Pass on a taste for life to your child

A taste for life is a gift, says Anna Skavitina, a child psychoanalyst. – And of course, there is no magic recipe that would help instill it in children. The ability to experience joy from sensual contact with the world is adopted at an unconscious level. It is pointless to try to convince children that they should enjoy life: the child learns to enjoy in other ways, and the main one is love.

“When we love someone, when we are attached to a person, we involuntarily adopt his ideas, his sense of life,” explains French psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik. “Joy is absorbed from the family atmosphere.” The behavior and positive feelings of parents in happy moments remain in the memory of the child. In the future, he will be able to make this joy his own, because he will associate it (consciously or not) with moments of happiness. The child needs the experience of pleasure as well as the idea of ​​pleasure. But it is not at all necessary to specifically discuss with him everything that can give us pleasure. “Speak about it unobtrusively: pleasant memories are needed insofar as they give pleasure to us ourselves, and not as an educational moment,” says Anna Skavitina.

“Our mum and dad were passionate kayakers,” says 34-year-old Sergey. – They took me and my sister on hikes, and then they remembered all the time: how wonderful it was! They “crammed” their love of hiking into us like unloved porridge. After thirteen years, I have not been on a campaign even once and do not want to. “Too strong parental pressure extinguishes the vital energy of the child,” Anna Skavitina comments, “and causes a reaction opposite to what is expected. In other words, if a daughter reads In Search of Lost Time with enthusiasm and does not like caramel, then this is not because her father admires Proust and praises chocolate truffles. And if children do not like trips in a noisy subway, then this is not because their mother prefers silence. You cannot force a child to love what we ourselves love. It is much more important to pass on to children the very ability to enjoy: they will adopt it in order to apply it to something else, their own.

The ability to experience pleasure also depends on the ability to focus our attention on what we are doing. As Buddhist teachers say, in order to get the maximum pleasure from any state or activity, you need to devote yourself to it. This is how we are captured by the pleasure of swimming in the sea, dancing or singing. Children have this ability by nature, but sometimes we ourselves force them to give it up: we try to fill every minute of their time with something, in our opinion, important and useful.

“At times, a child needs the freedom to indulge in idleness, because he does not spend this time in vain, but emotionally processes what he is experiencing,” Anna Skavitina clarifies. “When parents devalue this pastime, children themselves cease to feel its significance, and the more difficult it is for them to be free and spontaneous.” The taste for pleasure cannot be instilled by force – it is formed through love and the ability to concentrate. And, perhaps, there is no more valuable gift in the world.