that be a time to judge? You don't humiliate your kid to get results - and risk sending them even further down. The research and real world evidence is conclusive on this. I'm not saying the guy does not have good intentions, but a dose of child psychology 101 would be helpful for this parent in this situation.
Unfortunately this is where the world is failing, we so politically correct that we wash our hands of shithouse parenting examples by saying, 'it's not my place to tell someone how to raise their kids?' Unfortunately when too many people turn a blind eye to things that are profoundly wrong - or even worse - agree with it - our entire society suffers. And the debate over the idiot who shot up his daughter's computer and then posted it on Facebook is a prime example. His actions were immature and stupid and no matter what they all said on talk shows after the fact, that is not how you teach your kids right from wrong.
We turn a blind eye at parents who feed their kids rubbish and raise kids who are morbidly obese; we turn a blind eye to parents who abuse their kids; we turn a blind eye to those who let their kids roam the streets at night; some even turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse that went on in churches and hostels. All of these things not only affect the welfare of those children, but in turn affect the health of society. Now-a-days, the 'expert' is often ignored in favour of an attitude of 'it's my right to do as I wish'. And thanks to the current right-wing anti-academia thrusts, someone who is educated and experienced is seen as 'elitist'.
Sure it is wrong to judge purely on an ignorant opinion - as many in our society do - and I'm not trying to set myself up as the world authority on everything who does no wrong - but an opinion based on tertiary and post graduate education, field experience and being one of the ones who has to try to pick up the pieces in a school of the result of this kind of dumb arse parenting - I'm going to keep judging on matters such as this.
Well, you keep on judging then. I certainly don't walk around spouting my credentials to judge anyone and neither should you. Regardless of the situation.
Well, you keep on judging then. I certainly don't walk around spouting my credentials to judge anyone and neither should you. Regardless of the situation.
My guess is you do judge in certain situations, like if a parent belted a kid across the face in the grocery store. In that case, no one would fault you for judging. In the OP, this is a situation where I disagree with the parent. I give myself the right to judge in this situation, just like you probably would in my grocery store example.
Well, you keep on judging then. I certainly don't walk around spouting my credentials to judge anyone and neither should you. Regardless of the situation.
My guess is you do judge in certain situations, like if a parent belted a kid across the face in the grocery store. In that case, no one would fault you for judging. In the OP, this is a situation where I disagree with the parent. I give myself the right to judge in this situation, just like you probably would in my grocery store example.
It's definitely difficult not to judge in certain situations. But in this one, where there's very limited info, I won't. The way I look at life, is to try to live simply, judge less, and accept people for who they are more. Pointing fingers, attempting to control situations, and setting my "right way of living" upon others is not my thing. I've been through enough drama for one lifetime, and getting all riled up about other people's lives isn't worth the energy. Yeah there's plenty of bad things going on out there in the world right now, but this story is hardly worth getting panties all in a bunch for, especially seeing that we do not know details. Pick your battles.
...
Who am I to say what is the best way to teach/treat someone else's kid? I mean, yeah, it may not be my methods, but I don't think my methods would apply to everyone.
Basically... I don't know the specific detail of this story... what were the F's in? Algebra or Expressive Dance? U.S. History or Byzantine Philosophy? I don't know the kid... i don't know the parents... I don't know what they've tried and waht hasn't worked. And who knows... maybe the kid is funny. I don't know.
Read Paul's post at the top of the page, he gives an excellent explanation, and as someone who works in the same field as Paul, I wholeheartedly agree.
As far as the specific situation in the OP, I see the father giving people permission to comment on his parenting, since he is using people in the community as unwilling participants in his (unhealthy) parenting. To not comment could even be seen as colluding with something that's hurtful to the child.
...
I totally understand the point, humiliating the kid in public while the rest of us turn a blind eye... but, again, I don't know where in the process this is. I don't know if this father is at his wits end... whether or not he has tried other methods, including methods that we would all agree upon as good parenting practices... but, didn't seem to take affect on this one kid. We don't know if the kid is getting an F because he is bored or he just doesn't get the subject. We just don't know.
Allen Fieldhouse, home of the 2008 NCAA men's Basketball Champions! Go Jayhawks!
Hail, Hail!!!
Well, you keep on judging then. I certainly don't walk around spouting my credentials to judge anyone and neither should you. Regardless of the situation.
My guess is you do judge in certain situations, like if a parent belted a kid across the face in the grocery store. In that case, no one would fault you for judging. In the OP, this is a situation where I disagree with the parent. I give myself the right to judge in this situation, just like you probably would in my grocery store example.
It's definitely difficult not to judge in certain situations. But in this one, where there's very limited info, I won't. The way I look at life, is to try to live simply, judge less, and accept people for who they are more. Pointing fingers, attempting to control situations, and setting my "right way of living" upon others is not my thing. I've been through enough drama for one lifetime, and getting all riled up about other people's lives isn't worth the energy. Yeah there's plenty of bad things going on out there in the world right now, but this story is hardly worth getting panties all in a bunch for, especially seeing that we do not know details. Pick your battles.
I agree, this story is a non-story and shame on the media for picking it up - this is where the 'crime' and culpability lie.
But by your logic, we ignore all the 'small' things because there are big things in the world like unjust wars, mass poverty etc? Even though these small issues are insignificant against the weight of the universe, they are every bit as significant for this kid and the issues facing those in dire situations elsewhere. As Zuckerburg said (and I think this is a sad - but ultimately honest way many look at the world), "To you a dead squirrel on your front lawn may be more relevant and important and a million people starving a world away."
I certainly pick my battles, and honestly would not choose this as a battle from the other side of the world and with my own kids to raise and business to run, however, we were invited to discuss this matter on a message forum that that is what I (and you) are doing - respectfully
I'm not trying to say there is a right or wrong way of living - i am sure people could find fault in some of my lifestyle choices or actions. And if I were addressing this issue with the parent directly, I sure would not be using bulldozer diplomacy and not commenting on his love for his child or his overall worth as a parent - just on these actions. However we try to mitigate said action by saying 'we don't know the full story' etc, look at what came from this actions:
1. Kid was humiliated in front of his community and peers
2. Story was picked up by the media and the kid was then humiliated before the entire nation.
3. Story was picked up my the international media and now the kid is being humiliated by the entire world.
Misguided parenting at best, downright bloody minded and cruel at worst.
I am merely pointing out, in my training and experience, this kind of thing overwhelmingly backfires and often with disastrous results.
Comments
why humiliate the kid? is that ever acceptable? to me its not. thats all im saying.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Well said sir - we gotta have a beer next time I'm in the states
If I was 21 I would join you.
http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Code-Search ... 0446673714
Some call it" genius". Others have named it "spirit", "daimon", and even "guardian angel". But while philosophers and psychologists from Plato to Jung emphasized the fundamental essence of our individuality, our modern culture refuses to accept that a unique, formed soul is within us from birth, shaping as much as it is shaped.
...Drawing on the biographies of such disparate people as Ella Fitzgerald and Mohandas K. Gandhi, James Hillman argues that character is fate and shows how the soul, if given the opportunity, can assert itself even at an early age. The result is a reasoned and powerful road map to understanding our true nature and discovering an eye-opening array of choices -- from the way we raise our children to our career paths to our social and personal commitments to achieving excellence in our time.
http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/hillman.html
On Soul, Character and Calling:
A Conversation with James Hillman
'...London: You're not a very popular figure with the therapy establishment.
People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture, a sense that there is some purpose that has come with them into the world.
Hillman: I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. What I'm trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.
London: You can't fix the person without fixing the society.
Hillman: I don't think so. But I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person. We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, "What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?" We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.
London: You've said that you usually write out of "hatred, dislike, and destruction."
Hillman: I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness. In the cosmology that's behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything. We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I'm an accident — a result — and therefore a victim.
London: A victim?
Hillman: Well, if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here. Or, if you look at it from the sociological perspective, I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.
London: What about the idea that we are self-made, that since life is an accident we have the freedom to make ourselves into anything we want?
Hillman: Yes, we worship the idea of the "self-made man" — otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea. We vote for Perot. We think he's a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It's unbelievable, yet it's part of that worship of individuality.
But the culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world? All of this anxiety and depression casts doubt on whether I can make it as a heroic John Wayne-style individual.
London: In The Soul's Code, you talk about something called the "acorn theory." What is that?
Hillman: Well, it's more of a myth than a theory. It's Plato's myth that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the word paradigma, or paradigm, instead of destiny. The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.
The same myth can be found in the kabbalah. The Mormons have it. The West Africans have it. The Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways — they tie it more to reincarnation and karma, but you still come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly. So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only American psychology doesn't have it.
London: In our culture we tend to think of calling in terms of "vocation" or "career."
Hillman: Yes, but calling can refer not only to ways of doing — meaning work — but also to ways of being. Take being a friend. Goethe said that his friend Eckermann was born for friendship. Aristotle made friendship one of the great virtues. In his book on ethics, three or four chapters are on friendship. In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.
London: Motherhood is another example that comes to mind. Mothers are still expected to have a vocation above and beyond being a mother.
Hillman: Right, it's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them. It's a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood — the sense that motherhood isn't itself a calling — also arises from economic pressure.
London: What implications do your ideas have for parents?
Hillman: I think what I'm saying should relieve them hugely and make them want to pay more attention to their child, this peculiar stranger who has landed in their midst. Instead of saying, "This is my child," they must ask, "Who is this child who happens to be mine?" Then they will gain a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for instances where the kid's destiny might show itself — like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one year, or an obsession with one thing or another. Maybe something very important is going on there that the parents didn't see before.
London: Symptoms are so often seen as weaknesses.
Hillman: Right, so they set up some sort of medical or psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptoms may be the most crucial part of the kid. There are many stories in my book that illustrate this.
...London: What is the first step toward understanding one's calling?
Hillman: It's important to ask yourself, "How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?" That may very well reveal what you are here for.
Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too. When you look into the archetypal nature of taxation, you realize that all civilizations have had taxation of one sort or another. Some of the earliest Egyptian writing is about tax collecting — the scribe recording what was paid and what wasn't paid.
So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.
London: What do you think of traditional techniques for revealing the soul's code, such as the wise woman who reads palms, or the village elders whose job it is to look at a child and see that child's destiny? Would it be helpful to revive these traditions?
Hillman: First of all, I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose. Second of all, I think those traditions are going on underground. Many people will tell you about some astrologer who said this or that to them, or some teacher. So it's very widespread in the subculture.
What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child's destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child. It's almost an erotic thing, like the filmmaker Elia Kazan's stories of how his teacher "took to him." She said to him, "When you were only twelve, you stood near my desk one morning and the light from the window fell across your head and features and illuminated the expression on your face. The thought came to me of the great possibilities there in your development." She saw his beauty. Now that, you see, is something different from just going to the wise woman.
London: In The Soul's Code, you tell a similar story about Truman Capote.
Hillman: In Capote's case, his teacher responded to his crazy fantasies. He was a difficult boy who threw temper tantrums in which he would lie on the floor and kick, who refused to go to class, who combed his hair all the time — an impossible kid. She responded to his absurdities with equal absurdities. She took to him. Teachers today can't take to a child. It will be called manipulation, or seduction, or pedophilia.
London: Or preferential treatment.
Hillman: Right. James Baldwin is another example. He attended a little Harlem schoolhouse of fifty kids. Conditions were appalling. His teacher was a Midwestern white woman. And yet they clicked.
You see, we don't need to get back to the wise woman in the village. We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works — you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.
London: Of all the historical figures you studied while researching The Soul's Code, who fascinated you the most?
Hillman: They all did. All these little stories fascinated me. Take Martin Scorcese, another filmmaker, for example. He was a very short kid and had terrible asthma. He couldn't go out into the streets of Little Italy in Manhattan and play with the other kids. So he would sit up in his room and look out the window at what was going on and make little drawings — cartoons, with numerous frames — of the scene. In effect, he was making movies at nine years old.
London: What about someone like Adolf Hitler, the prototypical "bad seed"? Is he an example of a destiny gone awry, or perhaps the fulfillment of some sort of twisted destiny?
Hillman: It's a puzzle. How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don't think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it's a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation — like Charles Manson. Jeffrey Dahmer had a wonderful father. His father even wrote a book saying that it was his fault that Jeffrey was the way he was. His father had strange dreams in his youth that were very similar to some of the crimes that Dahmer committed. So the father took responsibility. But he was not a bad father at all. When Jeffrey was four, they were carving pumpkins for Halloween, and Jeffrey screamed, "Make a mean face!" He would not let his father put a smile on the pumpkin's face. "I want a mean face!" he screamed. He was in a fury.
So I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those "troublemakers" early on and try to weed them out. That's very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers. But then you look at a child like Mary Bell in England, who was ten when she strangled two little boys — one three and one five. Yes, there were extenuating circumstances. She had a "bad" mother, so to speak. But to think that she would note have "flowered" if her mother had been in therapy, or that (as psychologist Alice Miller thinks) there would have been no Adolf Hitler if Hitler's family had been treated — that's just naive.
London: You've written that "the great task of any culture is to keep the invisibles attached." What do you mean by that?
Hillman: It's a difficult idea to present without leaving psychology and getting into religion. I don't talk about who the invisibles are or where they live or what they want. There is no real theology in it. But it's the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.
London: God?
Hillman: Yes, but it doesn't have to be that lofty.
London: Our calling?
Hillman: I think the first step is the realization that each of us has such a thing. And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It doesn't necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It's more a sensitivity, such as a person living in a tribal culture would have: the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.
London: When you talk in those terms, it seems to me that the boundary between psychology and theology gets a little blurry. Psychology deals with the will, and religion deals with fate. Yet this is not clearly not one or the other, but a bit of both.
Hillman: You're right. It isn't such an easy thing as the old argument of free will versus predestination. The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.
London: What is the danger for a child who grows up never understanding his or her destiny?
Hillman: I think our entire civilization exemplifies that danger. People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world.
London: Is it possible never to discover that "something else" — to turn your back on it, or to resist it and therefore "waste" your life?
Hillman: I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not. You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things.
London: It seems to me that illness and divorce an prompt you to explore some themes in life more thoroughly than others.
Hillman: Certainly. I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper. Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.
Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be. People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.
London: You write that one of the most stultifying things about modern psychology is that it's lost its sense of beauty.
Hillman: Yes, if it ever had one. Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.
London: And this has trickled down to therapists today?
Hillman: Yes. Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way — whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.
London: But doesn't psychology have more in common with medicine than the arts?
Hillman: Well, one strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy.
But when the medical becomes scientistic; when it becomes analytical, diagnostic, statistical, and remedial; when it comes under the influence of pharmacology and HMOs — limiting patients to six conversations and those kinds of things — then we've lost the art altogether, and we're just doing business: industrial, corporate business.
London: Doesn't this have to do with the fact that, at a certain point in its development, psychology adopted the reductive method in order to gain the respectability of science?
Hillman: I think you're absolutely correct. But as the popular trust in science fades — and many sociologists say that's happening today — people will develop a distrust of purely "scientific" psychology. Researchers in the universities haven't picked up on this; they're more interested in genetics and computer models of thinking than ever. But, in general, there is a huge distrust of the scientific establishment now.
London: As people rebel against the scientific approach, they often wind up at the other extreme. We're seeing many new forms of self-help and personal-growth therapies based on non-rational beliefs.
Hillman: The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along.
London: In some respects, you are a critic of the new age. Yet I noticed that a couple of reviewers of The Soul's Code have placed you in the new age category. How do you feel about that?
Hillman: Well, some reviewers have a scientistic ax to grind. To them, my book had to be either science or new age mush. It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.
My book is about a third view. It says, yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. So if you come at my book from the side of science, you see it as "new age." If you come at the book from the side of the new age, you say it doesn't go far enough — it's too rational.
London: I remember a public talk you gave a while back. People wanted to ask you all sorts of questions about your view of the soul, and you were a bit testy with them.
Hillman: I've been wrestling with these questions for thirty-five years. I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, "Can I ask you a quick question?" It's always, "a quick question." Well, my answers are slow. [Laughs]
London: You mentioned Goethe earlier. He remarked that our greatest happiness lies in practicing a talent that we were meant to use. Are we so miserable, as a culture, because we're dissociated from our inborn talents, our soul's code.
Hillman: I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world.
Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one's well-being on earth.
London: It's hard to pursue happiness. It seems to creep up on you.
Hillman: Ikkyu, the crazy Japanese monk, has a poem:
You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy
What he is saying is: Stop all that nonsense. You're really happy. Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
than a class clown. Also hides ridicule and pain.
Also a parent who would do this is an extrovert and apples don't fall far.
A need for attention ... even negative.
Were his grades really good before? took a huge ' I don't care' drop all of a sudden?
Is the child an outcast, being bullied, have a social life within school?
Any signs of skipping class, peer pressure, perhaps new friends, drugs?
These would be warning signs that could lead to worse behavior...
with a teen ... one step ahead.
Did he just change schools ... elementary to middle school?
This can be very tough on kids this move up. He might be finding his role
in school... if he's good at it get him into the theater projects where class clowns
excel and are role models for creativity.
Also this is common, a drop of grades at puberty for boys.
They got lot on their minds ... the parents can find a positive way to make
sure some of that is schoolwork.
what happened?
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
What happens if this child's grades improve would the parent's action be justified?
Peace
*MUSIC IS the expression of EMOTION.....and that POLITICS IS merely the DECOY of PERCEPTION*
.....song_Music & Politics....Michael Franti
*The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite INSANE*....Nikola Tesla(a man who shaped our world of electricity with his futuristic inventions)
Each child finds a different age, each child different intensity, different method.
But comes it does.
In my opinion better in high school when at home under your roof
then at college when the dollar is high and the danger greater
or once they are out on their own in the work force then fall back to the nest
feeling failure.
A parent hopefully finds the balance between freedoms and restrictions
respect and authority ... as to not truly mess up a kid's head.
A too strict parent can create an angry suppressed adult who feels
whatever they do is never good enough.... living stressed.
A too lenient parent can create a self absorbed, non achiever seeking self gratification,
thinking life is never good enough, a whole different kind of stress
but both unfulfilled.
Parenting is the knack of knowing your child ...
not knowing what you want them to be and guiding not leading.
Given a blip of info on this story, with no background, it's so easy for everyone to stick their two cents in and feel justified to judge. Count me out. That's the problem with society; we're all so quick to judge when not given the full story.
No I wouldn't embarrass my kid. But it's not my place to tell someone else how to parent, nor would I like to be judged my parenting skills. There's a lot of problems out there in the world right now, and butting our noses into every single one of them is not worth the angst.
I understand what you're saying. It's not a good thing, but seeing that the article was very short, it's not worth ruffling my feathers about. That's all I'm saying.
I agree and disagree.
While it is impossible to judge an entire situation by a small snippet of a media grab, it is easy to judge that snippet. To say we need to know more about this particular situation is not correct. What more do we really need to know - the parent is humiliating his kid in public. If he was out there bashing the kid with a baseball bat would that be a time to judge? You don't humiliate your kid to get results - and risk sending them even further down. The research and real world evidence is conclusive on this. I'm not saying the guy does not have good intentions, but a dose of child psychology 101 would be helpful for this parent in this situation.
Unfortunately this is where the world is failing, we so politically correct that we wash our hands of shithouse parenting examples by saying, 'it's not my place to tell someone how to raise their kids?' Unfortunately when too many people turn a blind eye to things that are profoundly wrong - or even worse - agree with it - our entire society suffers. And the debate over the idiot who shot up his daughter's computer and then posted it on Facebook is a prime example. His actions were immature and stupid and no matter what they all said on talk shows after the fact, that is not how you teach your kids right from wrong.
We turn a blind eye at parents who feed their kids rubbish and raise kids who are morbidly obese; we turn a blind eye to parents who abuse their kids; we turn a blind eye to those who let their kids roam the streets at night; some even turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse that went on in churches and hostels. All of these things not only affect the welfare of those children, but in turn affect the health of society. Now-a-days, the 'expert' is often ignored in favour of an attitude of 'it's my right to do as I wish'. And thanks to the current right-wing anti-academia thrusts, someone who is educated and experienced is seen as 'elitist'.
Sure it is wrong to judge purely on an ignorant opinion - as many in our society do - and I'm not trying to set myself up as the world authority on everything who does no wrong - but an opinion based on tertiary and post graduate education, field experience and being one of the ones who has to try to pick up the pieces in a school of the result of this kind of dumb arse parenting - I'm going to keep judging on matters such as this.
Are children only an extension of the adults who raise them?
Are their only rights those that break laws concerning heinous acts?
Many don't like the idea of more laws governing choices adults make in raising
their children.
How about establishing more rights, more voice, for those who are under age.
I have known a few teens that certainly could have used a voice in how they
were being raised and the example their adults were setting.
Speaking out, seeking help, runs the risk of that child entering a less than adequate system
that is perhaps not even the lesser evil of the two environments.
Children should stay with their adult counterparts but should have a voice and often
the adults just need a little education and the family a little help.
Its a volatile time ... teen years. Parents are accustomed to calling all the shots, controlling
behavior, molding a person from birth, even for the best parents it's hard to step back
and allow this person to grow to be independent, which includes making mistakes.
That is the hardest, seeing the mistakes made and the consequences they must learn
to be a stable and productive adult. Everyone makes mistakes and learns from them,
parent and child alike.
absolutely children have rights...amongst all the other basic rights ALL people have, regardless of age, they have the right not to be humiliated by their parents. they have the right to be respected and theyaahve the right to be protected... even from the grown ups raising them, irrespectively of whether or not they gave birth to them. giving life does not mean owning.
in a way children are an extension of the adults who raise them.. but they are also their own people. and i think this is what the grown ups raising them have the most problem with, forgetting that they themselves were in the same position not all that long ago. there are no peolpe on earth that i respect more than my children.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Who am I to say what is the best way to teach/treat someone else's kid? I mean, yeah, it may not be my methods, but I don't think my methods would apply to everyone.
Basically... I don't know the specific detail of this story... what were the F's in? Algebra or Expressive Dance? U.S. History or Byzantine Philosophy? I don't know the kid... i don't know the parents... I don't know what they've tried and waht hasn't worked. And who knows... maybe the kid is funny. I don't know.
Hail, Hail!!!
Read Paul's post at the top of the page, he gives an excellent explanation, and as someone who works in the same field as Paul, I wholeheartedly agree.
As far as the specific situation in the OP, I see the father giving people permission to comment on his parenting, since he is using people in the community as unwilling participants in his (unhealthy) parenting. To not comment could even be seen as colluding with something that's hurtful to the child.
Couple this with book learned methods from experts and doctors
which really help a parent cope and set a standard for good care.
The result ...
you have something valuable to share ...
though still an opinion of course.
I feel there are general rules of respect when raising children
no different then how adults interact with other adults.
I've seen and been guilty myself of not always remembering this.
Yesterday on the news it spoke of a 14 year old girl who has bought a rental property in
FL, saved her money, 6,000 and went in on it with her Mom.
I was proud of the young lady!
As the piece closed the Mom pretty much degraded her daughter on national TV
when speaking of the money she will owe for her half of the window repair.
Spoke down to her, 'what don't you get' type attitude,
the girl confused, not really understanding the scope of what she
has gotten herself into.
I felt at that moment like the young girl was property herself,
something no child should ever feel.
It is these rewind moments when if we could stand back and see what bystanders see
of the interaction between child and parent it becomes very clear what is healthy
parenting and what isn't...
just look at the child's face.
Well, you keep on judging then. I certainly don't walk around spouting my credentials to judge anyone and neither should you. Regardless of the situation.
My guess is you do judge in certain situations, like if a parent belted a kid across the face in the grocery store. In that case, no one would fault you for judging. In the OP, this is a situation where I disagree with the parent. I give myself the right to judge in this situation, just like you probably would in my grocery store example.
I totally understand the point, humiliating the kid in public while the rest of us turn a blind eye... but, again, I don't know where in the process this is. I don't know if this father is at his wits end... whether or not he has tried other methods, including methods that we would all agree upon as good parenting practices... but, didn't seem to take affect on this one kid. We don't know if the kid is getting an F because he is bored or he just doesn't get the subject. We just don't know.
Hail, Hail!!!
I agree, this story is a non-story and shame on the media for picking it up - this is where the 'crime' and culpability lie.
But by your logic, we ignore all the 'small' things because there are big things in the world like unjust wars, mass poverty etc? Even though these small issues are insignificant against the weight of the universe, they are every bit as significant for this kid and the issues facing those in dire situations elsewhere. As Zuckerburg said (and I think this is a sad - but ultimately honest way many look at the world), "To you a dead squirrel on your front lawn may be more relevant and important and a million people starving a world away."
I certainly pick my battles, and honestly would not choose this as a battle from the other side of the world and with my own kids to raise and business to run, however, we were invited to discuss this matter on a message forum that that is what I (and you) are doing - respectfully
I'm not trying to say there is a right or wrong way of living - i am sure people could find fault in some of my lifestyle choices or actions. And if I were addressing this issue with the parent directly, I sure would not be using bulldozer diplomacy and not commenting on his love for his child or his overall worth as a parent - just on these actions. However we try to mitigate said action by saying 'we don't know the full story' etc, look at what came from this actions:
1. Kid was humiliated in front of his community and peers
2. Story was picked up by the media and the kid was then humiliated before the entire nation.
3. Story was picked up my the international media and now the kid is being humiliated by the entire world.
Misguided parenting at best, downright bloody minded and cruel at worst.
I am merely pointing out, in my training and experience, this kind of thing overwhelmingly backfires and often with disastrous results.