The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [79]
Conscious Mothering and Fathering
I used to close my public lectures with the admonition that we are personally responsible for everything in our lives. Such a closure did not make me popular with the audience. That responsibility was too much for many people to accept. After one lecture, an older woman in the audience was so distressed by my conclusion that she brought her husband backstage and in tears vehemently contested my conclusion. She did not want any part of some of the tragedies she had experienced. This woman convinced me that my summary conclusion had to be modified. I realized that I didn’t want to contribute to foisting blame and guilt on any individual. As a society, we are too apt to wallow in guilt or scapegoat others for our problems. As we gain insights over a lifetime, we become better equipped to take charge of our lives.
After some deliberation, this woman from the audience happily accepted the following resolution: you are personally responsible for everything in your life, once you become aware that you are personally responsible for everything in your life. One cannot be “guilty” of being a poor parent unless one is already aware of the above-described information and disregards it. Once you become aware of this information, you can begin to apply it to reprogram your behavior.
And while we’re on the subject of myths about parenting, it is absolutely not true that you are the same parent for all of your children. Your second child is not a clone of the first child. The same things are not happening in your world that happened when the first child was born. As I said above, I once thought that I was the same parent for my first child as I was for my very different second child. But when I analyzed my parenting, I found that was not true. When my first child was born, I was at the beginning of my graduate school training, which was for me, a difficult transition fraught with a high workload accompanied by high insecurity. By the time my second daughter was born, I was a more confident, more accomplished research scientist ready to start my academic career. I had more time and more psychic energy to parent my second child and to better parent my first daughter, who was now a toddler.
Another myth I’d like to address is that infants need lots of stimulation in the form of black and white flash cards or other learning tools marketed to parents to increase the intelligence of their children. Michael Mendizza and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s inspiring book Magical Parent-Magical Child makes it clear that play not programming is the key to optimizing the learning and performance of infants and children. (Mendizza and Pearce 2001) Children need parents who can playfully foster the curiosity, creativity, and wonder that accompanies their children into the world.
Obviously, what humans need is nurture in the form of love and the ability to observe older humans going about their everyday lives. When babies in orphanages, for example, are kept in cribs and only provided with food but not one-on-one smiles and hugs, they develop long-lasting developmental problems. One study of Romanian orphans by Mary Carlson, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School, concluded that the lack of touching and attention in Romanian orphanages and poor-quality day care centers stunted the children’s growth and adversely affected their behavior. Carl-son, who studied sixty Romanian children from a few months to three years of age, measured their cortisol levels by analyzing samples of saliva. The more stressed a child was, as determined by the higher than normal levels of cortisol in its blood, the poorer the outcome for the child. (Holden 1996)
Carlson and others have also done research