Love, Discipline and Attentiveness
By: Roderick Galloway
Childhood is important, and may be the most important time of our lives. Although, we must first ask the question, what is or rather, when is childhood? Technically, each of us are children. This is to say, we are all the children of someone. Some of us have two parents, some of us one, some of us have even more than two, and some of us may not have any living parents. Some of us consider our deities or gods as our parents. Either way you look at it, even those of us without living parents, we are still children to someone.
So, if we are all children. Then my first statement takes on a very different meaning. It would be understood, in this new context, that every moment of life is the most important. And while, that could be argued, that is not what I meant. When we talk about childhood in the piece and the series that will follow, we are talking about that important developmental stage of life, where our bones are still hardening and our brains are still forming and we are still learning to walk, run ... converse.
At a young age we begin to speak. But the words we learn to utter aren't the ones we are taught from a book or from a children's song or show. We utter the words of the older people around us. This is when we begin to develop our language bias. By this I mean, we begin to choose which words we will use. We develop our tone and accents. These three things already will affect us for the rest of our lives; word choice, tonality and our accent alongside our dialect.
For instance, due to social biases in society today, you may already have an idea of how my voice sounds by my word choice. Not just the words I choose, but the order in which I choose to express them. From this imaginary voice that you have inevitably constructed for me, you will have begun to make preconceived ideas on my educational background, my behavior maybe, and maybe even my physical origins. Sometimes these biases go even deeper and you may have decided upon my race, gender, and sexuality.
It's in our childhoods that we first begin to develop these social biases. We of course learn them from the older people in our lives but also from our experiences. The more dramatic or traumatic an experience the more likely it will affect our view point or stay inside our heads to be built on later in life. Some people believe we can avoid succumbing to these social biases through early education on what they are. Unfortunately, the human brain doesn't always equate knowledge, common sense, and traumatization, in that way.
For instance, we may be taught that automatic doors open when you walk up to them because of a sensor that reads your motion moving towards the door. That is the knowledge we hold. Common sense then tells us, if we walk up to the door, it'll open. But as is with all things in life, nothing is 100%. So, there is a chance the door may close on you even though the sensor noticed you. This would be traumatic for anyone, especially a small child, still learning the world. So, even though you have a knowledge of the inner workings of the door and common sense to know it should open for you and stay open, because of a past experience each automatic door causes you anxiety. That is a learned physiological response to automatic doors.
The same way we can learn to have a physiological response to automatic doors without being taught it, we can learn to have biases and prejudices without being directly taught to have them. The more traumatic, the stronger the emotional attachment and likely, the stronger the bias or prejudice formed in response to it.
These biases we eventually use when interacting with people, even as adults. They are not easily over-written with truth or understanding. Some things we learn in our childhood we can accept when they change. Like, Pluto losing its status as a planet. Though, other things are harder to accept like the idea that the same traumatic experience won't happen again.
So, if we can't use education to avoid biases that lead to harmful political decisions, poor choices in college, psychological impairments and many other negative long term effects, what can we do? The answer is simple, but so simple it shouldn't be over thought, but complex enough that some thought should go into it. The answer is love. Love, Discipline and Attentiveness.
Think of infamous characters in reality and fiction. Now ask yourself, did they have enough love, discipline and attentiveness? The answer is probably, no. Now the question is, how do we show these three things? Each one of these offered solutions could be performed incorrectly, inappropriately and of course too sparingly.
But this article is just the beginning of a series. The series will explore these three topics; love, discipline and attentiveness, and their relation to childhood development, trauma and how we interact with society as children and adults. To get updates please visit www.902youth.com .
Thanks for your support!
Roderick Galloway