Scientology Parent: Attack of the Why’s – And Why I Embrace Them

February 28, 2012 By treeves Leave a Comment

At the Air & Space Museum, Figuring out how engines work.

My daughter is two and a half, and she’s well into the “attack of the Why’s”.

“Why is that car broken, daddy?”

“Why is that tractor spraying water, daddy?”

“Why did that baby do spit-up, daddy?”

“Why is the sun asleep now, daddy?”

I’ve met plenty of parents who positively dread the Whys.  Evidently, they find it annoying that their child is constantly asking them, “Why, why why?”

I don’t find it annoying at all.  I embrace it.

The explanation for such has a lot to do with my own philosophy about life.   When I went to school at the Delphian School in Oregon (likely the single best move my parents ever made for my sister & I), I was studying chemistry & physics.  A lot of what I was studying seemed inapplicable to any professions I was considering.  But, the faculty of the school very adroitly suggested that I work out for myself why I was studying it before I went any further.

After some reflection, I did end up deciding that I actually wanted to know how my world worked, and that the more I understood my surroundings, the better I felt.   I made a decision that I wanted to actually understand anything I saw around me, so that virtually nothing would be left in my surroundings that was a mystery to me.    And that’s what I want for my kids.

Application of Study Technology to Life

There’s a core piece of Scientology technology at work here.  And that’s L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology.  A cornerstone of such, is that in studying, one does not go past words that one does not understand.   And if you encounter them, you get them cleared up fully to where you understand them conceptually.    Go past misunderstood words & symbols, and you end up yawning, tired, blank, and end up leaving courses of study you ‘re in.   Please see this video for a further explanation of this phenomena at work.

But extend this out to everything you encounter in life – advertisements, newspaper articles, text printed in your car’s dashboard, etc.    Your car has a button that says, “Traction Control Off”.  What’s “traction control”?   How does it work?  Your car says “fuel injection” on it.  What’s that?   The lights you go past on your city street are yellowish-orange in hue.  Why’s that?   You ride on a subway with signs that say “750VDC WARNING!”  What’s that mean? How does your subway get electricity to run?

My philosophy is that you can either pass these signs & just blank out on them, and choose to not understand your world – and live in the partial fog that goes along with that, or you can actually understand the things around you.  Understanding breeds control and responsibility for your environment.

How this applies to my Parenting Philosophy

I want my children to have total control & understanding of the world around them.  I do NOT want them operating in a fog where life sort of happens around them somehow, and they’re not active, understanding participants of it.

As such, I am not shying away from bringing my daughter to a construction site to have her look at excavators & bulldozers.  It’s not that I’m trying to make her a tomboy who likes tractors – I want her to understand how houses & roads are built!  I want her to understand how airplanes fly, how engines work, how lightbulbs operate, how electricity is made, how subways run, and how food is grown.   When she’s a grown-up, and someone says that their computer is busted, I don’t want her to look at it with a foggy stare and be scared to touch it – I ‘d want her to be able to flip it over and replace the broken parts if need be.

I want my kids to end up as competent, responsible adults who can control the environment they’re in.   And that starts with understanding it.

So, while some parents might roll their eyes and tell them to get back to their video games when their kids start asking too many questions, I instead relish another opportunity to help them explore their world.  And hopefully, with each question resolved, that can be one less misunderstood word they’ve got in their environment.

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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.

 

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From Scientology Parent–Dealing With Toddler Injuries

September 7, 2011 By treeves 1 Comment

Fortunately or unfortunately, my daughter is following in her father’s footsteps and is becoming an avid jumper.   On some jumps, she sticks the landing – like in the image above from the Children’s Museum of Manhattan.  On some other jumps…not so much.

The other night, My daughter was demanding I take pictures with “Daddy’s Camera” of her taking flying leaps off the couch.  So, I set up to do so, and she takes a few bounces and leaps off the couch and full-on belly flops on the floor, hard.

Now, generally, what I’ve found most useful in this case is the simple “Tell Me About It” assist, which you can read about in full here.  These have worked great with Mackenzie – I’ll ask her “What happened”, she tells me what happened, or if she can’t articulate it in words, she’ll show me with one of her dolls, brighten up, and then go back to playing.

But this time, after crying for a sec, she gets up, comes running to me and lets loose this flurry of a sentence saying,

“Daddy!  I was doing the BIG JUMP and I WENT DOWN and BONKED and I was WHAT’S HAPPENING?!!!!”

I could only laugh, and she thought it was AWESOME and then ran back to do more jumping.

Made me think of the final paragraph of that Scientology Handbook article:

There is nothing difficult about it. After a child has had a few assists this way, he will, upon being injured, run to the person who can administer this painless help and reassurance, demanding to “tell about it.” – LRH

image

Somehow I don’t think this was the last time we’ll be doing that assist after a “big jump”.  :)

I would definitely recommend anyone who spends any time around children to take the free Children course available on the Volunteer Ministers website.  It’s fast, effective know-how that anyone can use to improve the whole activity of raising & looking after children.

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.

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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.

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