16. Some Essential Blueprint Ingredients

      Every child born into this world comes into a different con- text and a different atmosphere from every other child, even when born to the same parents. Atmospheric influences refer to what is happening when the child is born and to the attitudes prevalent as she or he grows up. These influences are highly significant in the family blueprint.

      The actual experience of conception, pregnancy, and birth often leaves shadows that get into the atmosphere surrounding a particular child. If conception came at the wrong time or under undesirable circumstances, the parents might feel angry, helpless, or frustrated about it. These feelings could get in the way of using the family blueprint.

      The baby may become a symbol of a burden. Also, if the experience of pregnancy were accompanied with an extended period of sickness and continuing discomfort, and serious complications developed for either the mother or the child or both at birth, similar inhibiting effects might follow. As parents, you might develop unnecessary fears, which keep you from reacting normally to your baby, who might thus become a symbol of hurt or pity.

      Some babies are born prematurely; some are born with physical parts missing or unusable, and some are born with internal and intellectual handicaps. When this happens, people can relate to the baby in terms of what is missing or unusable, out of proportion to the rest of the child. Again, the blueprint is affected. Often the child is treated not as a person but as some kind of cripple, which, of course, affects how he or she reacts and is reacted to.

      Substantial numbers of children are also born to mothers when the fathers are away for long periods of time after the birth. These men may be in the service, prison, distant business ventures. or hospitals. This creates a difference for the infant from the beginning and lays a groundwork for skewing family relationships. When the father returns, he sometimes has a hard time finding as significant a place with his child as his wife has. Meeting your child at the age of two, you can hardly expect to be on a par with the adult who was there two years ahead of you.

      If either spouse has died, deserted, or divorced at the time of the birth of a child, this can often result in an exaggerated relationship between the remaining parent and child, which eventually could hurt both of them. Dire consequences aren’t automatic, but one needs to be actively alert and creative to avoid them.

       Other unpleasant circumstances ca11 affect how the infant gets started in the world, such as death, illness, unemployment, or serious trouble for some member of the family. The pressing nature of these kinds of problems frequently requires that parental attention gets focused elsewhere, and not on the newborn child who needs the attention. This can make for neglect and indifference——something the parents never really intended.

      For example, I know a woman who already had two children, aged twenty-one months and ten months respectively, when a third child came along. She asked herself, “Where will I get enough arms and legs to take care of this one when I already have two babies?” A woman in tight financial circumstances was saying, “How am I going to feed this new child? I already have eight!” Or, “Good heavens, another girl, and we have three girls already!” Or, “Good heavens, another boy, and we already have five!” Perhaps a family hasn’t had a child for fifteen years, and then along comes another one.

      Each child comes into the parents’ lives when many other things are going on. Adults are not always able to control the timing of a child’s birth, and it may or may not be the best month or year for the parents. I have never taken the statistics, but I don’t believe too many of us arrived at the best possible time. This doesn’t make us rejected children, even though many of us could make a case for being “unwanted” if we so chose. The most important thing is that we got here.

      Another possible atmospheric influence is trouble in the marital relationship when the baby comes. Marriage may not have turned out to be the satisfying experience hoped for by the marital partners. Very often this leads to the parents having difficulty being sensible and realistic with the child. I think marital harmony is directly related to successful peoplemaking. If the personal situation of one or both parents is not particularly happy, that person’s self-worth will probably be low, and applying the blueprint enthusiastically and appropriately will be hard.

      Bringing a first child into a family is a very big step. Existing circumstances change drastically for the couple. That first child is the means by which adults first find out what parenting is all about. The first child is always a testing ground and receives different treatment from any succeeding children. In many ways the first child forms the context for the children to follow. The first baby is truly a guinea pig, and I don’t see how it could be otherwise.

      I have described important factors that can affect how the family blueprint will be carried out. Briefly summarized, these atmospheric influences are: the actual experience of conception, pregnancy, and birth; individual circumstances in the family; the condition of the infant; and the relationship of the marital pair. Additional factors include the family’s relationship to the grandparents, and the adults’ level of knowledge, their ways of communicating, and their philosophy.

      Within any atmosphere and blueprint, certain learnings are essential for every human being between birth and adulthood. They fall into four main categories which, when translated into family life, come out in the following questions:

What do I teach my child about herself or himself?
What do I teach about others?
What do I teach about the world?
And what do I teach about life and its source, about God?

      The teaching process includes the following: a clear idea of what is to be taught, each parent’s awareness of what she or he is modeling, a knowledge of how to interest the other parent in agreeing on a model, and the communication to make it work.

      In the ideal family, adults show their own uniqueness; demonstrate their power; show their sexuality; demonstrate their ability to share through understanding, kindness, and affection; use their common sense; show their spiritual nature; and are realistic and responsible.

       Have we said it’s no disgrace to be an imperfect parent? There are no perfect parents! What’s important is that you keep moving in the direction of good parenting. If you remain honest about where you are, your children’s trust in you will increase. They care about truth, not perfection, and it is an impossible job for a human to play God. Yet many parents saddle themselves with this terrible responsibility.

      I have never known any perfect families, any perfect children, or for that matter, any perfect people. Nor do I ever expect to meet any. The key words are unique, loving, powerful, sexual, sharing, sensible, spiritual, realistic, and responsible. Can you describe yourself in these terms? Are you trying to teach your children to be what you are not? If you are, this realization may hurt; but if you use it as a signal, you may make a start on changing things in your family.

      Once someone achieves the essential learnings, a whole‘ set of other things will follow: honesty, sincerity, creativity, love, interest, zest, competence, and constructive problem-solving. As human beings, we prize all of these. With them, we can also more easily teach the necessary information that all children need.

      Once you as an adult grasp the notion that a human being is a person at any age——at birth, two weeks, fifteen years, thirty-five years, or eighty years——your job as a peoplemaker will be easier. You have more in common with your children than you thought. For example, disappointment is the same at any age, whether you are a grown man who loses a desired job or a four-year-old who loses a favorite toy. The effects of loss will have a greater impact on a child who is the brunt of a tirade from an angry mother; the nature of that emotion, though, is no different from the woman’s feeling when she has been the brunt of a tirade from her angry husband. or vice versa.

      A child feels very few things that the adult does not know something about from personal experience. Children seem to thrive on the knowledge that their world of hope, fear, mistakes, imperfection, and successes is a world also familiar to and shared by their parents. What adult is without occasional, if not frequent, feelings of hopelessness, fear, disappointment, poor judgment, and mistakes?

      Yet many parents believe that they undermine their authority if they express these feelings. If you act on this, though, you come out looking phony to your children. If you do have this attitude, I hope you will experiment with changing it. Children have much more trust in humanness than they do in sainthood and perfection.

      If you want to check this out, ask your children what they know about your feelings and hopes and disappointments. Ask them how they feel about talking to you about mistakes when you make them. And perhaps you could do it the other way around: tell your children your feelings about hopes and disappointments and mistakes that they make. Much can be cleared up in this way, with the result that new bonds form.

      Once a child develops a feeling of distrust for parents, the feeling extends into personal isolation and general feelings of unsureness, personal imbalance, and rebellion. When adults do not acknowledge and express their own humanness and do not acknowledge the child’s humanness, it is very scary to the child.

      Now, to get back to the essential learnings, I think it isn’t necessary to explain what I mean by sensible, sharing, and realistic. I use these words in the same way you do. But when it comes to uniqueness, power, and sexuality, I want to go into considerably more detail, not only because my use of the words may be different from yours, but also because understanding of these concepts is of primary importance in the family blueprint. Spirituality is discussed at length in chapter 22.

      I believe that uniqueness is the key word to self-worth. As I discussed in the chapter on couples, we get together on the basis of our similarities, and we grow on the basis of our differences. We need both. It is this combination of same- ness and differentness in a human being that I call uniqueness.

      Very early you and your child are going to discover that she or he is different in some ways from you and other human beings, and vice versa. A frequently found example comes to mind. I know two boys in a family; one is fourteen, the other fifteen. The fifteen-year-old is interested in athletics and prefers to spend his time on that. The fourteen-year-old is more interested in the artistic side of life and prefers to devote his time to those interests. These boys have the same coloring and the same intelligence, but they have different interests. This is a very basic example of the kinds of differentness I am talking about. Fortunately for these boys, they have parents who respect their differences and help each boy evolve in his own way.

      Genetically, each child is different even if he or she comes from the same parents. The equipment each child brings into the world, just from a genetic point of view, differs from every other chi1d’s. Each child, then, presents an opportunity to parents for unique adventure as he or she unfolds and develops.

       By the same token, each husband and wife is different from one another. And they certainly don’t stop unfolding just because they get married and have children. Helping a child to appreciate the differences between the two parents becomes an important part of learning. If parents try to present a facade of sameness, they bypass this very important opportunity. Mama likes to sleep late in the morning, and Papa likes to get up early, and that’s okay. People don’t have to be alike. Some differences make life a little more complicated, but most differences can be used constructively.

      If infants don’t have the opportunity to be treated as unique from the beginning of their lives, they develop habits that make it difficult to react to them as whole people. They will tend to react more as stereotypes of people——to stifle their differences for the sake of conformity——and can expect to be plagued with a variety of physical, emotional, social, and intellectual ills. They will be handicapped until they learn new ways of becoming whole people.

      So how are you going to teach your child about the differentness that is his or hers? How are you going to teach children to distinguish between negative and positive differences? How are you going to teach them to judge which differences in others they should support and which ones they should influence for change? How can you teach them that they don’t have to destroy people who are different, nor worship those associated with sameness? We all have these tendencies, you know.

      Strangeness and differentness can be scary, but they contain the seeds for growth. Every time I come upon a new situation or a strange one (which is another way of describing differences), I have an opportunity to learn something I didn’t know before. I don’t expect all of it to be pleasant, but I can’t help but learn something.

      I’ve said this before, and it’s important. Differentness can’t be handled successfully unless sameness is appreciated. The samenesses of people are few in number but are basic and fundamental, predictable and always present, although not always obvious. Each human being experiences feeling all through life, from birth until death. Each can feel anger, sorrow, joy, humiliation, shame, fear, helplessness, hopelessness, and love. This is the basis on which we have a ready-made connection to all other human beings at any point in our lives or theirs.

      Children feel.
      Adults feel.

      Men feel.
      Women feel.
      Black, brown, white, yellow, and red people feel.
      Rich feel.
      Poor feel.
      Jews, Buddhists, Protestants, Moslems, Catholics, and Hindus feel.
      People in power positions feel.
      People in nonpower positions feel.

       Every human being feels. It may not always show, but it’s there. And the faith that it is there can make you act differently from the way you would if you reacted only to what shows. Being absolutely convinced that everyone feels makes parents and therapists effective.

      Developing your sense of uniqueness, then, is basic to developing high self-worth. without a sense of our own uniqueness, we are slaves, robots, computers, and despots——not human beings.

      Now I think we’re ready to talk about power. Power is essential to every human being. To be an effective person, everyone needs all her or his powers developed as fully as possible. Power, according to Webster, is from a word that means “to be able.” It is defined as the ability to act, the ability to produce an effect, physical might, or the possession of control, authority, or influence over others.

      Body power is the first power humans develop. Almost

everyone greets evidence of the infant’s lung power at birth with relief. The baby is alive. Later, physical coordination as shown in turning, sitting, walking, holding things; and toilet training is also greeted with joy. The child is growing as expected. Simply speaking, he or she is learning to manage body muscles, the end point of which is that one’s body responds well to one’s demands. Over the years I have noticed that parents have endless patience teaching their child body power and become joyful at the manifestations of every new successful effort.

      I think this is also a suitable way to teach the other areas of power I think this is also a suitable way to teach the other areas of power——to use patience and to respond to the expression of the child’s newfound power with joy and approval. Other personal powers to be developed are emotional, social, intellectual, material, and spiritual.

      A person shows intellectual power (thinking) in learning, concentration, problem-solving, and innovating. This is more difficult to teach, but can be met with the same kind of joy a parent expresses when the child, say, takes a first step. The parent can beam, “I’ve got a smart kid!”

      A person’s emotional power is shown in freedom to feel all emotions openly, clearly express them, and channel them into constructive action. This is oftentimes the scariest power to teach, so be sure to give yourself recognition and approval for trying.

      A child’s material power is demonstrated by the way she or he makes use of the environment for personal needs, while at the same time considering the needs of others. Unfortunately, this is all too often limited to the ability to work. You may want to think of other opportunities——playtime, naptime, or even picking flowers——for showing your child about material power.

      An individual shows social power by the way he or she connects with other people, shares with them, and teams up with them for achieving joint goals, as well as how he or she can both lead and follow. This is an area rich in opportunities for parents to express joy in and approval of their children.

      Spiritual power can be seen in a person’s reverence for life——one’s own and all others, including animals and nature, with a recognition of a universal life force referred to by many as God. Many people limit this part of their lives to an hour or so on Sunday. I think most of us know that all human beings have a spiritual side, a side involved with their souls. Right now we’re having some pretty hard times with relationships among people of different races, economic groups, and generations. A great deal of this would be solved if we developed our spiritual power and were willing to put it into practice to a greater degree.

      To meet life freely and openly, I think we need to develop our power in all of these areas.

      I ’m going to make adjectives out of the words Webster used to define power: able, active, effective, mighty, influential, controlling, and authoritative. These are the main faces of power. Few people would object to the first five adjectives, but the last two might bring up confused and/ or negative messages. These are the words more related to negative use of power. Violence is even more extreme; it is the destructive use of power.

      Control, responsibility, and decision-making are related to power. The questions arise over and over again of how much control I have over myself, over you, or over the situation I am in, and how I use this control. If I want to understand how action takes place between two people at a given point in time, there are three places I can look.

      The first place is the self-worth level of each person (how I am feeling about myself at this moment in time). The second place is each individual’s response to the other person (how I am looking and sounding, and what I am saying), and the third is each person’s knowledge of the resources available at a given time (where I am, what time and what place this is, what situation I am in, who is here, what I want to happen, and what possibilities exist in this reality).

Together, we come up with the following:

The self-esteem of person A and of person B
The response of A to B and the response of B to A
A’s picture of what possibilities exist
B’s picture of what possibilities exist

      It’s a good idea to separate those things over which you have control and those over which you have only influence. I have control over my choice of whether to act or not act and the course of action I take. For this, I am responsible to myself. I can’t be responsible for what is presented to me, only for my response to it. I cannot hold myself responsible for the rain that falls as I am walking; I am responsible only for how I respond to it.

      I cannot hold myself responsible for your tears. I can only be responsible for how I respond to them. The kind of response I make will influence your experience of crying but won’t decide it. You have to do that. It may be that I exerted a powerful influence, to which you felt you had to respond by crying. Each of us, I think, bears the responsibility of being aware of what we give out to other persons. If I am twenty-eight and am your mother, and you are three, my responses to you will undoubtedly have a stronger influence with you than if you were also twenty-eight and a fellow employee. Some situations and some responses have a greater influence than others, and it is up to me to know about that, too. That means that I have an ethical and moral responsibility to treat you humanly.

      I think there is a lot of murkiness about what responsibility is and how it can be exercised. I would like to tell you where I am in my practice of being responsible. First, I clearly own what comes out of me: my words, thoughts, body movement, and my deeds. I might have been influenced by you, but I accept that I made the decisions to act on that influence, so that part is my show completely.

      Whatever comes out of you is your show and represents your decision to use whatever influence you used. I become responsible when I fully acknowledge this. I can use you to influence me, but only I can decide to act on that influence. The three exceptions to this are when a person is an infant, is unconscious, or is seriously physically ill. In addition, I only feel free to monitor your influence if I have a sense of high self-esteem.

      If we do not know that we make the choices about how to use what influences us, then it is easy to feel insecure and to create relationships with others that are blaming and dissatisfying, leaving us helpless and even more insecure.

      I want to point out here that an objective piece of reality doesn’t necessarily change because of our choices. Let’s take the objective reality of blindness. If your eyes don’t see, they don’t see——period. As long as you are busy blaming the world for your blindness, you will be spending your energies in hating the World and pitying yourself, and consequently shriveling as a human being. Of course, as long as you’re doing this, you’re not taking responsibility for acknowledging what is. The moment you do that, you can use your energies for creating and growing yourself.

      Here is the same theme in a different example.

      A husband shouts at his wife at 5:30 P.M., “You damned fool!” Whether he should have or wanted to or even whether he knew what he was saying is irrelevant to the fact that this is something the wife has to deal with at that point in time. She has choices, whether or not she knows it, about how she responds. It may not be any more pleasant than blindness, but she does have choices. You may remember the possibilities open to her from the chapter on communication.

“I’m sorry; you’re right.” (placating)
“Don’t call me names, you idiot!” (blaming him back)
“I guess in marriage one has to expect times like this.” (computing)
“Dr. Smith called and wants you to call him right back.” (distracting)

      “You sound all worn out,” or, “I felt hurt when you said that”——either of which would be leveling. In the first instance, she’d be responding to his pain; in the second, responding to her own.

      Each of these responses can influence her husband’s response. Because they are different, there are apt to be different consequences; but again, how she responds doesn’t necessarily determine how he responds.

      In families, it is unfortunately true that control and authority are often assumed to be the primary province of the parent: “I [the parent] control you [my child].” In this way the child doesn’t develop an appreciation for positive uses of power and could run into some sticky problems in adult life. There are two ways to use authority that seem to make a difference here. Does the parent speak as an empowering leader or as an autocratic one? If he or she speaks as an empowering leader, chances are that control can be used as a learning as well as an implementing tool. This can also serve as a model for learning about power.

      Bossing a child, on the other hand, doesn’t teach much about developing personal power constructively. The main result of bossing is that the child’s self-esteem decreases, and

another example of the generation gap is well into the making.

      What really scares parents, though, is the child’s development of emotional power——the basic emotions of loneliness, hurt, love, joy, anger, fear, frustration, humiliation, and shame.

“Don’t be angry.”
“How can you love her? She’s [Catholic, Jewish, black, or white].”
“Big boys are not afraid.”
“Only babies complain.”
“If you did what you were told, you wouldn’t be lonely.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve.”
“Keep a stiff upper lip.”

These typical comments suggest the kind of teaching that goes on in families with regard to emotion. Our emotions are our experience of feeling human. Our emotions carry the energy of life. To be helpful to us, they need to be appreciated, acknowledged, and have appropriate ways of expression. There can be no valid argument about how one feels. One feels what one feels. The crucial mistake is to use feeling as a primary basis for behavior (“I am angry at you, so I hit you”).

      Unfortunately, few parents have developed their own emotional power enough so they can tolerate it, much less develop it, in their children. In fact, emotional power is apparently so scary that it is often actively squelched. Much of this fear is based on ignorance.

      My own feeling is that if adults knew how to use their own emotional power constructively, they would become more willing to plan ways to develop it for their children. What you have read so far, I hope, has shed some light on this subject for you.

      This brings us to the essential learning about sexuality. The family teaches maleness and femaleness——sex in its broadest sense and in its more narrow genital sense. Babies can be clearly divided into two sexes at birth, but this says nothing about how each will grow up feeling about his or her sex, or whether each will find out how to live with what she or he has in common with the other sex. Men and women are different, but how different and different how? A great deal depends on what answers a parent gives to the child when asked these questions. Part of the child’s learning comes from experiencing the parent as the parent answers these questions. How each parent tries to help each child establish sexual identity is a basic part of the blueprint.

      Each parent represents one sex, and the child has a sexual model of what he or she can become. Did you know it takes a male and female both to develop the sexual identification of any individual child? Each person contains aspects of both sexes. Every man has some female potentials; every woman, some male potentials. I am convinced that the only real differences between men and women are physical and sexual. All other supposed differences are imposed by the culture and vary from culture to culture.

      No woman can say how it feels to be a man, and no man can say how it feels to be a woman. This is immediately obvious when you realize that no woman knows what it’s like to have and use a penis, or to have hair growing all over her face. Likewise, no man feels how it feels to menstruate, to be pregnant, or to give birth. In the course of life, most people make a union with the other sex, so this is important information to share. Each needs to teach the other what it is like to be that sex. The father teaches the little boy what it means to be a male, how a male views and interacts with a female; likewise with the mother and her little girl. Out of this teaching the child develops a picture of what a male is, and of what a female is, and how the two of them relate to one another. Clearly, confusion can set in if the parents don’t understand this, don’t value themselves as sexual people, or do not see each sex as having different but equal value.

      If a child’s father and mother do not have healthy ways of handling their differentness (including their bodies), the child gets an unclear idea of how to appreciate himself as a male, or herself as a female, and how to enjoy and appreciate the other gender. To make wholeness possible, the child needs to learn from adults of each gender. This takes greater effort in families with a single parent or same-sex parents. The point is that we owe our children a model of life in which they can experience their wholeness.

      What is so sad is that many parents haven’t achieved this for themselves. So how could they teach it to their children? The good news is that we can learn at any age. As we talked about in the chapter on rules, for many years sexual organs were considered dirty and shameful, which made an additional handicap to dealing openly with the whole male-female question. You can’t really talk freely about maleness and femaleness without including talk about the genitals. Today, this information is readily available in books and magazines.

      As a sexual being, the growing child learns much in the home by seeing the way the parents treat each other and how openly and frankly they can deal with male and female sexual matters. If you, as a woman, do not appreciate and find joy and pleasure in your husband and his body, how can you teach your daughter an appreciation of men? The same is true for the father. Somehow this veil of secrecy has to be lifted from the whole sexual subject so that adults who emerge from families are more fully whole.

      Another learning that must take place is how males and females fit together, how they bring their separate selves to make a kind of new union——sexual, social, intellectual, and emotional. In the past it was very easy to pit males and females against one another——the old “battle of the sexes.” This is unnecessary and uncomfortable. Many families train females to be subservient to males. The woman is told she has been put on this earth to serve the male. Still other families teach that males must always be the servants of the females: they must protect them, take care of them, think and feel for them, and never cause them any pain. Some children are taught that males and females are alike in every respect and deny the fact of difference. Still others are taught that they are sexually different but do have things in common and they can join together.

      To use a rather homely comparison, when a plumber joins two pipes together, one part has to be smaller than the other. No plumber ever wasted time wondering whether one part is better than the other. He needs both to make a smooth fitting. So it is with males and females. Can there be

a flowing between the two as a result of their contact, without worrying about who is on top?

      In the sexual stereotypes that determine much of the male-female teaching in families, the female is supposed to be soft, yielding, and tender, not tough and aggressive. The male is supposed to be tough and aggressive, not yielding and tender. I believe tenderness and toughness are qualities everyone needs. How can a male relate to a woman’s tenderness if he hasn’t developed it himself? How can a female relate to a man’s toughness if she's had no experience with it in her existence? With these stereotypes as models, you can see how easy it is for men to regard women as weak, and for women to look at men as if they were cruel and beastly. How can anyone ever get together with anyone else on this basis?

      Men live shorter lives than women, statistically, which I think is largely attributable to the fact that men strangle their soft feelings. Our soft feelings are the juice of our beings, but a man is not ever supposed to cry or be hurt. To accommodate this, he has to become insensitive. If he also has rules against being angry, he can’t vent his aggressive feelings either, even in appropriate ways. These bottled-up feelings then go underground and play havoc on his body, and he ultimately gets high blood pressure and heart attacks. I have personally witnessed dramatic changes in those men who were able to get in touch with soft feelings. Almost all of them said they had been afraid of their violence; but having learned to honor their soft feelings, their aggressive feelings went into building energy instead of destruction.

      Similarly, if women feel they can demonstrate soft feelings only, they feel in constant danger of being trampled. So they get men as protectors, paying for this by being in an emotional straitjacket. To keep any sense of security and feeling of safety, they turn into schemers.

      When human beings are estranged from their soft feelings, they become dangerous robots. If they are estranged from their tough feelings, they become parasites or victims. The family is the place where all this is learned.

      We’ve been talking a lot about teaching, but it is obviously not possible to teach a child what to do in every situation. We have to teach approaches and perspectives. Therefore the parent has to teach ways of approaching things: which way do you use what in this instance? Which way in that case? In other words, parents teach judgment when they use an empowering style of leadership.

      I have a couple of stories that highlight this point. Epaminondos was a little boy of five who lived in a village far away. One day his mother needed some butter. She decided to send Epaminondos to the store for it. He was very glad to do something for his mother because he loved her very much and he knew she loved him. His mother’s parting words were, “Mind how you bring the butter back.”

      Epaminondos skipped happily to the store, singing a tune as he went. After he bought the butter, he remembered his mother’s words. He wanted to be very careful. He had never carried butter home before. He thought and thought and finally decided to put it on his head under his hat. The sun was very warm. By the time he got home, the butter had melted and was running down his face. His mother exclaimed disapprovingly, “Epaminondos, you haven’t the sense you were born with! You should have carefully cooled the butter in the running brook, put it in a sack, and run home with it.” Epaminondos felt very sad. He had disappointed his mother.

      The next day she sent him to the store for a little puppy. Epaminondos was very happy. He knew just what to do. Very carefully and thoroughly he cooled the puppy in the brook, and when it was cold and stiff, put it in a bag. His mother was horrified. In a much sharper way she said, “You don’t have the sense you were born with. You should have tied a string around his neck and led him home.” He loved his mother very much and she loved him, but this terrible thing was happening. Now he knew exactly what to do.

      The next day his mother decided to give him another chance. This time she sent him for a loaf of bread. Epaminondos gleefully tied a string around the loaf of bread and dragged it home through the dust. His mother just looked sternly at him and said nothing.

      The next day she decided to go to the store herself. She had just baked a cherry pie. Before she left she said, “Mind how you step around that cherry pie.” Epaminondos was very, very careful. He placed his foot right smack in the middle of that pie!

      This folktale exemplifies the sad dilemma that frequently occurs between parents and children. Judgment is the decision of what to do when; no recipe covers all situations.

      I am reminded of a near-tragic incident involving young parents, Bill and Harriet, and their four-year-old daughter, Alyce. Harriet was alternately rageful and frightened as she told me how Alyce had viciously attacked Ted, a mutual college friend of the parents who had come to visit. She had already whipped Alyce severely, mostly out of her embarrassment. Although Alyce had never behaved in this manner before, it was so dramatically different that Harriet wondered if the attack represented criminal tendencies or even psychosis. She remembered that her great-uncle had been some kind of a criminal.

      Exploring the relevant facts, this picture emerged. In anticipation of Ted’s visit, the parents had sent him a recent picture of Alyce but had neglected to introduce Alyce to Ted via a picture. When Ted arrived, Alyce was playing on the lawn. He knew her, but she didn’t know him. He approached her in a rather boisterous fashion and tried to pick her up, to which Alyce responded by kicking and screaming and biting. Harriet and Bill were much embarrassed by this behavior, and Ted was angry and hurt.

      When I pointed out that Ted knew Alyce, but Alyce did not know Ted, some light began to dawn. The final illumination came when I asked what Harriet and Bill had taught Alyce about responding to strange men. Some child-molesting had occurred in the neighborhood, and Harriet and Bill had made a big point of teaching Alyce that if a strange man tried to touch her, she should fight with all her might. Bill had even had her practice with him.

      Bill got about halfway through telling me this part, stopped, and recoiled from his own words with shame and a terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. Alyce had done

exactly what she had been asked to do. I shiver very much at the thought of how many more times this kind of thing happens and is never corrected. To Harriet and Bill, Ted was a friend; to Alyce, he was the strange man who was trying to touch her.

      Now I would like to turn to a part of the blueprint that is an essential part of life but is rarely talked about: death. Some teachings about death are absolutely ridiculous: use this medicine or that perfume, think this way and not that way, and maybe you can cheat death. Impossible!

      I know it is a hard subject for most of us to even talk about, let alone talk about frankly and openly. Yet living is meaningless unless we see dying as a natural, inevitable, and essential part of life. Death is not a disease or something that happens only to bad people. It happens to all of us.

      I think a good goal would be to make it possible to prevent premature death. This is possible through better medical care, safety, better environmental conditions, better relationships among people, and a higher sense of self-worth. I happen to believe that life is extremely precious, and I would like to be productively alive as long as I can. I would like to help make this possible for other human beings as well, and I think the family is a good place to start.

      What do your rules say about death? If you have valued a person who then dies, you suffer a loss and you grieve. Grieving is an important love act to perform for ourselves. Do you have rules about how to grieve, or how long to grieve?

      Do you realize how much secrecy surrounds death? I know of adults who try to hide the evidence of death from their children. They prevent them from going to the funerals of their relatives. Then they compound the problem by dismissing the death with a statement like, “Grandma went to heaven,” and never speaking of it again. I realize many adults think they are doing their children a favor by “protecting” them in this way, but I think they’re doing them real harm.

      Children who do not see evidence of the death of a loved one, and are not helped to grieve over the death and integrate it into their lives, can develop serious blocks in their emotional lives. I could fill this whole book with stories of adults who never really integrated their parents’ deaths into their lives, particularly if the parents died when they were children. These people suffered severe psychological trauma.

      Another distortion happens when the adults who survive elevate the departed one to some kind of saintly status. This completely skews the child’s view of the one who died as a person.

      I know of one youngster, Jim, who was ten when his father died. Every time Jim mentioned some negative experience with his dad, his mother sternly reprimanded him for speaking ill of the dead. Eventually this led to Jim’s closing off all memories of his father. Then he developed a saintly picture of his father, whom he could neither relate to nor use as a model. Jim developed some serious problems coping with his life.

      I know another situation in which whenever the child did anything wrong or questionable, her mother would tell her to be careful because her father was looking down from heaven and would punish her. Since the child believed this, she soon developed some paranoid ideas. Can you imagine what a helpless feeling it is to believe you have no privacy anywhere, that you are always watched?

      At one time I was a staff member in a residential treatment center for girls. I was struck by how many of the children who had dead parents and had not participated actively in their deaths were troubled with serious self-esteem problems. Equally striking, this began to change when I showed these girls some evidence of their parents’s deaths. I found obituary notices, went sleuthing for people who had been present at the funeral, or took the girls to cemeteries where their parents were buried. Then, with their help, I reconstructed their parents as people. Many times we role-played scenes from life before death, and the death itself.

      Death is an inevitable part of life for all of us. I think the acceptance of death makes life a real and rewarding experience.

      I have a hunch that until we accept mortality, we mistake a lot of other things for death and we mess up our lives. For instance, some people have so much fear of criticism that they avoid it at all costs. I don’t think that criticism is pleasant, but it is necessary and often useful. To treat it as a death matter mixes it up. Did you ever know anyone who never tried anything for fear of getting criticized? The fear of making mistakes, or of being wrong——any fear, for that matter——can get tied up with death. I have heard it said that many people fear so much that they die a little every day. The rest of the time, they are trying to avoid dying, so they really die before they have ever had a chance to live.

      Death is death. It happens only once in a lifetime. No other thing in life is like it. When you make this distinction, then everything except the act of death is life. To treat it any other way is a travesty on life.

      The question of safety is related quite directly to death fears in the family. How are you going to teach a child how to be safe and at the same time allow the risks essential for expansion and growth? You don’t want your child to die, so you teach caution.

      Of course, nothing is 100 percent safe. I’ve met so many parents who, because of their fears, practically kept their kids chained to the front porch. I can understand wanting to protect the young. Yet we lived through it and are still around, so we should relax a little bit and give our kids the same opportunity to struggle with life’s dangers as we had. I don’t propose that we send three-year-olds across town alone, but that we look at what our children want to do, being real about the dangers rather than maximizing or minimizing them.

      I know a twelve-year-old boy, Ralph, whose parents wouldn’t let him ride his bike for three miles because he might get killed. Ralph was a good, careful bike rider and the bike was his only means of transportation. He felt his parents were unfair. So, by skillful lying, he worked out a deal with his friends so he could ride anyway. His wish to ride reflected his need to develop independence and self-reliance. Yet he had to do it at the expense of honesty and of being punished if he were caught.

      I would like to see a parent ask each child at the close of the day, “What danger did you meet today? How did you meet it?” It would be an added bonus if the parent were able to share the same information.

      Many times I quaked in my boots when my daughters were teenagers and I watched them meet dangers. When is our desire to protect them real, and when is it just a sneaky way to calm ourselves? judging when a child is ready to take on new dangers is not easy but, as parents, we have to do it.

      I remember when my second daughter took out the family car for the first time alone. She was only sixteen, just a baby, really, and my goodness, how was she going to manage in that heavy traffic? There were drunk drivers out there. She could be killed. Besides, we had only one car, and what if she wrecked it? What if I wasn’t there to guide her? By the time I got through with my fantasy, the car was totaled and she was already stretched out in the morgue——in my mind. Actually, she had not yet gone out the door.

      In another part of my reasoning, I knew she had had good driver training. I had ridden with her, and she drove well. We had insurance, and I trusted her. None of these realizations kept me from sweating as I watched her go out the door. I wasn’t going to bug her with my fears, so I managed to say, weakly, “How do you feel about going off by yourself?”

      She smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Mother. I will be all right.”

      And, of course, she was. Later we had a chance to compare our “insides.” She told me she knew I was worried, and that she was too. She said she was glad I hadn’t burdened her with my fears, as they would have made her own worse.

      Now, I want to end this chapter on something I touched on in the couples chapter, namely, dreams. Dreams and What we do about them——encouraging and keeping personal dreams alive——are essential elements of our blueprint, too. Dreams about what one will become are a big part of the lives of children. Our dreams stand as beacons beckoning us on to greater growth and accomplishments.

      Your dreams are your hopes for yourself. When dreams are gone, “vegetablitis” sets in, with accompanying attitudes of indifference and resignation. You run the risk of becoming a robot and becoming old early. Sad but true, the family is often the place where dreams die. We learned this when discussing the couple: too often, individual hopes that flourished during courtship fall flat in the family.

      Family members can give each other a great deal of inspiration and support for keeping their dreams alive. “Tell me your dream, and I’ll tell you mine. Maybe then we can help each other achieve what we both want.” I recommend that families sit down and talk openly about their dreams. This can be very important for children. How much better it is to say, “How can we all work together to make your dream come true?” than to say something like “Let me tell you why that isn’t practical.” Believe me, some exciting things can happen.

      Don’t take my word for it. Sit down with your family and openly discuss your dreams and their dreams. Find out about some of this excitement yourselves, first hand.

      I remember a family who tried this. One of the parents asked one of the children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Tom, a four-year-old, said he wanted to be a fireman. After several interested questions, it turned out that Tom liked to put out fires; he also liked to light them. He enjoyed the bright, shiny red fire trucks and liked the looks of the sturdy men who rode on them.

      The family decided Tommy didn’t have to wait until he was grown up to become a fireman. He was given special instructions in laying and lighting fires in the fireplace. His dad took him to the fire station, where he had a chance to talk “man-to-man” with the firemen. They showed him different ways to put out fires. He had a chance to inspect the fire truck. Everyone in the family got something out of helping Tom with his dream. And his father, who also had his own dream, invited Tom to help him set up a chemistry lab at home. Could you do a similar thing?

      What can you do to keep alive a spirit of curiosity and imagination, to stimulate a search for making new meaning, to find new uses for things already known, and to probe into the unknown for things not yet known? This is what makes for zest in life. The world is filled with much to wonder about, to be awestruck by, to explore, and to be challenged by.

      Dreams occur in the present. Chances are pretty good that some part of almost any dream can be realized now. I recommend that people live out their current dreams as much as possible. Sometimes it takes help from other people, but they have to know about the dream first. Test out your dreams for possibilities. Realizing our little dreams helps us have faith in big dreams. The family is where it can happen.

      In my lifetime, I have gone from crystal sets to color television; from a Ford crank-it-yourself car to today’s slick, comfortable cars, which practically drive themselves; from walking three miles to a little country school to flying all over the world in a few short hours on a jet; and from cranking a telephone on the wall to call someone named Central to a pretty colored push-button phone that makes almost instantaneous connections. Not only have humans walked on the moon, many children use microcomputers in school and have a chance to make play out of this fantastic technical advancement.

      During all of this, I was continually expanding my knowledge of the world and finding new things that awed, educated, and excited me. All these developments came out of someone’s being willing to follow a dream. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet had as many dreamers who know how to bring along the world of people at the same rate. My dream is to make families a place where people with high self-esteem can develop. I think that unless we get busy on dreams of this sort, our end is in sight. We need a world that is as good for human beings as it is for technology and nuclear energy. We have good tools. All we have to do is to dream up effective ways to use them.

      I feel so sad about the number of adults that I meet in families who have turned their backs on their dreams. They are indifferent and resigned. “What difference does it make?” and “It doesn’t really matter” are frequent statements.

      I know some adults whose interest in their children’s development led them to help with their children’s dreams and thus become interested in reviving or developing their own. We, as human beings, use so little of our potential. I hope you don’t let your dreams die. If you have, see if you can rekindle past cherished dreams or invent new ones. See what you can do to realize them by sitting and talking, sharing them with your other family members, and asking for their help.