1828. Sex Difference Redux—Part 76: Created to Do Good — I

This is a tough mission assignment for me and I hope the design holds. I anticipate three daily articles with these themes.

I — Although we each are born with the capability to do good as both mate and parent, our upbringing and self-underdevelopment overwhelm our natural talent.

II — As mate and parent, we often slip, slide, grope, and sometimes fail. Both prevention and recovery are possible.

III — The female sex can use a unique genetic predisposition for exemplary leadership.

Love and other affirming emotions—the ‘positives’—are insufficient to hold mates together. Criticism and other demeaning emotions—the ‘negatives’—are far too powerful. Consequently, marriage thrives to the extent that belittling emotions are absent.  

Both sexes emerge the womb with an inheritance of two major capabilities. God designs, Nature endows, and hormones energize each individual to live compatibly as a couple with a member of the opposite sex. The same genetic inheritance makes every couple capable of harmonizing* their home on behalf of the next generation (so that the species continues).

A compatible couple is bonded by affirmations of their connectedness and rewards of togetherness. Positive concepts enable it. We each inherited the capability of delivering goodness through the use of these positives. They include romantic love, mother love, familial love, pledges, promises, vows, responsibility, pleasant associations, mutual trust, mutual respect, forgiveness and forgetfulness, mature leadership, beneficial social pressures, personal likeability, sex as physical reward for men, sex as intimate opportunity for women, family closeness, religious beliefs, common values, extended family support, and many other blessings and expectations. Each positive is a concept that has a range from great to poor and every relationship has some mixture. Benefit of the positives depends on the acceptance of beneficiaries and belief in the deliverer.

People generally know and expect that continued family success depends on the stability and mutually attractive influence of those positives. They also believe that marital compatibility and family harmonizing come from building up and continually strengthening those factors. It’s easy to believe that and it’s necessary, to be sure.

It’s necessary because the negatives are far more powerful. They easily outweigh the positives in effects that linger. Each negative works like an on-off switch. It’s an act that’s present or absent. The degrees of intensity vary with specific incidents that are repeated. The effect on a ‘victim’ is profound. To judge the deliverer of a negative, the victim need not have belief, faith, or trust in him or her.  The positives satisfy beneficiaries but the negatives motivate victims to take negative action. 

Positives are concepts. Negatives happen as incidents and these are ‘ungood’. Criticism weakens acceptance of the criticizer. Lack of trust weakens respect and vice versa. Faultfinding weakens mutual respect and likeability. Contradiction of mom weakens motherly authority. Reproach of father weakens his usefulness. Censure of husband weakens his value. Censure of wife weakens her harmonizing leadership. Complaining weakens the leadership ability of the complainer. Blaming others for one’s mistakes sparks hatred. False accusers lose credibility. Disapproval of a girl’s choices devalues her importance. Scorn of masculine behavior turns boys toward rejection of parental values. Contempt for a child’s immature values causes loss of self-respect. Condemnation of children’s friends solidifies child’s opinions. Immature, disrespectful, and untrusting treatment wires children to duplicate it later with their own. Parental scorn of adults and authority figures causes children to disrespect them. Continual scorn of father and men in general inspires boys to be something else and girls to do without men. Impatience spreads unwanted pressure to others. Sour attitude causes loss of respect and full appreciation of others and generates the same from them. Manipulation destroys manipulator’s credibility. Wife denying sex insults husband. Husband denying sex convinces wife she’s unimportant. Not respecting teen as an adult and toddler as a person stimulates rebellious thoughts. Verbalizing parents’ disagreement before children empowers kids to play parents against each other. A negative spirit makes positive affirmations virtually worthless. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Some negative factors have greater impact than others. When the effects demean the importance of females or suppress admiration of males, they are both egregious and unforgiving. The ‘victims’ react with their own form of negatives. For example, adults may find physical diversions outside the home. Children may use mental diversions to disturb family harmony.

Even though we enter life well prepared to shine as both mate and parent, we fall prey to real life growing up. Home, parental, social, and experiential pressures steer us astray. The result is poorer mating and parenting. We can both survive and recover with a simple change in our strategic aim in life but a rather large change in our habits of thought. I describe them next at #1829.

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*Take ‘harmonize’ to mean emotional attachment, mutual acceptance, and interpersonal agreement on family matters.

278. Female malpractice — Part 8

Feminists popularized complaints about men. This one pressures women into wifely malpractice: ‘A woman’s work is never done’.

First, work-never-ends is the woman’s natural state. She needs a brighter future. She feels compelled to make it so through corrections and improvements.

Second, everything needs care, requires time, or must be made better. But those ‘everythings’ interfere with each other: job, housework, kids, step kids, husband, parents, and maybe even an ex. 

Third, she focuses more on the bad in others than the good around her. Complaints erode her gratefulness, and lack of gratitude erodes her happiness. The ‘everythings’ worsen.

Fourth, she can attack her misery by stopping malpractice in the home. For example:

·        Expecting too much of herself and others.

·        Living her life vicariously through kids.

·        Supervising kids beyond their maturity, hovering as helo mom.

·        Parenting her husband, especially as an intolerable ‘nagatha’.

·        Striving for perfection at work or home.

·        Equalizing domestic and childcare workloads with husband. (Sharing is possible, equality is not. Endless squabbles and resentments are easy.)

·        Letting kids escape responsibility for housework and domestic tranquility.

·        Failing to anticipate family squabbles that lead to further disruptions.

·        Bossing instead of negotiating with husband. (She and not him is the relationship expert.)

·        Bossing kids angrily. Stirring passions unnecessarily, including her own.

·        Letting kids see mom-dad disputes, arguments, fights.  

Malpractice adds burdens, but better choices can be made.

[More about female malpractice appears in posts 236, 221, 206, 189, 175, 164, and 150. Scroll down or search for the number with a dot and space following it.]

268. Weans, tweens, and teens #10 — Self-centered

          This post continues the description of subsets that make up the universal motivator, self-interest (post 223). Mature self-interest arrives after a child passes through three stages that are simplified here for clarity.

Selfish (post 239), self-centered, and self-tests are actions that motivate children at various stages of growing up. This post summarizes selfishness and then addresses self-centeredness.

In the last half of the weans, selfishness is the standard order of the day for toddlers. Such children promote their interests ahead of what’s agreeable with others. It becomes an undesirable habit, when they learn that it pays off. 

As effective parenting discourages selfishness, the child learns to think long instead of short term. He learns that spitefulness does not pay but fairness usually does. Groundwork is thus laid for the next stage after toddlerhood.

Self-centeredness arises during the tweens and takes two forms in every child. Whether viewed as good or bad, he behaves to make himself feel good about himself.

Parents consider it bad, when a child focuses repeatedly on getting others to make him feel good about himself. The child dwells on getting attention, affection, or appreciation. After repeated failures to be satisfied, he often escalates to outrageous behavior.  

Parents consider it good, when a child energizes himself to make his life better or more interesting. He depends upon himself to feel good about himself. He learns to benefit from turning off his selfish and self-centered switches when associating with others.

Self-centeredness in the tweens determines what’s ahead for the child and helps shapes his adult self-interest.

Lessons learned take on permanence as puberty arrives. Following that, the teen years provide the third stage of developing adult self-interest—self-testing. That’s the next post in this series.

[More about childhood mental growth appears in posts 239, 223, 208, 197, 193, 192, 187, 178, and 177. Scroll down or search by the number with a dot and space following it.]

197. Weans, tweens, and teens #6 —Self-worth

Self-worth determines how well people get along with other people. In the grand scheme of life, we can’t or don’t respect and appreciate others more than ourselves. Until proven otherwise, they have the same shortcomings we do. And, how we view others governs how well they get along with us. Early childhood makes all the difference.     

Baby-care adults infuse a child’s subconscious mind with three major factors that govern human behavior: self-worth, self-image, and self-interest. They help with two others: self-talk and self-fulfilling prophecy. This post focuses on the first factor.

Definition. Self-worth is how a person likes, loves, respects, and appreciates himself as a person. It’s his subconscious value of himself to himself.

Development. For simplicity only, I explain it this way: Nature and genetics wire the newborn brain. Care givers, people nearby, and surroundings program the baby’s subconscious—whether intended or not.

·        Self-worth develops in infancy and mostly before an infant’s conscious mind develops.

·        Intensity of development is exponentially high in the first three months of life and less intense for the rest of the first three years. (Times are approximate and vary.)

·        Both a floor and ceiling on self-worth are ‘built’ in these early years. In the tweens,  minor up and down adjustments occur until they stabilize in puberty. Movements pretty much stop after that.  

·        Many childhood mistakes and corrections push self-worth downward. Kind and appreciative words uplift. However, both are outweighed by wiring and programming already made permanent in the earliest years. So, daily ups and downs of feeling good and bad about oneself bump into a floor and a ceiling.

·        In the tweens, a child’s conscious mind interferes. It evaluates, accepts, and rejects the validity of how he’s treated and what he’s told. This process eventually stabilizes both the upper and lower limits of self-worth.

·        In the teens, hormones solidly seal self-worth into whatever it was at puberty. A primary cause of teen angst, it will be visited later.

·        Floor and ceiling work for life as limitations on how one likes and appreciates himself. After puberty, penetrations occur during personal highs such as success and lows such as failures, but they’re temporary.

Child-care adult behaviors that program both high and low self-worth will be presented in new posts.

[More about the mind appears in posts 193, 192, 187, 178, and 177. If not hyperlinked yet, scroll down or search by the number. ]

193. Weans, tweens, and teens #5—The subconscious

According to one researcher, over 99 percent of a person’s behavior is controlled by the subconscious. It guides us through habits and routine tasks that require little or no thinking. It does so from early toddling to deep dementia.

For example, most body movements require little thought. Drive to work. Get ready for bed. Eat the meal before you. Prepare for sex.

Much behavior is involved in these efforts, but few conscious thoughts are required. The details need little attention, because the subconscious automates those tasks within boundaries of safety, sleep, taste, and enjoyment respectively.

Social success in adulthood needs good programming. Inadequate, abnormal, and poisonous programming—aka bad upbringing—produces unhappy, immature, and violent adults and even criminal and dysfunctional mates and parents.

Details will follow about five major factors that enable understanding the subconscious mind. Self-worth, self-image, and self-interest explain how it operates. Self-talk and self-fulfilling prophecy explain how it either matures or doesn’t adjust from earlier wiring and programming.

[Earlier posts about the mind are 177, 178, 187, and 192.]

192. Weans, tweens, and teens #4—Heads Up!

Some natural principles govern development of the mind.

Involved adults ‘program’ the subconscious mind of each child. Successful programming flows primarily from nurturing in the weans and dominant leadership in the tweens. But both of these adult capabilities lose effectiveness after puberty embraces a child.  

Coaching succeeds best with teens, if adequate wiring and programming were done earlier.  

At puberty a child’s subconscious is crowded, partially filled, or empty. It’s works as if the subconscious mind were finite.

If filled to capacity with adult and mature values for self-guidance, teen peer influence will be minimized. When it’s not filled with values that endorse mature adult behavior, ‘leftover room’ will be filled with teen peer values.

Children well-prepared for adulthood aspire to reach it. Rather than claim the glories of post-puberty teen independence, they seek smooth passage through adolescence in order to reach adult goals beyond.

Consequently, those well prepared for adulthood pass mostly unscathed by troubled teens. They minimize rather than add to family problems.

On the flip side, some kids pass through puberty with minds empty or near-empty of mature adult values. They are the troubled teens.

More follows about the subconscious.

[More about the mind appears in posts 187, 178, and 177. Best viewed in that order too. Scroll down or search by a number with dot and space following it.]

187. Weans, tweens, and teens #3—The child’s psyche

The following predominant factors are programmed into each child’s subconscious mind: self-esteem, self-image, and self-interest. Whether they intend or not, adults do the programming in the weans; supercharge or deflate it in the tweens; and worry, enjoy, and interfere in the teens.

During and after such programming, self-talk and the self-fulfilling prophecy about successes and failures keep the subconscious up-to-date with the world in which the individual lives as both child and later as an adult.

For simplicity and clarity, I focus on the effects of Nurture and ignore Nature. We know too little about the genetic and parenting mixture, but parents, guardians, teachers, and other childcare givers do have control of Nurture programming.

Each factor will be covered in subsequent posts. But first, let me remove politics from the subject.

Our education system has corrupted the term ‘self-esteem’. Educators use the need for greater student self-esteem to gild professorial pockets, enlarge school budgets, and program teachers to confuse parents or defuse parental interference.

First, the term implies liking oneself. This empowers the educators’ hidden agenda that there’s never enough. All childhood misbehavior, low academic progress, and lack of motivation can be traced to lack of self-esteem. Of course, parents catch the blame. Teachers thus add value to themselves by working to compensate for parental errors.

Second, purposely or ignorantly, educators confuse it with and as a substitute for self-image (or –concept). This keeps the political side alive and jumping.  

Therefore, I mostly use self-worth to define how individuals love, like, respect, and appreciate themselves as a person.

Self-worth is critical to a child’s well-being, but schools can do little about it. It hardens in the subconscious during the early years of weaning from, hopefully, the mother.  

[Other posts about childhood mental development are listed in the Content page at the top.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

178. Weans, tweens, and teens #2—ThreePhases

This series is about mental development and shaping the minds of children.

It’s not love that raises a child, it’s how parents apply their love with a single purpose in mind. Effective parenting comes from converting love and affection into mature adult thinking that first nurtures, then leads, and finally coaches a child into mature adult behavior.  

Children develop differently in three distinct phases. Consider the far end of each phase to be the first grade, puberty, and age 21 and to vary somewhat for each child.

·         In the ‘weans’ before age six or seven, a child finally eases away from mom’s side. Throughout the weans, nurture works best to prepare a child for mature behavior in adulthood.

·         In the ‘tweens’ before puberty, dominant leadership works best to prepare a child for mature behavior in adulthood.

·         In the teens after puberty, coaching works best to prepare a child for mature behavior in adulthood.

The most important phrase above is “prepare a child for mature behavior in adulthood.” All that follows has that as the primary objective of mind development.

[More on the mind appears at post 177 and others that follow this post with higher numbers. Scroll upward.]