Making sense of the world

"Children are natural philosophers. They ask the big questions: 'Who am I?' 'Why is the sky blue?' 'What happens when we die?' It's our job to encourage their explorations and help them find their own answers."

Problem from the start

Children aren’t inherently born with the ideas of “Am I enough? Am I worthy? Am I deserving or loveable?” Children come into this world with a complete sense of wholeness, and this is undisputed. It is after this, that a myriad of complex sequences and its affects start to take form.

For a lot of children unfortunately, the violent eruptions by the caregiver or the lack of a soothing voice or a gentle touch harvests a feeling of being “unwanted.” The child becomes “an extra mouth to feed” in poverty stricken areas and withdraws from the parent and creates a distant atmosphere so as to not bother or worry his or her caregiver or parent. If this need is not addressed what follows is a complicated, frustrating development of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity and addiction. It is in the early years that the work begins.

Our brain is organized to act and feel before we think, and this “acting and feeling” comes from preformed wired connections. This is how our brain develops, from the “bottom up.” The developing infant acts and feels, and these actions and feelings help organize how they will begin to think.

A baby's experience

Starting in the mother’s womb, the developing infant’s brain begins to store parts of their lives and memories as “experience.” Fetal brain development can be influenced by a host of factors including mother’s stress, alcohol, nicotine intake, diet, patterns of activity. During the first nine months; development is explosive (about twenty thousand new neurons are “born” each second). The different sensations which include sights, sounds, smells and movements all create an experience and these experiences once become connected – make a sense of the world for a developing infant.

A child's cues

As babies grow and start to develop a sense around them they start to associate meanings to certain cues. For one child eye contact means; “I care for you; I’m interested in you.” For another child, this same cue may mean, “I’m about to yell at you.” Children start to develop their own codebook from a very young age. The experiences in the first years of our lives are very powerful in shaping how our brain organizes. It stands true that young children absorb much more than we realize and the younger you are the more sensitive you are to your emotional climate. 

It is also true that children raised by abusive fathers, begin to connect men with threat, anger and fear. When this thought becomes ingrained in a child’s brain, he or she associates any new male such as a teacher or a coach, no matter how harmless they may be as dangerous or a threat. At an even earlier age, when they have not even developed phrases or words to describe their feelings, the inherent thought is about vibrations, and the vibrations that the child exhibits is that “…this is bad..” These vibrations are very important to a growing child’s brain, because there are parts of our brain that arevery very sensitive to nonverbal relational cues.

Trauma as parents’ divorce or a new person in the family dynamic

For most children, divorce is like death, this is because children view their parents as a single unit not as two separate people. So, even if divorce is better for the family overall, the children feel pieces of themselves being torn away. Moreover, if another relation in introduced in this dynamic before trust is built, children lose their self-worth. This lack of self- worth carries with a child in every relationship and interaction way-forward. It is very important for children to feel respected by their parents, this is so their own values aren’t crushed. Moreover, the shift of attention away from them to this new person can elicit destabilizing reactions from the child. For any new person in the family dynamic, it takes a long time to make sense of the shift of attention and to return to a calm, regulated state.

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