Quote of the Day

	Love and work. Erich Fromm observed, allow us to restore meaning to life and provide us with a genuine sense of belonging, completeness, and above all, a sense of self. With love supported by a moral scaffold we unite with others, we become altruistic and, just as Kant taught, hold these actions to be universal moral laws. Love, for Fromm, was the most desirable way to derive meaning from life if only because it is the most desirable form of human interaction. A balance between security and responsibility, he maintained, is afforded by love, and affirmation sits deep in the heart of respect that parents offer their children, a respect, moreover, parents hope children will incorporate as part of their own sense of self. The love and affirmation offered by parents also provide the basis of a love for life, nature, and all living things. They lead a child, Fromm wrote, to be attracted to constructive life forces, authentic creativity. They cause the child to define influence in terms of reason and example, rather than aggressiveness, coercion, and outright force, and encourage the child to look outward toward the world, forever imagining possibility. Notice that Fromm’s words suggest the significance of turning the child in the direction of devotion to others, which in a sense is the basis of moral behaviour, and a far cry from the more popular preoccupation with self-esteem.Some children, however, are exposed neither to love nor affirmation. These are the psychological, if not literal, latch key children, the ones always home alone, even when others are around. These are the children eager for the hours to pass so they can hear Mr. Rogers’ say directly to them: “There’s no one in the world exactly like you... I like you just the way you are.” Love and affirmation launch the child’s search for self-reliance and beneath it a sense of self. The child can even get angry with her father and not fear that he will hurt, abandon, or disaffirm her: she can rely, in other words, on his presence and her own felt sense of his affirmation. Wouldn’t it be marvellous to hear celebrities speak about the ways they actively love and affirm other people? Better yet, wouldn’t it be wonderful to enjoy people doing the things they do that earn them celebrity status, while focusing on our love lives, and not theirs? Wouldn’t it be fun to imagine a time when celebrities buy magazines in which our lives, and our children’s lives are featured? Sometimes I wish that people could feel comforted in the thought that they won’t be famous, for fame may not be such an ideal devoutly to be desired. Let us just do the work that permits us to be loving and affirming, the child in me keeps repeating. A precarious distraction, fame is but a prop meant to fill human emptiness and hollowness. It may well represent the grand compensation, the embodiment of an ego left unaffirmed. Children who are genuinely affirmed require no stardom: they already have achieved it, and they haven’t even cut their first CD. Hundreds of millions of people will receive neither public attention nor prominent roles in movies or television shows. In the context of America’s overriding public relations/entertainment mentality, their own lives are deemed boring. They are called, simply, ethical parents. Produce a television show about them and audiences would turn away in droves. Parents merely getting by and raising lovely children continue to be called the ‘silent majority’, Homer’s term, not so incidentally, for the dead. We have all met many of these families. We have come to know the children as well-mannered, intelligent, moral, dare I say affirmed young men and women, who appear nothing short of terrific. I never think of them as the children of the silent majority. Rather. I imagine that regularly in these young people’s lives, they heard Mr. Rogers’ deceptively simple message spoken to them by heaven only knows who, but I suspect it has been their parents: “There’s no one in the world exactly like you... I like you just the way you are”
	THOMAS COTTLE Cottle, T.J. (2004) Affirmation is priceless as a parenting skill. ChildrenFirst. Vol.8 No.53 pp.14-15