Childbirth must transform from an opportunity to privilege. Teachers should enter top highest-paid jobs with the strictest requirements. Schools must employ the most qualified and the most demanded workers on the market.
That is the least we can do to sever centuries of suffering and prepare to forthcoming immortality of the human.
Laziness, sociophobia, low self-esteem — they are the fruit of our childhood; the fruit of first experiences and skills that we either develop or miss. We’ll carry them throughout all our life, and psychotherapists are going to fix wrong turns. If, of course, we’ve been lucky enough to develop skills that allow earning enough today.
A psychiatrist is the sixth highest-paid job for a reason.
To go further, we need to learn why our souls are so vulnerable beyond our control. We are going to cover two parts: sociopsychological, which is hard to accept, and evolutional, which is hard to fix.
Time in Childhood: The Treasure Cheque We Fail to Cash
There are several social reasons why childhood is so important. Many of us know the feeling of regret about wasted youth and time. For the majority of people, school years are full of free time, which suits best for learning and self-development that are so pricey to afford in adulthood. However, children cannot make decisions as sane as they will as adults, so they depend solely on their parents and medium.
Kids in an encouraging environment learn how to develop independently earlier, so they become more competitive in modern society than their happy-go-lucky peers. Even months matter in early childhood, so if your parents had used to make wrong or careless decisions, you would have missed life-changing opportunities. It is critical for children in disadvantaged communities, where the environment and culture play against them.
In sociology, there is a relative age effect phenomenon, which illustrates the importance of early work and development. Famous data show that children born at the beginning of the year have a significant advantage over their peers who born later in the year. In childhood, being a few months older may mean being a few levels more fit. That is proved by the fact that the majority of successful athletes are born in January, February, and March. This advantage lasts even in adulthood: successful world-class athletes are born at the beginning of the year too.
Relative age effect works in education too, but the advantage goes to children born closer to September or August. They go to school older and more developed, so learn faster and more effectively. According to the UK study by Roberts et al., this advantage lasts until the child enrolls the college, where the diversity of age and experience is high.
If your parents did not — or could not — make efforts to adjust relative age effects and invest in your early development, older peers could easily outplay you. This difference may be not critical if you are a middle-class White male in the U.S., whose parents have college savings. But the lesser privilege by birth you had, the more grateful you would be for anything that boosts your fitness.
Luckily, it is not the worst that could happen. In the worst and the most common scenario, your ability to perceive the world may get distorted.
How the Environment Determines Us
What we talk about is imprinting. Using genetic mechanisms present in all developed lifeforms, imprinting determines our tastes, intuition, and subconscious preferences. Imprinting occurs during main developmental stages — such as infancy, toddler stage or puberty — and affects us for the rest of our lives.
Dangerous mistake it is to confuse imprinting with mental traumas and impressions. Traumas locate on superficial levels of the subconscious while imprints reach the very depth of our self. Actually, imprints are the deepest traumas we may have. Imprints determine intuitive understanding of good and evil, beauteous and disgusting, everything we never ever doubt in, as studies claim.
We rarely can recall events that created imprints, but be sure they do exist.
Konrad Lorenz won Nobel Prize for the discovery of imprinting by experimenting on gees. He proved that newly hatched chicks perceived the first object they saw as their mother. The nature of the object didn’t matter: little goslings got imprinted on human, cat, dog, and even basketball “mothers.” Moreover, the “mother” transformed into the object of sexual desire when chick grew older. When mis-imprinted geese and eagles became adult, they attempted courting and mating humans and cats, ignoring partners of their species.
The baby duck syndrome, which is the tendency of computer users to get attached to the first interface they used, was originally a baby gosling syndrome. Another fact for your piggy bank.
Human children are imprinted as easily as geese; also, the impact is deeper. Children who were not taught to speak couldn’t rehabilitate. Little children, who survived alone or with animals since very early years, became wild and could not fully learn the ropes of the human psyche — Mowgli’s return to the village is truly fantastic.
However, infancy imprints are only on the tip of the iceberg, and Mowgli would have lost much more than the ability to speak, think, and be sexually attracted to humans. Between 4 and 6 years — when the initial socialization occurs — children are imprinted to reflect on their emotions and to understand the feelings of others. 5 out of 8 developmental stages by Erikson, life periods when imprints are gains, are stuffed into initial 18 years of life.
So, imprints impact how well you understand other people and express your sexuality. They correspond to your ability to concentrate, resist stress, and deal with other people. Even your beliefs about labor and property seem to be imprinted.
Is it fair that they are determined by strangers?
Relentless Randomness of Parents, Privilege & Disadvantage
It is hard to accept that our parents were random people who weren’t chosen by us, and whose impact we couldn’t change. The place of our birth and maturing was accidental, and we can’t fully trace its impact. Of course, now we’re imprinted, so we feel certain connection (or its absence) with our parents and homes. Our memories are tied with feelings and morals, and this is too late to change.
Now, I hope you at least admit that your life would’ve been different — if even small elements of your early childhood equation had changed.
If you were lucky with parents, teachers, and the environment, you’d experience only a small share of difficulties related to early development. You can be a little bit lazy, excessively affectionate, or prone to impulsive buying. That’s not critical, given that you could have difficulties with basic reasoning or chronical mood disorder.
Even those little problems need big efforts to fix them, though.
Plus, not everyone is lucky. Children in disadvantaged families and communities without birth control are exposed to poverty and deprivation, but that’s not critical. What critical is that parents of children in disadvantage may lack basic skills and abilities to grow children.
Unprepared parents may deny the peculiarities of early developmental stages. They aren’t beneficial role models and sources of imprints. They’re likely to have distorted and harmful beliefs about parenting: anti-waxers to serve an example. Such parents cannot afford to control the environment of their children wisely, allowing excessive freedom or putting unreasonable, morals-driven restraints.
In result, children in disadvantage grow with random but intendedly harmful imprints. If their luck is bad at all, they are doomed to die marginalized. Otherwise, they will struggle with personality and mental health issues, which may be even worse. This is proved by recent studies on the US-wide data; it has been proved by dozens of articles decades before.
And while sociologists define “disadvantaged families” as poor, I define disadvantaged as everyone who is not capable of evidence-based parenting.
The scariest thing is that such a situation may happen even with ordinary parents. Western society has learned that wealth should precede kids. Now it’s less common to give birth in misery, and even if you do, there’ll be services to seek help.
However, I hope you see now: parental skills and attitude are much more than money in the healthy development of the child.
Why Normal Parents Lead to the Worst Outcomes?
The healthy mature individual uses their intelligence in full, feels free in society, and they aren’t restraint by mental concerns. Given all evidence in this article, it appears that only a professional can help the child to grow into such a person.
Traditional parenting isn’t enough, because parents should master evidence-based pedagogics and scientific approach to creating optimal conditions. Parents should be able to craft a stimulating environment for children and plan their development without restraining their personal freedom and independence. This is double Dutch for modern middle-class parents, not even saying about parents in previous generations.
On this stage, people usually ask me whether such efforts are justified.
If usual parenting leads only to minor issues in imprinting and development, are they severe enough to be concerned?
The problem is that the majority of people are unhappy and lonesome because of this minor but irresolvable mental issues that get worse with age. Random events in critical stages of childhood may put paid your conflict resolution skills, which is hard to fix. Strict parental control may help you to develop competitive skills earlier — at the cost of your leadership and decision-making abilities. Uncontrolled socialization in puberty may ruin your life, but lack of socialization may isolate you for life.
With minor issues from ordinary parenting, thousands of psychotherapists from all over the world struggle. With major issues, struggle psychiatry and police.
We Have a Backup Plan. It Fails
Many of us, however, are lucky to overcome even the most terrible conditions. Martin Eden was a poor sailor, Henry Ford was a farm boy, George Soros used to escape Nazis being a teen, you name it. Sometimes, one or two lucky imprints and experiences are enough to change the game.
In the world of obligatory education, the school must be a backup plan for skill development, socialization, and imprinting. Here teachers work, who are experts in using evidence-based practice and individualized approach. At school, children of all classes and cultures interact in equity and justice, regardless of early childhood experience.
Now, think about your own school. Was it at least similar to an imprint-fixing school above? Could the majority of the schools in your state tackle these function? Is it possible for thousands of schools all over the globe, where the majority of people is a minority of wealth?
If teachers aren’t paid well, we’ll pay hundredfold to psychiatrists and police. If teachers aren’t prepared well, we should prepare for the apocalypse that we won’t survive in the age of technological singularity.
Do you think we have other options to save ourselves?
