Model Being the Adult You Want Your Child to Become

Every child is born with more potential than Leonardo da Vinci ever used.
- Glenn Doman, founder of Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential

Dear Valued Stakeholders,

Host: Elane V Scott

It’s inherent in the human condition to want to make things better for our kids. We want them to stand on our shoulders and reach up. However, under the umbrella theory that giving our children more things and asking less of them in the home is a way to give them an advantage, recent and future generations are now on track to die earlier from obesity and related diseases and be less educated than previous ones.  Going along as we have been isn’t going to cut it anymore.  As the Birth2Work team continues to work with community stakeholder leaders around the country, we hear more and more stories about how precious resources of time and effort are being spent on fixing problems with our children up and down the school spectrum, rather than providing the students with new opportunities. Eighty-five years ago, kids went to kindergarten knowing how to read already, now 30% of kids never learn.  Why is that? 

In today’s show,  a second interview with Janet Doman,  Director of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, we identify the solution. Parents! Parents are not the problem for kids, but the answer. Babies don’t arrive with an “owners manual,” Janet points out.  And when mom and dad have realized this, they wonder what they are supposed to do with their new baby besides feed it and wash it? That is when they look for help.   

Listen as Janet talks about how the Institutes’ week-long class, where parents can learn how the brain grows, how to enrich their child’s environment,  and understand what a baby needs and wants physiologically, socially, and mentally.  When parents leave the Institutes at the end of the week they know they can teach their baby to read, do math, and learn anything and everything else they can present in a joyous and factual way.  With soaring confidence that they now understand their new baby, parents can observe their child and trust that understand what’s happening.

Adults often love kids, but they don’t often respect them.  Love and respect together are symbiotic partners, and more powerful than either alone. This does not mean parents let kids flagrantly do whatever they want. It means that parents learn to do with their children what every great scientist learns to do: observe and respond in a way that supports the best possible growth and development.  Kids will tell you (in words and through actions) who they are, but you must be communicating (listening) with your child. And through that constant exchange of listening, love and respect, the missed miscommunications of early childhood that create upset kids, and teenage rebellion later on, can all be avoided. Teen rebellion is a falsehood created by the last few generations because increasingly those teens did not get the kind of love and respect they needed when they were really little. Therefore they don’t have it or show it for their parents later. When you take time with a baby and young child to teach them and provide them with opportunity, they will flow that energy back to the family, take on more responsibility, and mirror back the love and care. They naturally want to can continue to stay close and contribute to the family forever.

Families everywhere in the world adore their children and want to do the best for their kids, but they do not always know what that is. When they find out it’s not just buying more toys for their kids, then being a parent makes sense. Too many devices that parents buy for babies are NOT for the baby. They are remote baby sitters for parents.  Parents think it’s better for the baby’s safety to contain them, but it is not true. They lull us into a false sense of security and eventually, disaster. They confine and limit kids’ abilities to learn on their own from the natural environment.  Parents and children need to be free to grow and learn together.  What is most surprising is how much better off we would be if we allowed ourselves to be confident that nature provided us with some very useful, basic instincts.  Every child wants to learn more than anything else! Every mother is the best teacher a child will ever have!

I know there is a question that begs to be answered in this context: why should anyone without kids care about how other people’s kids are reared? Well, because all children lead us into the future.  To deny that, or ignore it, is to be divorced from nature. Just as a beautiful, healthy tree provides everyone within its space with oxygen and life, kids do the same. If we are divorced from nature, we fail to understand that most living things are not selective about who benefits from their strength and beauty. Only humans try to make that distinction.  Parents have custody of children for a time, but kids belong to all of us. 

At Birth2Work we support the work of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential and the excellent work the leaders and staff do to help us all appreciate the potential for human excellence that eludes us because we have come to rely more on solutions we can buy than the ones that rest within our own hearts and minds.  It is the work of the Institutes that continues to inspire us about what we can do to help children be capable and ready for the future. Our challenge is to be the adults we want our children to become. Please join us.

If you miss this show airing live today, or would like to share it with others, archives of this and other programs are available for free streaming and/or download from our website, www.birth2work.org/radioshow.php. 

Next week we bring you an interview with neonatologist and hospital administrator Dr. Bob Roth. He is a world class physician, adept hospital CEO, and a passionate advocate for mothers and babies. In his career he habitually forged new connections across economic sector lines on their behalf. We’ll talk about some of the major events of his career and the relationship of his working style to Birth2Work.

Talk with us at www.birth2work.org and/or through e-mail, info@birth2work.org. VOTE for your preferred location for the upcoming Stakeholder Leader Workshops now being planned for 2009! Stay tuned to Birth2Work Radio, the Voice of the Community Stakeholder Leader.