Children – And the Goal of Growing Up

January 4, 2012 By treeves Leave a Comment
photo

I’ve had an interesting time seeing the following datum in action:

 

“The child has to have a goal. His goal is growing up and being an adult. As long as he has this goal he does pretty well. He can come through most anything. ‘Someday I am going to…’ That’s hope. That’s the mind–overcome obstacles toward a known goal.

“Now, any system which would seek to convince a child that being a child–I mean, this system knowingly or unknowingly seeks to convince the child that the thing to be is a child, is going to lead this child away from a goal and is going to make his wits rot just by that and by that alone.”

L. RON HUBBARD
from lecture Processing Children in Research & Discovery Volume 3
15 July 1950

The datum is also discussed in the quite-excellent Successfully Raising Children Course, and is one I’ve found working in curious ways with my 2 year old daughter.   As long as she understands that she’s growing up to be a big girl, and there are certain things that “big girls” can do, I continue to get improving abilities & responsibilities from her.  If she’s convinced she’s a “little kid” or “baby”,  she reverts to old behaviour and acts more like a baby.    Simple things like potty training, eating well at the table, helping with chores, etc all can very visibly be tied to this.

When I did the Successfully Raising Children course at the Washington DC Church of Scientology, I had a thought that this concept of setting and keeping a goal of “being an adult” would be one I’d continually have to revisit as my kids grew up.  And that’s definitely turned out to be the case.  As time goes on, I’m continually having to find new things as goals that make it worthwhile and desirable for my daughter to want to be more “grown up” – quite contrary to the Toys “R” Us tagline.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

Don’t Bypass Your Child (Part 2)

December 14, 2011 By treeves Leave a Comment

Children Love to Help

This is the second of two (perhaps more) posts on the subject of bypassing your children – and in this context, bypassing means to ignore their efforts to help or do work that is theirs, and instead doing it yourself.

I realized after writing my last post on the topic that there is so much more that could be written on this, and so many other facets to the issue.   The facet mainly covered in the first post was that the more you bypass them and don’t let them do the work, the more you’re grooving in the fact that they don’t do the work, and you do.  I.e., you cop all of the work and end up as an overworked parent.

Making a More Responsible Child

Another facet of why you don’t want to habitually bypass a child lies in something that is one of the bare-bones basics of Scientology.  If you look at the Scientology symbol, it’s an S with two triangles.  The bottom triangle – the Affinity-Reality-Communication triangle, is covered in depth in this video.  The top triangle, however, is the one relevant here – the triangle symbolizing the interrelationship between knowledge, responsibility and control.  (more info)

In an issue L. Ron Hubbard wrote for the Executive Series of organization policy letters, he wrote the following:

“It is hard to fully know something or be responsible for something over which you have no CONTROL, otherwise the result can be an overwhelm.”    – LRH (18 Feb 72, THE TOP TRIANGLE)

So, obviously, whether you’re training an employee or raising a child, you would want them to have maximal control of their work area or their environment.   But that’s where, again, this mechanism of the habitual-bypass comes in.

As I watch my daughter grow up, she is constantly finding new things about which she can be responsible, and which she can control.  She found out she could push the buttons on the microwave, and if she uses her step, she can load her own food into the microwave & cook it.  She found out she can control a rag and a spray bottle, so when she spills something, she expects to be able to clean it herself.  Et cetera.

Now, the problem comes in when you all of the sudden, randomly (to them) interrupting that control and asserting that they can’t do it for whatever reason (you’re late for work / they’re taking to long / they suck at it / they’re making a mess / etc).  What happens then?

The mechanics of that, LRH discusses in another organization policy, this one written on 24 March 1985 and entitled RESPONSIBILITY, CONTROL AND DANGER CONDITIONS:

“An executive can tend to occasionally sever somebody’s responsibility line.  it’s a technical point.

“As one definition of responsibility is to defend one’s control of an area, an exec can sometimes tend to sever that control point.” – LRH

He then goes on to detail that this is why execs continue to get repeatedly pulled into an area – and the same applies to parents.  That if you habitually bypass your child (or junior employee) and fail to take the necessary steps so that they can be responsible for the area you just bypassed them on – they will assume it is NOT THEIR RESPONSIBILITY and will relinquish control for it.

Just THINK about that for a bit.

imageIt applies to potty training.  It applies to why kids don’t clean their rooms.  It applies to a lot of things.

Again, I’d fully recommend a study of all of these related policies – they’re all available in Organization Executive Course Volume 0.   But at the very least, do the free course on Ethics and the Conditions which gives you the essence of these factors and what to do about it.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , Leave a Comment

Communication: The Key Element in Parenting

May 31, 2011 By treeves Leave a Comment

Tad Reeves is Scientologist, a website systems engineer, and a parent of two adorable children.  He has a great time applying Scientology as a parent, and keeps up a website entitled ScientologyParent with tips and successes that he, his wife, and his friends have had in applying Scientology to the joys and challenges of parenting.

I think that communication skill is one of the single most – if not the single most undervalued yet utterly essential skills in being a parent, a husband or a wife.

Reasons to be a skilled, competent communicator abound.

  • Who of you has shaken their head in contempt of the parent you see at the grocery store screaming at their kids? It’s pretty much a given that only a very, very small percentage of parents actually mean to inflict permanent harm on their children and intend to verbally abuse them until they die.  My theory is that the rest are likely are at their wits end of how to actually control and communicate with their children.  The kids, having lived through years of poor communication and poor control, probably are at their wits end too on how to communicate with mommy.
  • Parents yelling at each other, unable to communicate, is the single biggest destabilizing influence in a child’s life. Seriously.  The one thing that needs to stay stable in a kids life to keep them sane, is for there always to be “mommy” and “daddy” and that “daddy & mommy love each other and love me”.  Now what happens if mommy can’t get daddy’ to listen to her simple demands, and daddy is a jerk and yells at mommy to shut up, and then when general communication failure happens and coffee cups start flying, what happens to the kids?  Suffering, big time.
  • Tantrums: Today, walking down by the Lincoln Memorial, I saw a family happily walking along pushing a stroller – and in that stroller was a Tasmanian-devil-look-alike child of about 3, flailing her legs and arms in a near-blur, screaming bloody murder.  Mom had a look on her face of, “oh, she always does this,” and the dad had this look of, “well, dear let’s just look like we’re enjoying the day”.   HOW ABOUT COMMUNICATING TO YOUR KID GUYS??? Maybe find out what’s up?  Maybe have them look around and communicate with the environment a bit?Boggling, but it was obvious that the parents gave up long ago on communication, and have resorted instead to pretending communication problems don’t exist.

As people who grew up in Scientology, it definitely wasn’t lost on my wife and I that in order to be good parents, we had better sharpen up on our communication skills.  Not that either of us was bad to begin with, but as such an important subject – especially with the “terrible twos” not too far away (the “terrible” aspect of them commonly agreed to be a result of the two-year-old not being able to communicate their thoughts to the parents) – we thought we’d better brush up.

So, we enrolled at our local Church of Scientology on the new Success Through Communication Course – a course available to anyone, and one that specifically teaches the art and skill of guiding and controlling communication.

And doing this course together as a married couple is magic.  To sum it up in a sentence, after every course period, I’ve finished off the day more utterly in love with her than I’ve ever been.

The course focuses on all of the real-world aspects of communication, one at a time.  Aspects like being a good listener (something just about every husband in the world could use brush-up on) and being able to effectively handle upsets, and to get ones point across despite interference.

My wife and I just came home from our third course period working on the course.  We’re doing the course together as a “twinship”, meaning that we are taking turns getting each other through each of the communication drills in the course.

And doing this course together as a married couple is magic.  To sum it up in a sentence, after every course period, I’ve finished off the day more utterly in love with her than I’ve ever been.

The reason for this is really simple.  We’ve gotten to each individually take up, and drill out of each other, bad communication habits that we’ve picked up in dealing with each other.  Things that we’ve grown to do with each other over 10 years of marriage that frankly are annoying.  Times when I tune her out if she drones on, or times she tunes me out when I go off on some long-winded technical explanation of something.  Or just simply being comfortable being there and listening to her and her to me.

It really is truly magical.

The course is designed such that anyone can pick it up and start immediately.  It’s streamlined and its easy, and if you approach it with the view that there is something you can learn about communication, it will change your whole life.

And I’m positive that it’s making me into a much better husband and a more competent daddy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment