To train our children to become liars and manipulators, we must hit them
on a regular basis, or at the very least, deny their emerging sense of
reality. This is one of the basic tenants of developmental child psychology.
Most of us are of course revolted by parents who deem it perfectly accept to
inflict violence on children.
At Crosswords bookshop, in South Bombay, one of a chain of bookstores
hideously branded yellow and black, rather like a British DIY warehouse, having
finally located George Orwell’s Animal Farm in the wildlife section, I
watched a charming small boy, about six years of age, leaping around, with a
keen interest in a photography book on tigers. Attempting to lift the
rather heavy tabletop book to show his mother, who was on her mobile phone, he
dropped it on his foot and he began to cry. His mother then bent down to
comfort him and checks that he was okay and nothing was broken. No - he was
rewarded for his interest in nature - by being violently slapped twice across
the back of his legs.
In all my time in Bombay, beginning around 2005, I have not seen one
slum dweller, one street person, one vagabond living under tarpaulin ever hit a
child. It’s not that I haven’t looked. It may of course be that violence
towards children by the poor is a much more secret affair, or an unwise image
that may reduce the day’s takings from begging, or indeed that they don’t have
the means to bribe their way out of any citizen protest. I have seen
however, rather too many moneyed mothers, dangling expense Western designer
handbags, dripping in diamonds as though dressed for an Arabic karaoke night,
behave in entirely animal-like and violent ways towards their children.
This is not however, aggression that is entirely out of control. What is
clear is that the majority of such parents, who physically abuse their children
in this way, seem to have limits. They go only so far. Two slaps on the back of
the legs is acceptable, three is not. Most beating of children is within
some bizarre and cruel personal register of what is acceptable. Three
bruises, is fine, four is not. Can give a vigorous slap across the head from a
hand, but not a baseball ball, can poke the child with pencil, but not a meat-cleaver.
There is much more calculating going on than first appears.
What all this has to do with creating lying adults is very simply.
The child comes into the world without any ability whatsoever to distinguish
between his inner world (what’s going on inside him) and the external reality
(what is going on outside of him). Achieving this awareness, this distinction,
is a remarkable developmental achievement and a profoundly important one.
The capacity to distinguish the inner from the outer is of course facilitated
under the best circumstances, by the caregiver, primarily, the mother. One of
the most important ways that parents help this come about is by mirroring the
child’s mental experience. In a sense, teaching the child how to mentalise
events, to think, to form their own understanding. So the good enough mother at
Crosswords (not the one I saw), these moments of facilitation, would in some
way reflect to the child what he has just experienced, perhaps something like,
“Ouch, little Haresh, that must really hurt,” nicely entering into the
world of the child, adding perhaps, “But we must run along now, granny is
expecting us for tea,” maintaining parental authority and a reminder that
others like granny have their inner world and feelings too.
When parents more consistently than not, deny a child’s experience, his
thoughts, his feelings, or the actual reality of physical abuse, his experience
of the world is invalidated. He learns how to be a fake, he’s had good
childhood training after all, to wear a mask (hitting doesn’t hurt, isn’t
real), to be strategic in relationship, rather than intimate (how am I going to
make sure I don’t get hit again) and to be confused about his own sense of what
is going on (this feels bad but mum says its fine). Fundamentally, he has
been deprived of developing a viable sense of himself, his thoughts and
feelings. What this means, is the important line, as the child heads towards
adulthood, between fantasy and reality, is not even made of sand, it barely
exists, to the point that his internal cues are so vague, so undifferentiated
that he will search to make sense, to make meaning in the reflections of others
as a form of substitution. His thinking about things has been made illegitimate
and thus his capacity to think for himself is likely to be retarded.
Inevitably, as an adult he will have emotions that he can’t make sense of and
many confusion. He is of course then, highly vulnerable to the influence of
others, to mindlessly following the crowd, or flip-flopping between seeking
approval here, then there. Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst called this
phenomena the ‘false self.’
Devoid of any real consistency, the false-self character cannot be true
to himself or others because his compass, whether moral or otherwise, which
developmentally for adulthood if all goes well will be internal, is in fact
external, in the hands of whoever is currently influencing him or whatever
fantasy of identity is imagined. It’s not a huge leap to see how this may set
the path of corrupting, corruptible citizen. What strikes me as the consistent
pattern of the lack of authentic self in adult clients I see with such a
history of gross parental neglect (although whether they can digest this is the
case is a different matter), is a profound inability to be alone. Perhaps, one
might surmise, to be alone, without the reflection of others, means to feel one
does not exist at all. One such adult client, inclined to live in his world of
pretend play, just as he had found comfort as a child, dreamed of doing all
sorts of things with his life, travelling around the world, yet rarely did
these manifest as external reality that would have afforded him some real
satisfaction and relief. As Winnicott put it, “Real milk is satisfying
compared to imaginary milk,” as it always is, adding, ”The point is,
that in fantasy things work by magic, there are no brakes on fantasy.” This
brings to mind crashes, as well as brakes with the corrupt Indian pilots, allegedly
found with forged Commercial Pilot’s Licenses who did not in fact have any
qualifications to fly so much as a paper plane. What is being forged here is
not merely papers, but identity, a form of adult play-acting, with potentially
horrendous consequences.
So what are the practical implications of what is being said here? As
parents, in order to facilitate the development of healthy adulthood in our
offspring, it seems rather all too obvious to say perhaps, that we must try to
be truly constructive, to understand the thoughts and feelings of our children
and not hastily dismiss them whether with language or a fist. It’s not enough
for a parent to simply pay off the police when their fifteen-year-old son’s drink
driving is clearly showing early signs of alcoholism. Beneath the symptoms, we
must dare to patiently explore the cause and what is probably, an unconscious
cry for help or get outside help for the child. Of course, the difficulty with
doing this, is that we have to face our own inadequacies as parents which maybe
no easy task, especially for the parent with a fragile sense of self and
self-worth. One important point that I find myself invariably raising
when I work with families, is that a wonderful way to deepen the everyday
experience of love, is when a family can say to one another, “I love you, and I
like it when you tell me about your day, and I don’t like when you don’t call
to say you’ll be late.” What I am suggesting here is that loving someone and
finding certain behaviours okay and not okay are two very different things.
Families, like businesses, need honest feedback loops, even dare I say in a
hierarchical culture like India, from children to their parents, whatever age,
so that everyone can grow and develop. A family of course, where behaviour is
primarily strategic, i.e. goal oriented, rather than intimate i.e. love
oriented, will find this a deeply challenging step to take, something that has
to be both unlearned as well as learned.
It would be the highly irresponsible to underestimate the reality that
in the city there is very little in the way of education for parents and rather
poor feedback loops between teachers and parents regarding children’s emotional
development. Urban India, perhaps naturally so, given its stage as an emerging
world economy, rather energetically, focuses on a child’s excellence in
tangible results, qualifications, grades and so on. Understandable as
this is, the emphasis on achievement can have crippling effects on the child’s
emotional development, no matter how well intentioned by parents.
Many of the parents I talk to, with children at the elite private
schools, particularly from European backgrounds, find the academic pressure on
the children to excel, without true regard for their emotional development
painfully foreboding, and worthy of leaving the city. Perhaps what stands out
most in my work in the city, compared to other major capitals in the world, in
fact whether in Mumbai or Delhi, is there is yet to develop a culture around
parenting and child-rearing that is characterised as a learning journey in
itself, where it is perfectly acceptable to discuss strategies for helping
little Santosh develop, without an overbearing sense of shame, or parental
inadequacy. This I think, links to the excessive need, perhaps through
insecurity, to be seen to know what one is doing as a parent (the performance
of the false-self?), and it would seem, largely only to seek professional help
when the child or adolescent is acting-out to such a degree that they are truly
at risk, in the rising cases of anorexia in the Mumbai of children literally
losing their lives in the golden cages.
Simply judging a child’s odd behaviour as stupid, out of control,
without attempting to understand what it is meant to achieve, i.e. entering the
world of the child, is perhaps one of life’s greatest, greatest cruelties.
To view a child’s distress, as simply some sort of karmic curse,
(yes this happens, I assure you), rather than face-up to the fact that the
child is being raised in an financially affluent environment, yet where there
is the poverty of frequently absent, argumentative, highly neglectful parents,
maybe be comfortingly and magically fateful for mum and dad (they aren’t
responsible after-all), but thoughtless gross stupidity. Perhaps they might
counter, it is their karma to be the terrible parents they are - a full stop on
any development and change - the curse of religion. Utter nonsense.
More than any other life activity, parenting will bring-up for all of
us, memories and experiences of our own childhood, the bad as well as the good.
I always tell parents, that the best we can hope for is to commit to evolve as
parents and do a little better than our own parents. The truth is, we can
always invest time and energy just as we would going to the hairdressers,
learning what it means to be a good enough parent, if in reality it is
important to us. As a start, some of the best writers on children’s
developmental needs are just one click away on the Internet, the likes of John
Bowlby, Donald Winnicott and indeed India’s Sudhir Kakar.
Sadly, India has only very recently made corporal punishment in schools
illegal, and as with many laws in the country, it is extraordinarily difficult
to implement and monitor. A recent study found that over 74% of children in
Maharashtra state schools have experienced physical violence from
teachers. It is easy to dramatize the effects of physical abuse of
children by quoting the numerous cases of suicide of children, particularly
those reported following brutal treatment in schools. However, it seems to me
that the fakery, the manipulation, the notion of relationships as merely as
instrumental to achieve one’s own selfish gains, an inability to trust oneself,
projected on to others, an excess of consumerism as a way of masking emptiness,
that potentially arises from the development of the ‘false self,’ poses
an even greater challenge to India’s development.
The country must invest more adequately in the education of teachers, a
deeper understanding of the developmental trajectory of children, their
psychological needs and the damaging consequences of physical violence.
Personally, I believe educating teachers and parents, cultivating interest and
learning in the exciting and remarkable world of children’s development is the
No 1 priority for India’s development as a noble nation. Not worth hitting for,
but certainly worth fighting for.
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