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While I was growing up, I was receiving two important messages
which were conflictual. One was the message of the "me"-generation that you
should be egocentric. The other was the message of my community or family that
you should care more about other people and relationships. Because the community
and family made for a more intimate experience, their messages had greater
influence over me than did the more global message. The more intimate, or
important, a system is for us, the more likely it is to influence us.
Thus, the messages of the family are usually more impactful than the messages of
the community, and the messages of the community are usually more impactful than
the messages of the world.
For a system to be important to you it has to be strongly valued by you.
The more intimate you are with a system, or the more you value it, the
more impact it will have on you. This has tremendous implications for the
treatment systems, which we construct for children. For the messages of those
systems to be important to the troubled children with whom we work, the children
must value something in the programme and feel a certain degree of intimacy with
it. That’s why family systems tend to be much more powerful than
treatment systems when it comes to effecting change in the youngsters
with whom we work.
What were the messages you received from the community and the families in which
you grew up? Were they the same or different from the global messages? How did
they influence you? How did they help you become who you are today?
What are the messages that we are giving to today’s children in our communities
and in our families? For each of us, because we live in different communities
and in different families, the answer to that question may be different. Each of
us knows the individual messages of our family and of our community. What values
and beliefs do you think are being taught by your families and communities? Each
of you individually should think about that.
What role are you playing in the teaching? All of us are contributors to the
teachings of our families and communities. Everyone who is a member of one of
these systems is a contributor, in one way or another, to what is being taught
to today’s children. What are we teaching our future caretakers about caring,
about relationships and about the importance of other people? Every time you do
anything which will impact upon a child, you are giving that child a message
about the values and beliefs of the communities and families within which he is
being raised. We are the representatives of our community and family values, and
every interaction we have with a child is an opportunity to convey values or
beliefs which we believe the community does, or should hold.
The influence of individual experiences
The most valued and intimate of systems that impact upon us are
our individual experiences. It is within the world of individual experiences
that we learn how we will deal with conflicting messages like the one about self
and other. One powerful individual experience can shape a person’s destiny. We
all know someone who changed their life or a major part of it because of
an individual experience. Perhaps you have had that experience yourself. You may
have grown up in a community within which education was unimportant and someone
helped you find that learning can be useful for you and so you decided to
continue your education. You may have grown up in a family in which tradition
was not important, but because of an individual experience you decided that
tradition was important to you. You may have grown up in a family in which human
relationships were characterised by distance and hurt, but because of your own
experience, you decided that relationships can and should be more intimate and
caring.
Generally we reflect the values and beliefs of the families and communities
within which we were raised. I would not for a minute try to deny the power of
our experiences of family or community. But I am saying that the individual
experiences which we have, especially when they are experiences with others who
are important to us, can be more powerful than the messages we receive from our
families and communities. If we would ask how today’s child will be as
tomorrow’s adult, we must look to the individual experiences which he has with
each and every one of us who has the opportunity to influence him.
Every interaction that you have with a young child is an opportunity to
influence how today’s child will be as tomorrow’s adult. A child may have grown
up in a family which gave her the message that children are not important. In
her relationship with you this child can learn that children are important, and
because of that she may raise her own children differently Or, perhaps, a child
who has been raised to think that education was unimportant will learn, in one
brief interaction with you, that learning is fun, or useful. Because of their
interaction with you, the messages that they give to their own children may be
different from the messages which they received from their families when they
were young. The family which they raise will now grow up with different values
and they will impact upon their own future community. In our every interaction
with children, we are helping to shape the world of tomorrow. |
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