Monthly Archives: July 2010

Character, Competence, Creativity & Collaboration

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Parents exert singular influence on their children’s development during the earliest years of life in four key areas:

  1. Character. The most significant role of early nurture is to form the character of children. How people treat one another is the very foundation of a just society – the kind of place in which the following three traits flourish. Without the baseline of a just society – which begins in a just family – the other aims of nurture (competence, creativity, and collaboration) can be used in ways that destroy communities rather than building them.
  2. Competence. After virtue, competence is paramount to the flourishing individuals and relationships. In fact, character and competence cannot be separated. A person cannot be virtuous without demonstrating hard work, integrity, and persistence – qualities that begin to form around age 1 when a child can learn to put his toys away.
  3. Creativity. Competence and creativity, too, are intertwined. To be competent in anything implies a measure of creativity and problem solving. In a home where creativity and innovation are intentionally cherished, children solve problems in new ways and develop life-long patterns of innovation. 
  4. Collaboration. A team is more than the sum of its parts; and children learn to work in teams (with parents and siblings!) from their earliest years. Together families that are marked by character, competence and creativity create the kind of environment where everyone wants to be.

Resolve: Human beings make purposeful decisions

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Every human being makes purposeful decisions. We choose one thing instead of another, and these choices have consequences. For example, parents can choose to read with their children, or choose to put them in front of a television. This choice has significant consequences for a child in learning to be human. In the context of a shared book, a child learns to communicate by interpreting words, gestures and body language from the reader, and expressing himself in words (if he is old enough to speak), and through his own gestures and body language.

In addition to learning to interact with others, he is being initiated into a way of being in the world. If reading a book together is an isolated encounter, the impact is not nearly so great as if it is repeated; hence the primacy of repetition. Both the single encounter and the repeated practice of reading books are part of initiation. Each communicates something about the value of literature, words and interpersonal communication; resolved repetition shows that we deliberately cherish something.

Normal & Normative

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Normal
Every person’s sense of normal is shaped by repeated experience. The earliest years of life play a singular role in establishing a child’s sense of normal. For one child, yelling and aggression are the normal experience of home life; for another respectful dialogue and negotiation are normal. Whatever is normal for a child profoundly affects how she perceives other ways of life. The child accustomed to aggression will be baffled by kind but firm words, just as the child  whose parents speak respectfully will be shocked by those who use name-calling or manipulation.

Normative
A child learns norms in the course of repeated early experiences. Not only does a child learn what to expect; in the earliest years she learns what is expected – or normative – behavior. A child in one home learns that telling lies is wrong, and he must not do it; another child learns that telling lies is only unacceptable if you get caught. Of course, like a child’s sense of normal, what is normative is learned as much or more from experience as from direct instruction. The child who hears his mom tell a lie talking on the phone will naturally see this as normative behavior, even if she never says anything about truth telling.

Initiation, Indoctrination and Indwelling

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Initiation
Early childhood is the initiation of a child into a way of being in the world. All of a child’s early experiences teach him how to navigate the social context into which he is born. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. was well prepared by family nurture to acknowledge and address the injustices of his time.

Indoctrination
The process of initiation is also one of indoctrination, not in the pejorative sense of brainwashing, but in the old, historic definition: “to instruct especially in the fundamentals or rudiments,” or, more simply, “to teach.” In the earliest years, children learn the fundamentals of how to be human.

Indwelling
Every child is born into the story of a family and community. She becomes a character in a living story, and thus indwells a story – as Ruby Bridges did from an early age in the struggle for civil rights.