Despite this being an extremely large and comprehensive topic in the field of human development, all of the work that I have
facilitated for children and their families during the past eleven years as well as my own experience as a parent, has helped
me distill my primary focus down to one specific tenet regarding child development. Joseph Chilton Pearce described it best
in 1977 in his groundbreaking book “Magical Child”:
“Learning to take our cues from the child and make a corresponding response means learning to heed and respond to the
primary process in ourselves as well. A child can teach us an incredible amount if we are willing to learn, and because s/he
is biologically geared to take his/her cues from us, s/he learns as we do.”
I believe that it is the most important dynamic to embrace and embody for parents who seek to model and demonstrate
positive, loving, and healthy relationship patterns for their children. In doing so, the greatest opportunity for the child to know
themselves and actualize their fullest potential is achieved.
Unfortunately, cultural conditioning over countless generations has created very different relationship dynamics within the
familial, academic, and community environments. Conformity to whatever agenda the prevailing authority figure has
determined is appropriate for the child and society as a whole is achieved and reinforced through a system of punishment
and rewards.
The problem with this approach is that all that has been accomplished is to ‘bend’ the child to the will, boundaries and false
limitations of whoever is ‘in charge’. Not only is the wound/trauma imprinting reinforced in the adult who takes this approach
but it subsequently creates similar wound/trauma imprinting in the child. Consequently, the child and the adult become
imprisoned together within these limiting, shaming, and fear-based patterns and beliefs because the parents are only at ease when the child is able and willing to conform to whatever conditions and limitations are being placed on them.
"No matter how we camouflage our intent, to ourselves and to our child, all parenting and education is based on: “Do this
or you will suffer the consequences.” This threat underlies every facet of our life from our first potty training through university
exams, doctoral candidate’s orals, employment papers, income tax, on and on ad infinitum down to official death. Culture is
a massive exercise in restraint, inhibiting, and curtailment of joy on behalf of pseudo and grim necessities.”
– Joseph Chilton Pearce, “The Biology of Transcendence” -
Children enter the world with the capacity for optimal growth and development. However, well-meaning parents begin to limit
and distort this capacity from the moment they become aware that another life has been conceived and they begin to project
identifications onto the child that have nothing to do with the unique being who is taking shape and form in the mother’s womb.
After the child is born these projections continue well into adulthood since most parents believe that they have a responsibility
as ‘guide’ and ‘teacher’ to bestow onto their child all of what they believe to be ‘true’ about them, the external world, and
‘reality’ in general.
What they fail to recognize, however, is that their well-meaning attempts to be responsible and effective parents has more to
do with their own agendas than it does the child’s best interests. This is because their ideas about parenting are always being
informed by their own unconscious and unresolved wound imprinting and subsequent fear-based beliefs from childhood.
“Since we must pattern ourselves and our worldview after our culture and parents, when that is a disordered system for
modeling, we are ourselves disordered in precisely the same way.” - Joseph Chilton Pearce, “Bond of Power” -
I have never met a parent, including myself, who, in determining their specific style of parenting, was not somehow trying to
compensate for how they were parented during their own childhood. Unfortunately, it turns out, that when we parent from our
unresolved wounding in an attempt to ensure that our children are not wounded in the manner or to the degree that we were;
we end up just shifting to the opposite end of the dualistic spectrum and are as equally out of balance as we judged our parents to be.
Shifting this parenting paradigm requires that we be open to learning new patterns and possibilities; the absence of which
has us responding and reacting from unconscious defense mechanisms stemming from whatever wounding we, as parents,
experienced throughout our own childhoods and still carry with us in the form of cellular imprinting and limiting beliefs. This
shift requires a tremendous amount of trust which is counter-intuitive to the control dynamics that we were raised with and have
relied on to ensure our own survival at the deepest levels.
It is extremely challenging for a parent to trust that their child carries an inherent, intuitive understanding of who they are and
what they came here to do and that their role, as a parent, has less to do with being a mechanism for control and instruction
and more to do with being a loving reflection of acceptance, acknowledgment, and reassurance. It is this dynamic, and only
this dynamic, that creates the safest and most secure environment for the child to explore their world, develop their identity,
and actualize their potential. What makes it so difficult to model is that the parent is encoded with cellular memory that continuously identifies that the world is not safe and in response to their own anxiety around this distorted belief, utilizes external control mechanisms in order to ensure that their child is safe. Unfortunately, these fear-based, control dynamics accomplish very little other than to infuse the child with the same level of anxiety that the parent is vibrating around.
Since a large part of human development is about ongoing identity formation; it’s important to bring awareness and
understanding to the fact that a child growing up in a controlled, anxious, and fearful environment will have an extremely
limited opportunity to explore and identify their true sense of self. Taking cues from this type of environment leaves the child
no other option other than to learn, from a very early age, the importance of being able to defend themselves. This posture is
then reinforced throughout lifetime and reflected in all of their relationship dynamics. Therefore, a very different parenting
paradigm is required in order to have the desired impact on human development; a paradigm that is no longer being
determined by the parent’s fear-based agendas or self-interests but is reciprocal in meeting the true needs of both the child
and adult.
Decision-making and behavioral expressions are primarily shaped and determined by the anticipated response the child has
learned to expect from those individuals who have the greatest control and influence over them. Therefore, I am always
reminding the parents I work with to stop telling their children who they are and what they need to do and to just join them in the moment in their experience.
However, children whose parents continue to have the perception that their child is out of control, are just reflections of how
much the parent needs to be in control in order to feel safe and secure. This has nothing to do with the child but is rather a
reflection of the parents own conditioning and unresolved imprinting from childhood. It is for this reason, that I always, without exception, choose to work as much with the parents as I do the child much to the parent's unexpected surprise.
“Once shame is imprinted there will never again be “unquestioned acceptance of the given” but a faltering hesitancy as doubt
intrudes and clouds the child’s knowledge of self and world” - Joseph Chilton Pearce, “The Biology of Transcendence”-
Letting go of the unconscious agendas that infuse the child’s environment and shape their limiting beliefs about themselves
and their world is paramount in ensuring that they have the potential to realize themselves without shame, doubt, or self-recrimination.
Once again:
“Learning to take our cues from the child and make a corresponding response means learning to heed and respond to the
primary process in ourselves as well. A child can teach us an incredible amount if we are willing to learn, and because s/he
is biologically geared to take his/her cues from us, s/he learns as we do.”
A paradigm such as this takes us all beyond the duality of our cultural conditioning and childhood imprinting by providing new
patterns and possibilities for anyone who mentors, teaches, parents or works with children; thereby changing the course of
human development.
facilitated for children and their families during the past eleven years as well as my own experience as a parent, has helped
me distill my primary focus down to one specific tenet regarding child development. Joseph Chilton Pearce described it best
in 1977 in his groundbreaking book “Magical Child”:
“Learning to take our cues from the child and make a corresponding response means learning to heed and respond to the
primary process in ourselves as well. A child can teach us an incredible amount if we are willing to learn, and because s/he
is biologically geared to take his/her cues from us, s/he learns as we do.”
I believe that it is the most important dynamic to embrace and embody for parents who seek to model and demonstrate
positive, loving, and healthy relationship patterns for their children. In doing so, the greatest opportunity for the child to know
themselves and actualize their fullest potential is achieved.
Unfortunately, cultural conditioning over countless generations has created very different relationship dynamics within the
familial, academic, and community environments. Conformity to whatever agenda the prevailing authority figure has
determined is appropriate for the child and society as a whole is achieved and reinforced through a system of punishment
and rewards.
The problem with this approach is that all that has been accomplished is to ‘bend’ the child to the will, boundaries and false
limitations of whoever is ‘in charge’. Not only is the wound/trauma imprinting reinforced in the adult who takes this approach
but it subsequently creates similar wound/trauma imprinting in the child. Consequently, the child and the adult become
imprisoned together within these limiting, shaming, and fear-based patterns and beliefs because the parents are only at ease when the child is able and willing to conform to whatever conditions and limitations are being placed on them.
"No matter how we camouflage our intent, to ourselves and to our child, all parenting and education is based on: “Do this
or you will suffer the consequences.” This threat underlies every facet of our life from our first potty training through university
exams, doctoral candidate’s orals, employment papers, income tax, on and on ad infinitum down to official death. Culture is
a massive exercise in restraint, inhibiting, and curtailment of joy on behalf of pseudo and grim necessities.”
– Joseph Chilton Pearce, “The Biology of Transcendence” -
Children enter the world with the capacity for optimal growth and development. However, well-meaning parents begin to limit
and distort this capacity from the moment they become aware that another life has been conceived and they begin to project
identifications onto the child that have nothing to do with the unique being who is taking shape and form in the mother’s womb.
After the child is born these projections continue well into adulthood since most parents believe that they have a responsibility
as ‘guide’ and ‘teacher’ to bestow onto their child all of what they believe to be ‘true’ about them, the external world, and
‘reality’ in general.
What they fail to recognize, however, is that their well-meaning attempts to be responsible and effective parents has more to
do with their own agendas than it does the child’s best interests. This is because their ideas about parenting are always being
informed by their own unconscious and unresolved wound imprinting and subsequent fear-based beliefs from childhood.
“Since we must pattern ourselves and our worldview after our culture and parents, when that is a disordered system for
modeling, we are ourselves disordered in precisely the same way.” - Joseph Chilton Pearce, “Bond of Power” -
I have never met a parent, including myself, who, in determining their specific style of parenting, was not somehow trying to
compensate for how they were parented during their own childhood. Unfortunately, it turns out, that when we parent from our
unresolved wounding in an attempt to ensure that our children are not wounded in the manner or to the degree that we were;
we end up just shifting to the opposite end of the dualistic spectrum and are as equally out of balance as we judged our parents to be.
Shifting this parenting paradigm requires that we be open to learning new patterns and possibilities; the absence of which
has us responding and reacting from unconscious defense mechanisms stemming from whatever wounding we, as parents,
experienced throughout our own childhoods and still carry with us in the form of cellular imprinting and limiting beliefs. This
shift requires a tremendous amount of trust which is counter-intuitive to the control dynamics that we were raised with and have
relied on to ensure our own survival at the deepest levels.
It is extremely challenging for a parent to trust that their child carries an inherent, intuitive understanding of who they are and
what they came here to do and that their role, as a parent, has less to do with being a mechanism for control and instruction
and more to do with being a loving reflection of acceptance, acknowledgment, and reassurance. It is this dynamic, and only
this dynamic, that creates the safest and most secure environment for the child to explore their world, develop their identity,
and actualize their potential. What makes it so difficult to model is that the parent is encoded with cellular memory that continuously identifies that the world is not safe and in response to their own anxiety around this distorted belief, utilizes external control mechanisms in order to ensure that their child is safe. Unfortunately, these fear-based, control dynamics accomplish very little other than to infuse the child with the same level of anxiety that the parent is vibrating around.
Since a large part of human development is about ongoing identity formation; it’s important to bring awareness and
understanding to the fact that a child growing up in a controlled, anxious, and fearful environment will have an extremely
limited opportunity to explore and identify their true sense of self. Taking cues from this type of environment leaves the child
no other option other than to learn, from a very early age, the importance of being able to defend themselves. This posture is
then reinforced throughout lifetime and reflected in all of their relationship dynamics. Therefore, a very different parenting
paradigm is required in order to have the desired impact on human development; a paradigm that is no longer being
determined by the parent’s fear-based agendas or self-interests but is reciprocal in meeting the true needs of both the child
and adult.
Decision-making and behavioral expressions are primarily shaped and determined by the anticipated response the child has
learned to expect from those individuals who have the greatest control and influence over them. Therefore, I am always
reminding the parents I work with to stop telling their children who they are and what they need to do and to just join them in the moment in their experience.
However, children whose parents continue to have the perception that their child is out of control, are just reflections of how
much the parent needs to be in control in order to feel safe and secure. This has nothing to do with the child but is rather a
reflection of the parents own conditioning and unresolved imprinting from childhood. It is for this reason, that I always, without exception, choose to work as much with the parents as I do the child much to the parent's unexpected surprise.
“Once shame is imprinted there will never again be “unquestioned acceptance of the given” but a faltering hesitancy as doubt
intrudes and clouds the child’s knowledge of self and world” - Joseph Chilton Pearce, “The Biology of Transcendence”-
Letting go of the unconscious agendas that infuse the child’s environment and shape their limiting beliefs about themselves
and their world is paramount in ensuring that they have the potential to realize themselves without shame, doubt, or self-recrimination.
Once again:
“Learning to take our cues from the child and make a corresponding response means learning to heed and respond to the
primary process in ourselves as well. A child can teach us an incredible amount if we are willing to learn, and because s/he
is biologically geared to take his/her cues from us, s/he learns as we do.”
A paradigm such as this takes us all beyond the duality of our cultural conditioning and childhood imprinting by providing new
patterns and possibilities for anyone who mentors, teaches, parents or works with children; thereby changing the course of
human development.
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