French pediatrician and one of the key figures in child psychoanalysis, Francoise Dolto, talks about how to establish a harmonious relationship with your child.
The child is the Achilles’ heel of the adult: perhaps even the one who at first glance seems to be the strongest is afraid of this truthful being who is able to disarm him.
Every adult must accept every new living creature that is born into the world, as he would like to be accepted.
Readiness to become a parent is achieved at that level of personality development when a person can take responsibility for another that exists independently of him, and which will never belong to this person.
I think that not all women benefit from raising their own children.
A newborn is not a toy. This is a full-fledged person who took a place next to his parents.
A child is a person who for the time being is not aware of either his history or the experience of the transition from childhood to adolescence. And this is normal.
The central nervous system of a child is characterized by great fragility, unusual sensitivity to shocks emanating from the environment.
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- Françoise Dolto, with respect to children
The greatest drama of humanity is that at the moment of the highest creativity, the highest clarity, we are made dependent on adults. Physical immaturity is paradoxically accompanied by a striking natural genius and sensitivity.
There is no “child with a capital letter”: there is a person who is experiencing the time of his childhood, a person who, in fact, already is what he will always be.
Every being, even if it was not desired by its parents, even if it was not “planned”, was born because it wanted to be born.
It is the unexpected child, the surprise child, who is the prototype of the man most endowed with his own vital energy, because no one insured him at the origin of his existence.
Children express their freedom more than adults. They prevent the sclerosis of civilization or slow it down. The younger generation is a force that prevents adults from feeling in imaginary security and reproducing in relationships with each other the same life clichés all the time.
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First of all, the child must cease to serve as a means of self-affirmation for the adult. It is necessary that the adult’s desires be fully directed towards a life in common with other adults and that he helps the little one who is in his care to become himself, surrounded by his own age group.
Any human being feels defenseless if an adult does not convey to him a sense of security. It is impossible to achieve security on your own while you depend on other people.
Only the experience of risk can instill in the child real immunity against the dangers that threaten his mental integrity.
The most constructive way is to warn children about the danger very early, without forbidding anything. For a child, this is the best way to avoid inevitable dangers, learn to control himself, develop observation and inquisitiveness.
In fact, a child, no matter how small he may be, can do the same as his parents. But only on the condition that they help him, explain the techniques they use, and help him understand and assimilate the reality of the dangers that actually threaten everyone.
If a child complains that the guys at school beat him, this means that he does not have normal social relations. If they existed, none of his classmates could bully him alone, because he would have his own company of friends, and this company would rebuff the company of the offender.
They talk a lot about the child, but they don’t talk to him himself.
Children are at the source of knowledge. They ask real questions. They are looking for answers that adults do not have. Most often, adults want to understand children in order to dominate them. And they should listen to children more often: then they would discover that it is they, the children, who hold the keys to love, hope and faith.
Children with severe physical and mental disabilities are useful and necessary for society.
Both health and illness are the result of interpersonal relationships, connections that develop between children and adults and between adults and children. It is necessary to work on understanding and improving these ties.
If an adult shows physical aggression towards a child, it is because he does not have a connection with the child through language: he does not see him as a human being.
Adults suppress the child in themselves and at the same time strive to ensure that the child behaves the way they want. This kind of upbringing is wrong. It is aimed at repeating the society of adults, that is, a society that has been deprived of the ingenuity, creative power, courage and poetry of childhood and youth, the enzyme of society’s renewal.
In vain do we adults believe that a child cannot understand language until he has mastered the oral grammatical technique of expression. In fact, he intuitively captures the essence of what he is told.
To communicate with a very young child, countless generations of mothers have resorted to “baby talk”, believing that it is better that way. But “baby talk” is not communication.
The child needs a respectful attitude towards his personality and a subject who maintains a desire-filled communication with him; the child exists wholly in the language, hears everything, understands everything, but does not know how to make it heard and understood.
In order to avoid suffering and neuroses, the child at an early age must at all costs remain in complete symbiosis with the mother.
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Maternity hospitals cause great damage by separating the newborn from the mother. His first experience is the length of time that passes between the moments when he finds his mother. Without her, he is as if in darkness, he is drowning in the cry of other babies.
If a child’s time, at the request of his mother, begins to be structured too early, the child cannot express his curiosity about the world – he lives in a rhythm imposed on him by adults and often contrary to his own.
There is nothing good in the fact that the child is not denied anything; he has to face other acts of desire, the desires of other people characteristic of other ages.
It is the expectation, the refusal to immediately satisfy his desires, that makes the little child feel that he exists; in this way the subject becomes an individual, first bodily, then mentally.
It is important, starting from the earliest age of the child, to tell him: there is no need to imitate and never need to obey another, even an adult; you should always look for your own answer to any question.
The child, at first merged with the adult, asserts his individuality with the very first “no”, which he opposes to the will of another person.
Sometimes we see terrorized children (people don’t know that these children are terrorized, they are called timid or well-mannered); they are so prone to anxiety that they constantly smile with a fixed smile, as if trying to please another person – they are so afraid that if they look displeased, this other will attack them.
If we want the child to have a better chance of retaining his potential, we need to make sure that his upbringing is as little as possible imbued with authoritarianism.
It is important to develop the child’s autonomy as early as possible, introducing different activities and people or groups without imposing.
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The most important thing in a person is not the body; It is psychic communication that makes a person viable, while respecting the value equality with those who address him and to whom he addresses.
If parent and child want to find each other, it must come from both sides. Rapprochement will occur if both are helped to understand that the father is for the son, and the son is for the father – beings of equal spiritual value.
A child does not have all rights, but rights are all they have. Parents have no rights to his personality – they have only duties.
The mind of a child is equal in value to the mind of an adult.
A child, in order to develop well, needs to be on the periphery of his parents’ group, and not be its center. Parents should reach out to people of their own age who have children or who are childless. It is never too late to make such connections.
The more the child is closed inside the triangle, inside the father-mother relationship, the more he suffocates and the less chances he has to become himself. It is necessary to unlock this cell for him, but take measures so that from this captivity he does not immediately fall into another, even more cruel one.
No one pays attention to what the child morally suffers from. People care about the body of a child, about a growing organism, and not about a person who has his own story and who needs to express it, but he does not have words for this. And until he expresses this story, he himself slows down his growth.
It is very important that the elderly, if they want it, of course, could see the children. It is in this way that ties between generations are woven in society.
Children always trust children more than adults.
When one child begins to show aggression towards another – specifically to one person, and not to all – we know: this is the beginning of a friendship. Selective aggression is a sign of mutual sympathy among those who cannot yet speak.
If the parents have given the child the right to enjoy freedom, the child becomes autonomous (independent), he is interested in all the laws of social life and his own success in his age environment, outside the parental family.
Each has its own potential trajectory. If a person is forced to roll off it, it can interfere with his growth.
It seems that we are standing at the origins of a completely new anthropology: a person is not at all what he thought of himself before, and a child is not at all what adults think of him.