All My Children

The event of a new birth is a time for celebration and thanksgiving in most parts of the world. Family and friends visit the mother and the new baby to wish them good luck and happiness. Gifts are offered, usually food, clothes, toys or money, and religious prayers or custom-led domestic rituals are enacted for the infant. An orthodox Jewishfamily may pin a red ribbon to the crib to ward off the ‘evil eye’; in Bali, the placenta is taken and solemnly buried; in the ancient world it was a custom to place the new-born immediately upon the ground. ‘Man alone at the very moment of his birth‘, wrote the learned Roman, Pliny the Elder, ‘cast naked upon the naked earth…’ Continue Reading »

When parents have an inner spontaneous empathy with the very special meaning play has for their child, this in itself does a great deal for the child and their relationship, even if the adults spend only limited amounts of time in play. What he needs most is their emotional commitment to the importance of his play, so that it can be fully significant to him. His frequent demand that we play with him represents his effort to gain, from our active participation, a sense that what he does is also important to us. If he gets this emotional message—if our conscious and unconscious interest in and respect for his play quiets his conscious doubts about it—the child will need less of our participation to remain convinced that we truly believe his activity is important. Continue Reading »

How important such play is in establishing selfhood was demonstrated to me by an eight-year-old autistic girl. As often happens, the severe pathology of her case permitted observing a phenomenon also seen in normal behavior but as if it were under microscopic enlargement, or thrown into bold relief by a bright light. This girl had been virtually mute all her life. She completely rejected all efforts to reach her physically or verbally, and was unresponsive to all aspects of her environment. She resented all efforts to make contact with her; if one reached out to her actively, she responded with angry, terrified withdrawal. Continue Reading »

While just this or that poor impulse,

Which for once had play unstifled,

Seems the sole work of a life-time

That away the rest have trifled.

In the days when parents and children played the same games, they shared a virtually automatic understanding of the purposes of play: to be both meaningful and enjoyable. This is still true concerning the most primitive, earliest, and hence most important play, that of the infant—and woe unto the child if it is not.

When a baby tosses a rattle out of his crib and his mother hands it back to him, in their moment of mutual delight the mother hardly notices the fact that in this new achievement, her infant is asking himself some very important questions: “Can I influence my objective environment without dire consequences to myself? Can I safely assert my will and manipulate objects without suffering for it? Can I rid myself of something that annoys me? Can I relinquish control of my belongings temporarily without losing them altogether?” Continue Reading »

Getting organized in a town

As contact is being made with the children by the street animator, three to four committed people willing to get something off the ground need to get together. Their first step is to identify the possible resources within the community and to communicate with these people and organisations with a view to calling a first meeting of concerned citizens. It should be made clear that the meeting is exploratory and that people do not commit themselves in any way by attending. Such resources could include the following:

• Child Welfare in the town and township;
• Two priests/ministers of religion (preferably belonging to a ministers’ fraternal) one in the town and the other in the township;
• A lower and higher primary school principal/teacher in the township;

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A child become familiar with material things and their properties as he plays with them; thus he masters objects and they become acceptable to him. This is why playing with his food is so important to the infant, and why he tries to feed the person who is feeding him. Through handling the food it becomes familiar to the infant; it becomes truly his food. The more he mashes it, the safer he feels it is and the more pleasant to ingest. By feeding his mother, he demonstrates to himself that he is not just the passive recipient of food but also its active dispenser; mastering the process of feeding makes eating all the more enjoyable. Continue Reading »

An uncomfortable problem for you as an idealistic young person, especially in the early teens, is the sharp contrast between the physical side of sex and the romantic, tender, spiritual side. By the time you are in your late teens or early twenties, these two aspects will tend to fuse together (sooner in one individual, later in another), giving strength and meaning to each other. But at first they are so opposite that they seem to battle against each other. Continue Reading »

Nothing is more difficult for some parents than to discuss the question of sex with their children. They can talk about these things quite freely with other people. But with their own children it becomes a most embarrassing experience for all concerned. Often the child is left completely confused, especially when no proper groundwork has been laid.

Yet the happiness of the whole family may be vitally affected unless the child is well informed on this important question. Countless young people have fallen into bad company for no other reason than lack of proper instruction in advance. Children are naturally inquisitive, and inevitably there comes a time when the child begins to inquire where he came from. The manner in which you answer his questions now will largely determine the way he will always react, not only in this but also in many other family problems. Continue Reading »

Popularity with a large group is useful only to the politician who’s after votes. What you as an individual can use and need is to be appreciated fondly by a small circle of friends for your particular flavour, whether it’s for your generosity or understanding or vivacity or witty tongue. Romantically what you as a teenager need is a chance to get to know and be known by some appropriate members of the opposite sex—a few at a time—in order to reveal your own ideas, to learn to respond to the ideas of others, to let your own qualities of personality come out so that those of the other sex who might cherish them can see them, to find out for yourself what qualities you want and need in a beloved. These things are not at all clear to a young person at first. In order to take advantage of your opportunities to get to know members of the opposite sex, you ought to learn enough easy flirtatiousness to signal interest to them. I don’t mean a heavy seductiveness but a sparkle in the eye, a personal smile, a lightly flattering remark, to show that you think the other person is fun. You should acquire enough facility with light talk so that you can pass ten minutes or an hour with another person while you—and he—decide whether or not there are possibilities in this friendship. Continue Reading »

Pubertal development in girls

While pubertal development and the reproductive process are relatively straightforward in boys, the changes that take place as a girl progresses to womanhood are in many ways much more complex. (As you will see, they also take quite a bit longer to explain.) Not only does she undergo significant changes in her outward appearance, but inside her body a delicate interplay of hormones eventually leads to a momentous occasion: her first menstrual period (also called menarche), announcing her potential to reproduce. Continue Reading »