The Myth of Normal 110
Though it no doubt runs diametrically counter to most parents’ intentions, a child whose cries are not responded to, who is not fed, not held close to a parent’s warm body when in distress, learns a clear if wordless lesson: that his needs will not be met, that he must constantly strive to find rest and peace, that he is not lovable as he is. By taxing my brain’s PANIC/GRIEF system, my poor mother’s non-responsiveness also helped wire my brain for those chronic tendencies of mine that express the overactivation of that system: anxiety and depression. “When our brains are undercared for,” writes Darcia Narvaez, “they become more stress-reactive and subject to dominance by our survival systems—fear, panic, rage.” Don’t I know it. “The question,” Gordon Neufeld said to me, “becomes, What are the irreducible needs of the child?” By “irreducible” he means a need that the child cannot do without if she is to reach her Nature-endowed potential; one that, if not met, will incur negative consequences. As he told the European Parliament, “It is true maturation, not schooling, learning or genetics that is key to becoming fully human and humane.” We cannot teach maturity; nor can we cajole, entice, or coerce a child into it. What is required of us is to ensure the developmental conditions that satisfy the child’s nonnegotiable needs; from there, Nature more or less takes care of the rest. There are four irreducible needs for human maturation, in Dr. Neufeld’s astute formulation. These four needs are both simultaneous and build one on the other, in pyramidal fashion. I invite you, the reader, to consider how well our culture satisfies them for our children, or fails to.[*]
