"Growth thru Rest"

The greatest challenge to any parent is to bring a child to a place of rest. Not necessarily to a place of sleep, although sleep promotes physical growth if there is psychological freedom from worry. Rest is described by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, as being a still point where children are no longer moved to pursue closeness to their parents, no longer stuck in trying to make things work that do not work, and when children are able to live with a coexistence of doubts and beliefs.

Both contemporary parenting advice and learning theory miss the point by not looking at the concept of rest. Rest is absolutely the core to the developmental approach. The child emerges into the world after age five when the prefrontal cortex hooks up, when the child can understand fairness and can take his turn. Credit has been given to learning social skills but it is not learning that allows this to happen. It is development. Senselessly, both pre-school and junior kindergarten programs are focused on teaching social skills when this is impossible developmentally. Childrens’ brains are not hooked-up to permit socializing to happen until age five or six. Pre and primary school teachers would do better to focus on the relationships they have with the child instead of trying to do the impossible by encouraging relationships among the children. Until age five or six, children are designed not to get along. Children are still learning who they are as individuals and are developmentally unable to be concerned about how they are going to fit into the social context.

In this contrived world, we miss the importance of the developmental processes of emergence and maturation. Only the child who emerges as a separate individual can be shoe-horned into a part of a larger group. In other words, the ability to be cooperative happens when a child is developmentally ready. How can we as teachers and parents facilitate this development?

Our work as human-beings is to pursue proximity or closeness to those to whom we are attached. Having proximity is a child’s only hope to grow, to reach his potential. In the same way that a hungry child can never rest from pursuing food, an attachment-hungry child can never rest from pursuing attachment. Even when attachment is satiated for a young child, it is only for a few hours. During that time, a child can rest from the pursuit and in that freedom can have room to grow into maturity. How can we as teachers and parents help our children get to the place where they are not anxious to please, not in a constant hunt for closeness, for approval, for worth, for value and for recognition?

If we withhold all of the above until the child does what we want, the whole quest becomes the psychology of work rather than the psychology of rest. The child becomes responsible to fill their attachment needs through what they do for us. This is not a child’s job. When the child becomes preoccupied with the hunt for attachment, he is unable to find the rest necessary to mature. Before we are asked, we must take charge of providing messages of love, specialness and acceptance to our children. Through maintaining an over-abundant supply of love, warmth, enjoyment and delight, our children will begin to trust that they can rest from the work of pursuing closeness and will be able to depend on us.

We, as parents and teachers, must communicate to our children that we believe in the child’s eventual becoming, that we understand their shortcomings, that we have patience for their mistakes. Reassurances such as: “I know, you’ll get there”; “don’t worry, it will come to you”; “it takes time to grow up” and “there’s lots of time” convey a message of faith in a child’s development. The acknowledgment that we know and love our children for who they are allows children to rest in who they are.

Learning to let go of what doesn’t work also helps a child to mature. Parents and teacher are responsible for providing “no’s”, for providing structure so that a child can predict what is next, and for limit setting. When this is not what the child wants to hear, we can invite our child to their tears and hold them in the comfort of our love. Not everything in life works out the way a child would like it to nor can a child do everything he or she wants to do. It is the tears over what does not work that brings a child to a place of rest and subsequent resilience.

When a child is able to accept questions that have no answers and can hold more than one feeling and/or one opinion at a time, s/he can rest in the “not knowing”. We as parents and teachers can model our own dissonance in our discourse with our children.

Our children are suffering from overstimulation. The brain cannot endure the cultural myth that more stimulation is better. Brains need huge periods of rest or they become toxic from information overload. We tend to worry that we are not doing a good job if we are not keeping our children stimulated, engaged, involved, and busy. Parents and teachers must provide time for rest and quiet reflection or the brain will become defended and numb out. Babies in preemie nurseries usually sleep more than babies who are with their mothers in birthing rooms. Research has shown us that because of the auditory stimulation of monitors and the visual stimulation of the lights, preemies’ brains numb out from the environment by increasing a sleep hormone.

Contemporary children are burdened with making far too many decisions. Parents and teachers must take back the responsibility for being the providers and therefore the decision-makers for young children. We expect children to make many choices every day, which in turn gives them the idea that they are responsible for taking care of their own needs. Responsible adults are the answers to children’s needs; determining what will be eaten for meals, what time is bed-time, where the family will spend their leisure time and what activities are appropriate. Children must not be called upon to make these decisions. Parents and teachers are their childrens’ best bet.

Restlessness is on the rise among our children. We must create structures that can provide rest in a chaotic world. Most parents and teachers believe, that if they weren’t doing their job their children would never grow up. In actual fact, if the context of attachment is provided, the child grows up just fine. As parents and teachers, we need to rest from working so hard at making our children grow up and let them unfold as nature intended - inside our shield.

November 13, 2007

Copyright, 2010 by Susan Dafoe-Abbey. Permission to use this material, either in English or in translation, for educational purposes is hereby granted.