Sharing

I have decided not having links from your blog is somewhat churlish. So I will add a few. Slowly.

I was thinking today about the relationship between children and adults. It seems like we adults are instinctively hardwired to display disapproval and even anger when confronted by children behaving inappropriately. The range of negative display depends on the degree of inappropriateness of the behaviour.

With most children, the response to this adult display is fear, or at least the understanding that they should stop or something unpleasant will happen. Or they experience the desire to please the adult by stopping what they are doing.

Some children though, respond by becoming defiant or hysterical. Some completely shut down. Is it a flight or fight response? Is it anger at being thwarted as they cut their monomaniacal swath through life? Is it total confusion about what to do next?

Whatever the reason, not all children can read the message adults send with the threatening tone, the disapproving voice, the softly or loudly spoken reprimand. Or the message goes in all right, but the processing is not what is normally expected.

If you are an adult in the life of a child like this, a child with a processing glitch, you spend a lot of time and energy suppressing your primal need to scream and trying to focus on the content of what is happening. The medium is not the message. It is like trying to learn a new language while teaching a different one while on a boat on fire in the middle of the ocean.

It is interesting and excruciating and sometimes satisfying.

Comments

[Jo]

That's a really insightful way to look at it and seems spot on to me.