Children Are People Too (1 of 3 free samples)

COPYRIGHT
Children Are People Too by Dr. Louise Porter. Copyright 2008 by Louise Porter.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

A Parent’s Guide to Young Children’s Behaviour

Fourth Edition

Louise Porter
Ph.D., M.A.(Hons.), M.Gifted.Ed., Dip.Ed.

For Hannah

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they do not belong to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls.
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

Kahlil Gibran

Guiding Principles
http://www.dailylit.com/books/children-are-people-too/principles

Part One:
The Basics of Discipline

Three events reinforce the choice of title for this book. The first is that over and over again I hear people – even early childhood practitioners – referring to babies as ‘it’. It seems that, until children are older, many adults do not regard them as being ‘people’ yet and so use pronouns that we usually reserve for objects.

The second event relates to when I lectured at university where, in sessions on behaviour management I would ask my students what caregivers should do when feeding someone who appears deliberately to spit the food back at them. There were always some people in the group who would say that it’s okay for the caregiver to smack the child. But then I would confound them by saying that I was thinking not of a three-year-old but of an 80-year-old with Alzheimer’s disease. Now is it okay to smack the (elderly) person? We agree as a group that it is not. But why the difference? It cannot be that you can reason with one and not the other, as dementia disables individuals’ reasoning skills. After some discussion, those who were willing to smack a child but would not smack an elderly person realise that, deep down, they were thinking that children weren’t people yet so it was okay to hit them.

A news item in 1999 of an ambush of Australians on the Kakoda Track also caused me to prick up my ears. In reporting the events, one witness described the group as comprising ten people and a child. No doubt, the witness meant ten adults and a child ... but that is not what was said.

In all, these incidents tell us that in our society, there is a pervasive and seldom-questioned view that children are not people yet. Therefore, when they behave inconsiderately, we give ourselves permission to treat them less humanely than we would an adult. The underlying belief in this book is that age is no barrier to human rights.

Furthermore, the same things that hurt adults, also hurt children. Children and adults have the same emotional needs. The difference is that children cannot escape when their needs are not satisfied.

At the same time, of course, we did not sign away our rights when our children were born. We have a right to balance the needs of our children with what works best for us, our entire family, and the parent-child relationship. It is important for children’s sakes that we respect their present developmental stage, that we accept that they are children; it is important for our sakes that we uphold our own rights. This mutual respect will be the basis of an enduring relationship with our children.

Children Are People Too (1 of 3 free samples)