Your Child's Path: Unlocking the Mysteries of Who Your Child Will Become - Softcover

Engel, Susan

 
9781439150139: Your Child's Path: Unlocking the Mysteries of Who Your Child Will Become
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1439150133 ISBN 13: 9781439150139
Verlag: Atria, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

This “compassionate guide for parents and readers” (Kirkus Reviews) reveals how to distinguish between the childhood traits that are cause for concern, and those that are not.

Every parent hopes their child will grow up to be happy, smart, popular, and successful—and as a result, many are anxious and eager to find clues to what their child’s future will be. But with websites, media, and other parents providing an endless stream of advice about how to raise your children to be perfect, whom can a parent trust?

Susan Engel draws on her years of experience as a developmental psychologist, educator, and mother to help parents and teachers identify behaviors that require intervention, while also providing reassurance about those that do not. Unlike many parenting experts, Engel encourages acceptance and perspective. Rambunctious children will calm down as they age and find activities to absorb their intellectual energy. Shy kids don’t need to become “un-shy”—they simply need to learn how to reach out to others on a one-to-one level.

Blending stories about real children with new ways of thinking and up-to-the-minute social and clinical research, Your Child's Path is both an absorbing narrative and an indispensable tool that will help restore parents’ sanity and put the joy back in child rearing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Engel is a developmental psychologist in the Department of Psychology at Williams College and the founder and director of the Williams Program in Teaching. She wrote a column on teaching for The New York Times called “Lessons” and is a cofounder of The Hayground School in Eastern Long Island.

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Introduction

A Road Map to Your Child’s Future

I got my first pair of evening slippers when I was three, a birthday gift from my six-year-old sister. They were sparkly gold plastic high-heeled mules, with little pink poofs on the toes. I’d sashay around the living room in them, listening to the click of the plastic, feeling glamorous. I liked to wear them to nursery school, along with a large black leather purse I dragged around with me. It had first belonged to an elderly relative and contained lots of things I might need during the day: lipstick, candy, pencils, stuffed animals, Scotch tape, and sometimes a book or two.

According to my family, from the time I was two years old, I’d spend hours by myself dressing up in other people’s discarded fancy dresses, telling stories, and outlining, to anyone who would listen, my secret lives. On any given day, I might be a mother of fourteen who also managed a busy medical practice. I loved the part where I would get out of my station wagon, loaded down with grocery bags, my stethoscope swinging around my neck. I’d pretend to soothe one of my babies on my hip, while holding a phone cradled between ear and shoulder, giving a diagnosis over the phone. I was harried and competent, and so many needy people depended on me. But other days, I was an immortal princess who had been married to a handsome strong king for a thousand years. I could visit with him only now and then, when he appeared magically in the night, to court me all over again. Sometimes I was the maverick head of a major company, who managed a large staff and strode into meetings wearing black high heels, holding a clipboard. At other times, however, I was a starving orphan who lived in the woods and had only animals for friends. I could get very caught up in the pathos of that character. My fantasies weren’t confined to marvelous identities acted out in the privacy and solitude of my bedroom, either. Sometimes I tried to bring others into my imaginary world.

My grandmother Helen lived in a small white farmhouse at the edge of a potato farm, her home since she married in 1927. I visited her almost every day, walking down a little dirt path that led from my house at one end of the farm to hers at the other end. She’d toast me Wonder bread, spread it with oleo, and I’d chatter to her. She was a wonderful audience, smiling and nodding, ready to sit there with me for hours.

One day, when I was about six, I arrived and plunked myself down on one of her blue plastic kitchen chairs. It was probably about seven in the morning. I explained that I had some bad news. In a mournful voice, I told her that I was suffering from a rare disease. I lifted my hands from my lap and laid them out on the red plastic checkered cloth that covered her kitchen table, so that she could see the odd semi-shiny veneer, cracked in places, that covered my skin. I explained that the disease required me to peel that top shiny layer of skin off my hands every few hours, even though it was extremely painful. I demonstrated by pulling at one of the edges, grimacing in stoic agony as the translucent material lifted from the top of my hand. Tolerant and adoring, she’d watch sympathetically, clucking her tongue at how awful it must be for me. It was Elmer’s glue, which I had carefully painted across my hand and allowed to dry before walking down the path to share my condition with my grandmother. I can remember the disbelieving glee that I felt when she seemed to fall for my fabulous account. I loved temporarily inhabiting that suffering victim, and I loved the thought that others would fall for my story.

The joke in my family is that someone passing by my bedroom door would hear lots of people talking. Looking in to find out who my visitors were, an observer would see just one little girl, pale and thin, sitting alone, sometimes in a darkened room, creating an imaginary world peopled by admirers, comrades, enemies, and support staff.

However, this funny little story has a twist. Sometime during my teens, I found out that when I was little, my father was concerned that all of those imaginary friends foreshadowed schizophrenia. When I talked to myself, he worried that I had a fragile hold on reality. He was alarmed that I didn’t know the difference between the real world and make-believe and that I spent too much time pretending. He anxiously watched for signs that my fantasy life was getting the better of me. His aunt had suffered from schizophrenia, although her diagnosis had been kept secret for most of his childhood. Perhaps my behavior triggered his fear that someone else in the family would also be afflicted with mental illness. Was my father right? Did those early escapes from reality presage something more debilitating?

As things turned out, I am riddled with anxieties and, perhaps as a result, almost unbearably controlling. I tell my husband what to say to the kids, I tell my grown children what to say in job interviews, and I wake my sixteen-year-old son, even though his alarm clock has gone off, just to guarantee he will get to school on time. When guests visit our home, I rush down to the kitchen before anyone else wakes up, just to make sure that breakfast goes the way I think it should. I have all kinds of fears. I cannot board a plane without Xanax. I don’t like to be the passenger in other people’s cars. I’ve never met a superstition I didn’t embrace. Every single evening, I stop whatever I am doing so that I can wish on the first star and ensure that my children will stay healthy. Just as I did when I was young, I still mentally rewrite the sad endings of novels I like. I’ve had my share of troubles, too—estrangements, disappointments, and regrets. But other than my quirks and the neuroses from which they spring, my connection to reality is pretty solid. I’ve worked my whole adult life, been married to the same man for thirty years, and raised three sons. The usual barometers of mental health point in the right direction.

Those wild gatherings of imaginary friends and narrative performances when I was little predicted something, but they did not predict mental illness. My love of fictive lives stayed with me. I studied literature in college and am still an avid reader; I love novels most of all. Much of my research has concerned the stories children tell and the worlds they create in their play. I have spent plenty of time thinking about alternative worlds, but scientists tend to call this counterfactual thinking. Most researchers do it.

My vivid fantasy life in early childhood might have foreshadowed my interest in psychology, but it wasn’t a red flag for mental illness. Although my father’s prediction turned out to be wrong, it’s understandable that he was uneasy. Most parents feel anxious at one point or another about how their children will turn out. In those uncertain moments, what are they to do? Often, parents feel lost, as if all they can do is read tea leaves. Some lean on folk wisdom they have inherited from others, and it might not, in fact, be very wise. Yet developmental psychology can provide parents with a helpful road map for identifying and interpreting clues about who their children will become.

Finding Each Child’s Pattern

I fell in love with developmental psychology when I was a sophomore in college. I was dazzled by the clever experiments that revealed how children thought. I loved the idea that there was a pattern and an order to development that could be deciphered through observation. I loved the contrasting theories that illuminated such different aspects of what children did and said. Seemingly small patches of behavior offered clues about how a child was thinking and feeling....

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1439150133
ISBN 13 
9781439150139
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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