September 1995
BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE
Who is Raising Our Children?
Children are the most important treasure of any generation, yet with more and more working and/ or divorced parents, there are very few households left who can afford to have one parent dedicated to raising a child.
"Although day care is a daily reality for most families, a great many day care workers and early childhood educators are only minimally trained and poorly paid, and the result is that many of our children are not receiving appropriate care," according to psychoanalyst Phyllis Cath, M.D. "As a society, we must begin to treat child care workers as professionals, providing them with educational and emotional support as well as an adequate income."
The San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute (SFPI), in conjunction with San Francisco State University, offers a year long program that teaches day care workers about child development issues. "The students in this program receive academic credit, and - most importantly - they learn how to enhance communication skills between staff, parents and - of course - the children they serve," Dr. Cath adds.
By training educators to understand patterns of child behavior, small emotional disturbances can be recognized and handled before they become major problems for the child. "While day care providers have lots of experience recognizing kids in trouble, they are often less informed about how to intervene effectively. When people are not sure what to do, problems tend to escalate. On the other hand, when a day care worker knows how to help, problems can often be resolved fairly easily."
Dr. Cath describes the example of a four-year-old girl she met who had severely broken her arm and who had to remain in a cast for several months. The child became withdrawn and did not readily join in games with her pre-school playmates. "In the program, the day care provider learned how to help the child identify her feelings through play and stories that included birds and animals with disabilities, and the girl began to re-emerge from her shell. By working with the child's parents, the progress made in school was enhanced at home."
The example also illustrates the importance of a working relationship between parents and providers. Dr. Cath emphasizes, "Sometimes, parents feel so guilty about leaving their children that they don't communicate with the day care center, making emotional growth that much more difficult for their children."
To interview Dr. Cath about "professionalizing" day care providers or to learn about the SFPI's credentialling program, please call Mary Tressel at 1-800-260-2663.
The Development of Conscience
by Jules Weiss, M.D.
Children experience strong and conflicting desires and emotions in the process of growing up. Children have unacceptable desires early in their lives, desires to be cruel, desires to have incest, desires to engage in strange, sadistic and impossible sexual practices. Anyone can notice these universal desires if they pay attention to the child's play and words. Adults usually don't take these desires and impulses seriously, since the child is so small, but the desires are present and the child is quite serious about them and experiences them with great intensity.
Children stop themselves from doing something terrible (the murder of a parent or a sibling or sadistic sexual play) by turning the aggressive and sexual forces back onto themselves. This switch to fantasies of being sexually or aggressively attacked by some molesting grownup is the earliest form of conscience, which is often violent and terrifying for the child.
Children need their parents for many things, but one of the most important needs a child has is for parental control. The child needs his or her parents to not allow violently aggressive or sexual behavior. By using consistent parental limit setting, the parents gradually civilize their child. This reassuring discipline gradually becomes internalized into the more mature and reasonable conscience.
When one of the parents is absent, as in divorce, or when the parents are alienated from each other, or when they have an overly permissive, 'laissez faire' attitude in controlling their child, the child is thrown back upon a more primitive form of conscience that has great potential for emotional damage. Parents, like everyone else, suffer from feelings of guilt, which they often mistakenly attribute to harsh discipline from their own parents. They then try to be different by raising their own child in a more permissive manner, expecting that such permissiveness will result in a more benign conscience in their child, a lesser intensity of guilt. But such permissiveness paradoxically results in a more primitive conscience, with a more self-destructive and violent form of guilt, a guilt derived from the earliest turning of primitive and violent aggressive and sexual desires against the self. In short, if the child cannot rely upon his or her parents for control, he or she is thrown back upon automatic and primitive kinds of self-control, uncorrected by the civilizing influence of benign discipline.
One example of the significance of limit setting by adults is the five-year old boy who continually threatened to kill his younger sister and acted seductively towards his mother. His father, who happened to be at odds with his wife, vied with her for his son's favor by overly gratifying the boys desires. In addition, the father tried an approach to discipline in which he "reasoned" with his son rather than sending the clear message that the boy's behavior was unacceptable and would be punished. Instead of being comforted by his father's overly gratifying and "understanding" approach, the boy had great difficulty in adequately controlling violent behavior towards his sister and sexually seductive behavior towards his mother. At the same time, he developed nightmares from which he awoke screaming in terror of demons who would come at night and kidnap or destroy him. These horrific dreams were clearly primitive, self-invented punishments for his wish to destroy his sister or seduce his mother.
When parents set reasonable limits for their child, the child internalizes these guidelines and develops a healthy and reasonable conscience which controls the primitive rage and sexual desires which are universal in the young, developing child. In our present day society, with its high incidence of one-parent families and its confusion about permissiveness, there is a dangerous situation in which destructive behavior and violent guilt derived from an immature and inadequate conscience can bedevil the developing child, leading to violent and self-destructive behaviors and symptoms.
To interview Dr. Weiss about setting limits in parenting, please call Media Consultant, Mary Tressel at 1-800-260-2663.
Preschool can be a wonderful time for a young child, helping boys and girls learn to play cooperatively, get along well with their peers and become used to the more structured environment they will experience soon in Kindergarten.
"For some children, the traditional pre-school experience can be very difficult," cautions child psychoanalyst Shahla Chehrazi, M.D., who has been working with the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute (SFPI) to develop a therapeutic preschool program in San Francisco. "Right now, our most vulnerable children are disbursed throughout the preschool system, leaving teachers to cope as best they can. The creation of a central therapeutic classroom would link mental health professionals experienced in child development with early childhood educators for early mental health intervention and treatment.
"The first thing psychoanalysts can do is help teachers recognize children in trouble, not only those who are 'acting out' and aggressive, but also children who are sad and withdrawn. These quiet children don't make trouble so their problems can sometimes be overlooked by teachers, yet some of these children, with professional assistance, can really develop and grow."
Dr. Chehrazi notes that the public school system provides special programs for children with special needs at elementary schools, but she and her colleagues feel that intervention on a preschool level may be more beneficial. "By grade school, there has already been significant self esteem damage in the child who can't 'get along'. We'd like to help these kids get a head start."
To interview Dr. Chehrazi about linking teachers with mental health professionals, please call Media Consultant, Mary Tressel at 1-800-260-2663.