One Child at a Time

An introduction

The fate of the world is in the hands of our children and theirs. But what they will do with this power depends to a very large extent on us. We can try to create various institutions designed to promote long term well-being and prosperity for all. However, institutions can only be as good as the people who embody them at any given time. If these people are psychologically healthy they would create, sustain and support good institutions. If they are not, every good institution would be in danger of being reinterpreted and transformed into a bad one. History provides ample examples of this.

The institutions we need to worry about most if we are interested in a better future are therefore the ones that shape the psychological makeup of our children. Since our children will in turn, shape the minds of their children, and so on, the effects of what we do now will reverberate through many generations. In the same way that who we are now is to a large extent the result of the actions of the many generations preceding us.

I believe in the natural goodness of human nature. That is, I believe that all human being naturally prefer to do good and to be good rather than bad. I believe badness to result from some very basic human needs not being adequately satisfied, usually quite early on in one’s life. And by far the most important of those needs are love and security. Badness is in the final analysis a result of some sort of psychological insecurity.

Bad and good actions have a tendency to live on and reverberate from one person to another. When released into the world they tend to cause other actions like them to occur, which will in their turn cause still others (sometimes even after many years) and so on. Such a chain reaction can only be stopped when bad is countered with good or vice versa. This is not some kind of a mystical aspect of the world; I believe it is just a result of the way our psychology tends to work. The effects of good or bad actions are therefore much larger than we may think. This is particularly true when we deal with children, who are so much more helpless and susceptible. Whatever we give to the child is therefore released into the world for a long time to come. This is a responsibility that needs to be always on our mind. It is also a great opportunity.

This is why I believe parenting to have such a crucial role for the future of our world. If there is a way of changing the world for the better it has to be done one child at a time. It is admittedly a slow process, but it is the only certain one. Imagine how the world may look if it was full of happy and creative people. If we could achieve this, the rest will mostly take care of itself.

These writings are the best way I could think of to try and promote such a goal. They comprise thoughts and observations around the theme of parenting. Through those I will try to persuade you to change some of the ways you look at children and parenting. This is often a long and gradual process but at the beginning of it there is almost always a sudden shift in perception. In my own personal case this shift occurred after reading a book by John Holt, to which I would like to pay tribute here. I have read that book before having any children of my own, and although the seeds of my present beliefs were sown at that time there was still a long a very gradual process of learning and shifting ahead of me, a process that is still unfolding.

Raising my own children, I have done many things I now see as mistakes, and I would have liked to have understood earlier what I now have come to believe. If reading this will save you some of these mistakes, then my effort would not have been in vain. I do not claim originality for any of these thoughts. If these ideas all appear somewhere else then it is all for the better. For in the present state of things they could not be repeated often enough.