November 12, 2014,
Family, Fundamental Human Needs 
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What do kid’s thoughts hide?
Every child is an individual and unique in the eyes of his/her parents. But what happens when a child does not understand the actions of his/her own parents?
It is really important to understand that the child’s thinking pattern is different from that of an adult. Very young children can really only think in concrete terms. That is, to them, something only exists if it can be seen, and it only exists in one form. The expansion in thinking follows a developmental path just as physical growth does.
Emotional growth also follows a developmental path. A young child feels all their feelings intensely and without any real capacity to control them. Just imagine a child throwing a temper tantrum and what’s really going on for them. For example, let’s say a child goes into the hospital for an operation. Mum “disappears,” according to the child, and leaves a very frightened child in the hands of “masked marauders”, who, from the child’s perspective, only want to hurt him. The child knows that Mum is allowing them to do this. So, out of rage, the decision the child may make about this is never to trust Mum again to know what is best for the child.
Children also tend to map the particular onto the general.
So, the child in the above example might also decide that not only is the mother not to be trusted but actually no adult can be trusted—and not just for now, but for all time. The child thus transfers all the anger at Mum onto other people, who are now suspected of being out to hurt him as well. The child may even begin to wish for all sorts of dreadful things to happen to them in payback.
It really does sound scary both for the child and for his/her parents. In my practice I often see the prime source of misunderstanding and the respective consequences resulting from this. Parents simply can’t make out why their children have this anger towards the world, their partners, and their colleagues at the office, and their grown-up children cannot explain the failures in their own relations and consequently seek for an explanation and/or the cause beyond their own selves.
Often such a person may present as depressed with suicidal tendencies; this is essentially a Victim life script in its most raw. The cause of the depression may have been long forgotten. It operates now at the subconscious level. In counselling, this person would be taken back to the time when the original decision was made, to explore it and evaluate it with clearer adult thinking. The outcome can be a new decision about his or her personal value, and consequently, a new script by which to live adult life.
To live our lives wisely and expediently means to learn how to think and analyse. A part of this process is to seek help where our own strength is simply not enough. It is critical to find the prime source of our emotional barriers, to find the thing that prevents us from just being happy and which makes plans for our future instead of us having control and maybe even the final say in all of this.
Each of us is a grown-up child searching for his/her own grown-up answers. It is never too late to take a look into the children’s photo albums and to search for our own credo as adults – between the old reels, indeed.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this topic. Add your comments and let’s get a conversation going.
To the wonder of you,
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