.
The peace of the riverside café was broken by a sudden outburst over in the corner.
“Be strong”, is what she kept saying to her pathetic little scrap of a 5 year old, as he wept and moaned, needing her comfort and attention. Her friend and her friend’s little daughter looked on, somewhat bemused, somewhat embarrassed. The child was an obvious poser, an attention-seeker. His reaction to something quite minor was clearly borderline hysterical.
Most parents would have said either ‘calm down’ or ‘be quiet’, but this lispy blond mum in a pink sweater and blue jeans kept saying, as she put her arm around him and patted his little blond head, “Be strong”.
I have never, ever, heard a parent speak like this to a child. Strong? What’s that about? What strength? What kind of message is that? He's a pathetic, weak, small child!
Now in terms of Transactional Analysis, “Be Strong” is one of the 5 controlling “scripts” that bedevil and subvert people’s lives - people who then spend years acting according to the command of some distant voice they heard long ago, following an instruction that they continue to try to carry out for the rest of their lives. To their own considerable cost.
The others are:
Be Perfect
Hurry Up
Please Me
Try Hard
I’ve had many a chat with people - adults and children - whom I’ve worked with, trying to persuade them to slow down, please themselves, stop trying to be so bloody perfect, to work less hard and allow themselves to show some element of what they would see as weakness.
It’s important to recognise that we have these scripts located within ourselves, unconsciously driving and directing our lives, and to understand the harm we do to ourselves when we live according to their internalised dictats. We should also understand what we need to do in order to liberate ourselves from them, for our own sakes, as soon as we can.
It’s often helpful to assume we’ve adopted and internalised two or three of them, unbeknownst to ourselves, and try to assess which ones. We can then get to work on getting rid of them.
Which does NOT mean that we should NEVER try hard, hurry up, be strong, please others, or aspire to doing something perfectly, even if BEING perfect seems pretty unreasonable.
There’s nothing wrong with trying hard when we want to achieve something for ourselves, but there’s a lot wrong with forever aiming to show other people how incredibly industrious, tireless, determined and aspirational we think we should be.
Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with hurrying up when something’s important to YOU, but everything wrong with living life at a relentlessly frantic pace, and aiming to always keep pace with someone else’s expectations.
It’s good to want to please someone when the urge comes from within yourself, but very bad to be forever trying to impress and please others in order to gain their approval, receive rewards, etc. It’s also bad to expect other people to always be aiming to please YOU.
To be forever thinking you should be perfect (in your eyes and other people's), and always be ‘strong’ (i.e. not weak; completely self-sufficient), can only lead to a life of dissatisfaction and probably mental and emotional illness. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to improve ourselves in various ways, or that we shouldn’t do our best to overcome weaknesses of various sorts. It’s the absolutes that are the killers.
All of this is an argument for balance and integration, for inclusion of positive and negative, which we all contain - of yin and yang, as eastern philosophy would have it.
These are interesting fields for further study - Transactional Analysis and eastern philosophy. Useful starting points might be Zen, Taoism and Confucianism.
But why were these kids in the café not in school, anyway? The whole city was supposed to have started the Autumn term. Ah yes, of course - but not the private schools, which clearly these two kids would have attended. Be stwong darling - it’s almost time for school to begin. And what an awful lot he’s already learned from his sweet, devoted mother.
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Affluenza
In Oliver James’s excellent book he describes the phenomenon of Affluenza - its causes, symptoms and antidotes. For various reasons this isn't the right place to detail what these are, but halfway through the book he has a chapter called “Meet Your Children’s Needs [Not Those of Little Adults]”, and another called “Educate Your Children [Don’t Brainwash Them]”.
Surprisingly he doesn’t mention Transactional Analysis, but he does describe very well the millions of children who desperately strive to Be Perfect, and then become depressed, disillusioned and stressed when they don’t get 100% and straight A’s in exams.
They’ve adopted their parents’ values and scripts, but very often also the norms and values of over-aspirational and competitive peer groups, especially the girls.
“The scientific evidence shows that the methods employed for the transmission of values from parent to child . . . are a prescription for Affluenza. Parents do it in two main ways. A controlling pattern uses rewards, threats, deadlines and hectoring words, pressuring them to think, feel and behave in conformity with parental dictates. Love is conditional upon achievement of goals laid down by the parent - there is no love for the child who does not achieve them. By contrast, supportive care takes the child’s perspective, minimizing pressure and encouraging the child to find out for itself what it wants: self-determination by the child is valued.”
“The child does not realise the demand [i.e. the ‘script’] has been introjected because the process by which the parental dictate has become the child’s compulsion has been going on from before it had words with which to question or analyse it.”
“Supportive nurture has a completely different outcome. In place of pressure, there has been affection and encouragement for what the child wants, and into its own chosen mix the child has welcomed some of what the parent wants. For self-regulation, it has ‘identified’ with them, rather than introjected - made an active choice. . . If this child is a hard worker and high achiever, it has chosen to be so of its own accord; its self-esteem does not depend upon how it is ranked against other pupils, or on living up to parents’ or teachers’ standards.”
Or living according to Government or Local Authority ‘Standards Agendas’ for that matter.
“The inner compulsion driven by introjection is absent, as is the fluctuating and fragile self-esteem, because nothing is contingent on the performance of externally provided goals. The child may be upset if it does not live up to its own standards, but at least they are its own, not someone else’s.”
“Experience will have taught them that the price of love is success, starting with school performance, and usually involving an equation between money and exam success, as in ‘work hard to be able to get a good job and earn a good salary’. The kind of parents who are controlling are . . . likely to have Virus values themselves and to seek to pass them on to their children. If the family is living in a Virus-stricken society, those values will be even more likely to be inculcated in a people-pleasing child who strives to conform to them.”
To combat all of this, James suggests the following 'vaccines':
1. Disentangle your parents’ values from your own.
2. Identify introjected values.
3. Scrutinise how you were persuaded by your parents to accede to their wishes.
4. Colonise your inherited values.
Under this 4th heading he writes:
“ Having disentangled what you really care about from what you were forced to value, you are then in a position to choose. (e.g. Realising that it’s unimportant whether you replace your car with a brand new one, or keeping the house spotlessly clean.) The key is to start work on finding out what really matters to you, not your parents [or ‘society’], and colonise for yourself.”
Chapter 8, Educate Your Children (Don’t Brainwash Them), begins with this paragraph:
“In most of the developed world today, you learn in order to earn. Especially in English-speaking nations, education has been hijacked by business. The goal is to create good little producers and consumers, whereas it should be an enquiring mind, capable of both scholarship and a playful, self-determined and emotionally productive life. The result is Virus distress.”
“Wherever you look in the English-speaking world, a new obsession with exam performance is to be seen. Compared with previous generations, schoolchildren are menaced from ever-younger ages by assessment.”
“The yoking of the wagon of education to business and to money-making, once limited to America, is now found throughout the English-speaking world. . . . The legislation for the new city academies, personally promoted by Tony Blair, effectively permits wealthy individuals to run state schools, often with strongly Selfish Capitalist values and sometimes tied to strong religious convictions. The curriculum of the State system is being increasingly divested of subjects which will not contribute to the economy . . .”
“The key message is that the purpose of education is not to find out what has intrinsic interest for you, but to work hard at school for long-term financial reward. . . . [This] is a prescription for the absence of flow during work, for low self-esteem and a host of other problems. Ironically, on top of that it is death to the capacity to think imaginatively - the foundation of our economic future if the ‘skills economy’ is as important as politicians are always telling us it is.”
By contrast Danish children are "by far the most positive about going to school, and the least likely to be in a hurry to leave".
And the reason? They don’t regard school as something that gets in the way of their “real” lives, and they don’t have teachers who pressurise them to “work hard”.
“The official rhetoric is that education is for creating good citizens rather than economic performance, very different to that of other countries.”
Certainly very different to England, where measurable test performance is all, and almost nobody has cared very much whether children become “good citizens”, whether they have high degrees of social and emotional intelligence, whether they espouse decent values that enhance everyone’s wellbeing, including their own, and whether they have any proper spiritual development or intelligence. The prevalence of teenage gangs and knife crime is an indicator of how well our schools have been developing citizenship and emotional intelligence.
“This rhetoric is reflected in the [Danish] pupils’ emphasis on learning to function well as part of a group. The curriculum is crafted to encourage them to find subjects that interest them and to be pursued in ways that also achieve this. In terms of fostering intrinsic rather than Virus motivation, this ought to result in confident, creative and autonomous children.”
Isn’t it enough to make you want to weep that our children’s education isn’t being driven by the same set of values and assumptions? If not, just think how you and your family and friends would feel if it was your child who was the target and victim of teenage thugs and killers, who think that it's cool or even necessary to carry a knife, who think that it's essential to punch, kick and stab anyone who shows you 'disrespect' or dares to enter 'your' territory.
“The Danish system’s strength is in its emphasis on emotional literacy. Social skills are very valued, recognizing emotions as important.”
“The Danish approach offers an important vaccine which also serves them well economically. In this respect, like the other Scandinavian countries, they are imaginative and innovative. The grinding obsession of parents and government in [most other] developed nations with children’s exam performances is unjustified on economic grounds, and absolutely indefensible in terms of emotional wellbeing.”
“Modern education has been sold under a false prospectus containing three untruths. The first is that it will bring meritocracy, which it has not; and the pretence of it, requiring absurdly long hours devoted to passing mind-sapping, pathology-inducing exams, is hugely harmful to our children’s well-being. The second is that by enabling people to rise up the system, it will confer wellbeing, which it does not. The third is that exam results are crucial for our individual and national prosperity, and that is simply not true.”
“The truth is that in all the countries I visited, except Denmark, education is used mercilessly to put the needs of employers and economic growth ahead of those of children and emotional well-being.”
“The education systems of the English-speaking countries, which puport to be giving children opportunities to become richer than their parents, are actively hostile to the flourishing of creativity and emotional development.”
“Blair presented education as increasing ‘opportunity’ and encouraging ‘aspiration’. What is really meant by these words is ‘to make money, become as rich and famous as the folk on TV’, not to have the intrinsic satisfaction of identifying and pursuing one’s authentic interests, which is the goal of Danish education.”
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My recommendation is that everyone should read this important, stimulating, original and enlightening book - available in Vermillion paperback for a mere £8.99. It’s a key sociological, psychological and philosophical text, but is also clear, engaging, and jargon-free.
As Will Self said in his review, “Oliver James is our foremost chronicler of what ails us. Affluenza should be mandatory reading for everyone, but especially those in politics, business and the media who are intent on upping our society’s dosage of toxic affluence”.
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