How do you learn what I see?
How do I learn what you see?
This project... this discovery... what I've learned about the framework of how children learn and develop, and how to more easily influence their understanding long before the meltdown, the sibling fight, or the sneaking and lying... developed slowly over time, using a fairly ordinary set of experiences.
Looking beyond the familiar
Reading, and then 'translating' the Tao Te Ching into the realm of parenting, is a large foundation of this project. Principles like leading from behind and resisting dogma, as well as the truly novel phrase I had never encountered anywhere else: the best governance is invisible, and the people say, "we are naturally this way."
Imagine an adult who doesn't think it necessary, or even very accurate, to say, "I owe everything I am to my parents..."
"We are naturally this way."
One of the half-jokes I make when people gush about my children and how great they are is, "They came great... I only twisted them up a little bit..."
Yes, my kids are great... but I didn't make them great. They started great, and got to be themselves with very few of the normal social pressures here.
Over the decades, I discovered that outside the Western world's dogma... everything from "babies need to be on a strict schedule" (institutional thinking from the early Industrial era), to "children need to be beaten daily" (one early 1700s German author's self-created rules), to "teens need to alienate their parents to assert their individuality" (Dr. Phil's fact-free assertion)... no one treats children as separate from the society they live in, and no one else has invented "adult-only" spaces with matching "child-only" spaces, complete with "child food."
Terry Pratchett says, "Kids don't need to learn to be children... they're naturally good at it."
Outside the Western world, people ask, about sleep training and babies alone in solitary cribs, "Aren't the babies lonely?"
Here, the convenience and needs of adults are often treated as paramount... something my observant inner child has never seen as particularly natural, or even justifiable.
So instead of following the leader in my thinking, my curiosity led me to the exceptions: people living happy, fulfilling lives who did not grow up "the normal way."
Watching what actually happens
I also couldn't help noticing that the kids with the harshest and strictest parents were not the best behaved... far from it.
They were the kids in trouble at school.
The kids who struggled most with schoolwork.
The kids the police knew for all the wrong reasons.
The kids with the substances and activities we weren't supposed to know about in Grade 5: shoplifting, porn, weed, alcohol, sex, stealing cars...
Reality simply didn't match the stories.
Outcome laundering
I also noticed that our culture has a disordered relationship with those stories.
It's fine, funny, cool, or otherwise mostly acceptable for some old guy to have started smoking at nine. Stories about running away from home at eleven, or being chased around the house by Mum waving the wooden spoon, are laundered by the listener because the outcome is already known.
What gets washed out of these stories is the risk... the pain of the injury... the cost of the adaptations that were made... the real-time responses of the people involved... and what was lost.
The costs have all been paid. They don't make the story sound cooler, so they quietly disappear.
The storyteller speaks from survivorship bias, making the real risks even less visible. Listeners compress the story into "adventure," "freedom," or "kids being kids," without ever thinking, "That must have terrified your parents," or "That must have hurt for a long time."
It's not fine, funny, or cool, for today's nine-year-old to be caught stealing and smoking Grandma's cigarettes. There's nothing funny or daring about a child who goes missing.
Yet it seems almost impossible for many people to grasp that "then" wasn't actually that different from "now."
The risks weren't different.
The costs weren't different.
Only the 'then' ending is already known.
Learning happens through living
As my own children grew, I noticed other bits and pieces.
"They need to learn to work it out for themselves."
No... they aren't going to spontaneously invent UN-level negotiation skills at six... or three.
Yes, they can learn them, but they need to live them first. They need to see negotiation applied to the things they care deeply about, like who gets to play The Sims first, or how long the turns should be.
Then my grandchildren were born... and I just kept noticing.
"Babies need to learn self-soothing."
"Self-regulation is something they need to figure out."
"Calming them comes first."
No... no... and nope.
Calming is the natural result of communication landing successfully... not a prerequisite for it.
Self-regulation is difficult for most adults. Like every other social skill, it's learned primarily through watching.
Watch the driver who gets cut off in traffic, starts to lose it, then deliberately brings themselves back down again.
Not the person who launches into the same tirade every time the subject comes up for the next eleven years.
Self-soothing is for snakes.
Humans, and every other social animal, regulate together whenever they can. The emotional and social costs of expecting otherwise are simply too high.
These are the kinds of thing adults often spend decades untangling in therapy.
"Why can't I ask for help when I need it?"
"Why do I hide under the blankets when something difficult happens?"
"Why do my relationships start well, drift into blandness, then explode?"
Or, put another way...
Why do I still not know how to communicate, negotiate, share space, or live happily in a social community?
Because we never learned how.
Where this led
While observing and trying to understand people all my life, I have had the privilege of watching thousands of people becoming over long spans of time... becoming more or less settled in themselves... more or less connected to others... more or less healthy... more or less successful.
Observation over time is supposed to result in wisdom.
If I am wise at all yet, it's in this way:
I can see that trying to make changes at the outcome end of the chain is frustrating and rarely successful, but intervening at the "map of reality" point can make a tremendous difference... immediately, and for life.
I've gradually developed a theory of this chain of events... which is really a loop, with many of the components overlapping and recurring rather than following a neat sequence.
I'm beginning to call it the Architecture of Human Becoming.
The framework that emerged
Over time, the observations began to organise themselves.
The same patterns kept appearing in children, adults, families, workplaces, friendships, and communities. Different people... different circumstances... but remarkably similar underlying processes.
Eventually, I realised I wasn't simply collecting parenting ideas anymore. I was gradually developing a framework for how people become who they become. At its simplest, it looks something like this:
- Reality exists, whether we understand it or not.
- Within reality (because there is no escape), every person continually builds an internal map of reality... their understanding of what reality is, what it means, and their place within it.
- That map is never finished. It is continuously revised through observation, experience, relationships, successes, mistakes, discoveries, insights, and feedback from reality itself.
- Using that map, people make attempts that they believe are most likely to move them toward something they want, or away from something they don't.
- Reality shows the outcome.
- The outcome provides new information. The map is updated.
- Then the process continues.
It isn't really a sequence. It's a continuous loop, with some internal overlapping and looping within (perception, for example, continues throughout, both internally and externally, shifting meaning or remembering one thing and not another, changing physical sensations and external observations, moment to moment.)
What fascinated me was not behaviour itself, but the map from which that specific behaviour makes perfect sense.
Most attempts to change people begin by trying to change behaviour.
I became increasingly interested in changing the map instead.
When an intervention helps a person's internal map become more closely aligned with reality, change is often immediate, durable, and requires surprisingly little effort.
One small example from ordinary family life...
My daughter was about 11, and she was swinging on the cupboard doors, as she was squatting to look into the cereal cupboard. I'd developed a technique called 'what doesn't she know' a few years earlier, so I picked it to use in this instance.
While lots of parents would bark orders ("Stop hanging off the cupboards!") or threaten ("You're going to pull the doors off") or make global comments about the child's character ("You never care at all about anyone's stuff but your own!") I figured out none of those were particularly helpful to lead children toward responsible, adult care and concern for things, so I didn't use them.
"Those hinges aren't made to hold your weight."
She looked at the doors, and at me, then back at the doors, let go, and never hung off another cupboard door that I ever saw. Speed forward nine years, her boyfriend was visiting and was in the exact same position. She said, "Those hinges aren't made to hold your weight."
When the intervention makes a person's internal map of reality more closely aligned with reality, it is effective instead of frustrating.