VALIDATION

In psychology, validation is the act of reinforcing another person's experience of being human. But more than that, it is supporting that person's individual expression of their unique human "voice." One of Webster's definitions of validation is "to confirm." When we as parents confirm our children's "emotional reality" - which is the essence who they are - it enables them to accept, value, and feel secure about the various parts of their inner selves: their self-image, their numerous emotions, their beliefs and values, their empathy for others, their ability to imagine and plan their future, their desire to self-motivate, and so forth. When parents use validation effectively, it fulfills the core developmental need in children that is the backbone on which all of their "ego strengths" will rest as they evolve into selfhood," as Nathaniel Branden characterizes the journey to emotional wholeness.

In Emotional Intelligence, etc., Steven Hein writes:

When we validate someone, we allow them to safely share their feelings and thoughts. We are reassuring them that it is okay to have the feelings they have. We are demonstrating that we will still accept them after they have shared their feelings. We let them know that we respect their perception of things at that moment. We help them feel heard, acknowledged, understood, and accepted.

From day to day, we all experience a certain degree of contradictory thoughts, feelings and behaviors, both in ourselves and others. But it is in childhood and especially during adolescence that our "fickleness" is most pronounced. Being a little confused as we search for our "true voice" is a natural expression of the developmental process of our growth into mature adulthood. When teenagers bounce from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, opinion to opinion, and behavior to behavior, they are merely trying to figure out the world and how they fit into it - not cause their parents a lot of grief. Typically, however, it is those children who are rarely validated, and especially those who are vehemently shamed and invalidated, who will develop a propensity for the greatest self-doubting, erratic, or even volatile feelings and behaviors. The resulting insecurities and anger of regularly being told that you're "wrong" to think and feel the way you do is what fuels these exaggerated inconsistencies. Severe emotional neglect can have a similar chilling effect on a child's emotional stability, and is itself a form of invalidation.

When we as parents routinely use validation in our interactions with our children, it confirms their "right" and need to have unique thoughts, feelings and ideas. This essential emotional support bolsters their self-esteem and self-confidence, which is a key ingredient in strengthening their "internal voice" - the voice within us all that, when properly formed, keeps us on track as we pursue our dreams. Parents with healthy self-images don't insist that their children share their views on life. Parents with healthy self-images allow their children to bring new and different ideas into the household without belittling those ideas or their children. They understand and accept the reality that their children are separate and complete individuals who will often have very different feelings, opinions, and goals in life (whether they like it or not). A staunch Democrat parent who possesses a secure self-image, for example, will not become upset if his or her adolescent child decides to join a Republican youth group, or vice versa. Or, you will never hear an emotionally whole father express the psychologically enmeshed thought progression that says: "I'm a doctor (or cop, or whatnot); my father was a doctor; and his father was a doctor; Therefore, you're going to be a doctor. End of discussion!" Emotionally healthy parents don't rely on their children to "agree" with them in order to feel right and good about who they are, and the job they are doing as parents.

Validation for our children's "reality of experience" is the cornerstone of helping them build a healthy self-image and an integrated psyche, where inconsistent and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are kept to a minimum. It is every child's birthright. An integrated psyche is characterized by a core acceptance of and confidence in the "self." It is expressed in such things as our ability to be spontaneous and genuine in our relationships with others (intimacy); in a reasonably thorough understanding of our emotional make-up and the reasons behind our thoughts, feelings and behaviors; in knowing how we feel about the people and things in our lives; in a keen focus on goal-setting and achievement. It is the validation of our children's emotional experience of being human, even if that experience is markedly different from our own, that will give them a strong "sense of self" to help them succeed in all areas of their lives.

When parents or other caregivers thoroughly understand the concept of validation, it gives them endless opportunities to bolster their children's feelings of self-acceptance and self-worth. And when parents regularly take advantage of these opportunities, over time, it will lessen the potential negative impact of their children's normal developmental feelings of self-doubt. As they mature, these children who feel powerfully supported in the home will be far less likely to succumb to negative peer pressure in adolescence. Instead, at this time when they are psychologically separating from their parents in earnest on their final push to "full independence," as they begin to look to their peer group for validation in place of parental validation, they will be more willing to defy the group, if need be, and follow their own healthy instincts. The expression, "He feels comfortable in his own skin," is a compliment that is sometimes paid to a person who truly accepts himself for who he is, and is thus lead by his own desires. We have all met these people, or are lucky enough to be one ourselves. They exude self-confidence and purpose of thought and action. They are hampered by relatively few insecurities and can therefore just "be."

One of our chief parenting goals, then, is to instill strong feelings of self-value in our children through the consistent use of validation. In fact, I believe that it is the prime goal of parenting. Because if we can help our children acquire an unshakable belief in themselves and thus the strength of spirit to follow their hearts, they will possess the emotional wherewithal to be able to face all that life has to throw at them - and not fall apart every time they have to face a tough challenge. It never ceases to amaze me to see young people who possess a presence of mind and confidence of self that is well beyond their years. For the most part, they know who they are, they are focused on positive living in the present, and many even have detailed goals planned well into the future. Although some of these characteristics may be influenced by genetic factors, their self-confidence and ability to focus is often the result of a great deal of emotional support in the home. I admire these "together" kids so much, I believe, because I was such a "basket case" in adolescence and early adulthood. Because I grew up in an environment where I was virtually alone, emotionally, I became completely lost about who I was or where I was going until much later in life, after I had worked through many of these issues on my own. But at the time, I had almost no feelings of self-value; and as a result, was unable to bring much value to the world around me. It was popular in my day to hear people say that they wanted to take time off from work, go on a journey, or even do drugs in order to "find themselves." I contend that this burning desire to discover who we are in adulthood is a direct consequence of not being sufficiently validated during childhood and adolescence - the time when our initial self-discovery process is intended to take place. Occasionally I have a fantasy about going back to childhood and being nurtured by the parents of these self-assured, focused, goal-oriented young men and women - to see the effects of good validation upon my psyche and its manifestation in my life.

In the field of child growth and development, there is general agreement that infants and young children cannot know "who they are" until they are shown "who they are" by their parents or caregivers. Although we were all infants at one time, no one remembers what it was like to be so helpless and new to the world. Psychologists theorize that infants experience what could be described as "felt-thought." And because they are at the developmental stage of pre-psychological birth, a big part of their reality is that they don't know much about who they are or how they feel about themselves or the world around them. In fact, up until about four months, a child cannot even differentiate his physical body from the rest of the physical world; he believes they are one and the same. As to his emotional reality, he also believes that he and his mother are one and the same until somewhere between fifteen and twenty-four months, when he begins to emotionally differentiate himself from the other people in his environment.

Not that anyone really knows the point of our existence on this planet in adulthood (except possibly the great sages). But as infants and young children, we were completely unaware about even the simplest aspects of how our familial relationships functioned. And we had no ability to get any of our needs met; we were utterly dependent upon the competence and good will of our caregivers. Our lives consisted solely of trying to get others to fulfill our physical and emotional needs, almost instinctually, using the few emotional skills we had available to us at the time. So when we were hungry, we cried. When we were wet, we cried. When we wanted comfort and touch, we cried again. But when we were picked up and held, fed and changed, smiled and cooed at, and tickled and sang to, we smiled! We laughed! And we felt GOOD inside! We also felt protected. But most of all, in some rudimentary way, we felt loved, valued, and wanted. When our parents or caregivers tended to our needs with a spirit of joy, we were shown that we were loveable little people. We saw the delight in their eyes, and as time progressed, we began to interpret it that we were indeed delightful. This is validation for a child's existential experience in its most fundamental form.

On the primal level with which a child relates to the world, he will come to "agree" with his caregivers' high opinion of his worth. (Conversely, children who are treated with little regard will also "agree" with this assessment, and will thus develop little regard for themselves.) He has nothing to compare it to, and so accepts it wholeheartedly. He will further accept the "judgement" that he is a valuable and capable person as he continues to be respected, understood, and praised for his efforts - all forms of validation - throughout his childhood and adolescence. And with enough expressed love and validation during his formative years, a child will fully internalize his caregivers' "opinion" of him and come to think of it as his own: "I am a valuable and capable human being!" And though there are other factors to be considered - most notably the esteem-building benefits of achieving a mastery over our physical, intellectual, and emotional abilities - I believe that a child's internalization of his parents' expressed high opinion of him (in conjunction with their high opinion of other children; not the self-delusional ego-trap that says "my child is superior to the rest"), as well as a healthy respect for his uniqueness and autonomy, forms the essence of self-esteem building in human beings.

In his book, Bradshaw On: The Family, John Bradshaw writes about how effective validation by emotionally strong and healthy caregivers positively influences our self-concept:

We humans would never know who we were without a mirror to look at in the beginning. The mirror [the caregiver's face] needs to reflect ourselves as the person we really are at any given time. The original mirror is almost always the mothering person [of either gender] who raises us . . . The mothering person needs to mirror, admire, and take us seriously. Each child [even] needs to have his instinctual drives (orality, defecation, sexuality) and aggressive feelings mirrored [as normal and natural] in the mothering person's face. Obviously, this requires a high degree of security, self-confidence and completeness in the mothering person.

Validation starts with empathy: the sharing of another person's emotions. We have to first care what someone thinks and feels in order to effectively connect with them. Empathy enables us to be "with" our children in their times of joy, anger, or sadness; it allows us to temporarily transcend our bodily separateness. For those individuals who do not possess much empathy, which is revealed in an inability to emotionally bond with and support other people, any kind of real human connection is all but impossible. So if we as parents feel that we have some emotional "blockage" in this area - that is, we find it difficult to care what our children think and feel, and are primarily interested in lecturing and advice-giving - it is crucial to do some in-depth feeling work in order to grow emotionally. In such cases, this is essential for creating and maintaining an emotionally open and supportive relationship with our children, the key to effective parenting. And as we begin to consciously examine our feelings, many of us will find that we care deeply about what our children think and feel. Admonishing and lecturing are simply bad habits that we picked up in our families of origin, habits that can be changed with enough practice in learning how to listen.

The ability to listen intently to our children has profoundly beneficial and lasting effects upon their psyches. I know how difficult it can be for we parents to resist giving advice to our children when they come to us with a problem. It can be equally challenging to resist scolding them when they are "acting out" without first finding out why they are behaving as they are. To those of us with poor listening skills, this can be particularly challenging. It is therefore imperative that we learn to listen to all that our children have to tell us as the first step in the validation process. The simple act of listening, in itself, sends a powerful message of acceptance to our children. It shows them that we are willing to take the time to hear them out. It shows them that we consider their thoughts, feelings, and ideas valuable enough to pay attention to. It also shows them that we will allow them to work through their own problems, using us as a sounding board, to find their own solutions. Isn't that the whole idea of parenting, to allow our children the time and experience to learn how to take care of themselves and solve their own problems? Helping our children develop independence of thought by way of our effective listening skills is a key ingredient in their journey to full autonomy in adulthood. When a child feels listened to and accepted by his parents or caregivers, he feels free to explore his own mind for the answers to his problems. And rest assured, when he needs our advice, he will ask for it. Children are also more willing to listen to and accept the wisdom and advice of their parents when they have first been listened to themselves.

In his book, Parent Effectiveness Training, Dr. Thomas Gordon writes:

[Parental] listening influences the child to be more willing to listen to the parent's thoughts and ideas. It is a universal experience that when someone will listen to one's own point of view, it is then easier to listen to his. Children are more likely to open themselves up to receive the parent's messages if their parents first hear them out. When parents complain that their kids don't listen to them, it's a good bet that the parents are not doing an effective job of listening to the kids.

Lets start with the basics of good listening. First off, it is important to signal our children that we are listening to them, using acknowledgement phrases, such as, "Really?" "Oh, yeah?" "You did, did you?" and so forth. These confirmation signals are also sent through non-verbal means, with our facial expressions and body language. To those of you with healthy interpersonal relationship skills, it may seem silly to even be discussing this point. But as many of us have experienced, there are significant numbers of people (maybe even a majority) who never learned good listening skills in childhood because they were not listened to and validated in their own right.

In Emotional Intelligence, etc., Steven Hein discusses the positive effects of good parental listening upon both the emotional well-being and behavior of our children. Steve calls it EQ-Based Listening, a kind of focused listening with concrete feedback that lets the talker know that he or she is being heard:

EQ-Based listeners focus on feelings, not facts . . . Clearly, we feel better when we are heard. And we feel better when we feel understood . . . Often it is more important to us to feel heard than to actually get what we wanted. On the other hand, feeling ignored and misunderstood is literally painful whether we are six or sixty.

It has been said that ninety percent of discipline problems come from children wanting adults to listen to them. One study reported that the number one request from suicidal teenagers was for adults to listen to them.

Steve goes on to offer some specific ways to listen to our children, as well as the kinds of feedback that promote emotional growth and a secure parent/child bond:

• Listen non-judgementally
• Attempt to identify the underlying feelings

  'It sounds like you felt disappointed . . .'
  'How did you feel when . . .'

• Listen with empathy; focus on feelings
• Show understanding and connection

  'I understand"
  'I know how you feel'
  'I have felt that way, too'

• Clarify and paraphrase, particularly the feelings

  'So, you really felt insulted, is that it?'

• Give your full attention; stop other tasks
• Use eye contact
• Do not judge with your body language or facial expressions
• Don't [be distracted by] preparing your response
• Allow long pauses before asking questions; be patient
• Don't interrupt, evaluate, or jump to conclusions
• Avoid: 'scene stealing,' advising, interrogating, correcting, debating

Dr. Thomas Gordon devotes a large section of his book, Parent Effectiveness Training, to what he calls "Active Listening," which is similar to Steven Hien's "EQ-based listening." Dr. Gordon explains, in detail, the process of human communication, with all its subtleties and potential miscues. And how, when we parents use active listening with our children, it helps us avoid the kinds of misunderstandings that can cause harm to the parent/child bond. "The receiver is active in the process as well as the sender," he writes. This attuned attention is how parents gain access to their children's emotional lives.

Write this one down, if it will help you to remember. It is that significant. Listening to our children and using effective feedback is the only way to interrelate deeply with their authentic, core selves! If we aren't listening to them, our children may as well be living in another city, for all the positive influence we are having upon their emotional growth and development. And we all know how children tend to hide thoughts and feelings from parents, especially if they get scolded and lectured to a lot when they speak out. Using effective feedback helps us get beyond these emotional impasses, guiding our children to their innermost thoughts and feelings, as we draw out the kinds of valuable information that we can use to help them mature. Our children need our healthy input in their lives probably even more than we (or they) know. We parents therefore require all the data available to us in order to make informed decisions about their inner lives, and more importantly, to help them develop problem-solving abilities of their own. Because of the emotional connection that it creates between parent and child and the emotional growth that takes place as a result, active listening is far superior to advice giving and/or enforcing parental will, or passive listening then advice giving and/or enforcing parental will.

With active listening, as parents feed back the child's own thoughts, it helps him better focus on and understand how he is really feeling in regard to a particular issue. And as the child opens up about his problem, it helps his parents perceive what he is going through and to empathize with his point of view. Parents can then use this vital information to assist the child in finding a resolution to his problem. With lecturing, advice giving, or imposing of parental will, the receiver (parent) is building an emotional wall between him- or herself and the sender (child). Little or no emotional growth is likely to take place in the sender (child) because he is being put on the defensive about not being allowed to add input to the relationship. As he trys to send, he is cut off and forced to receive; but he still needs to send in order to feel like his opinion has value! This is the classic "win-lose" parenting style that traditional staunch, disciplinarian parents follow. In this kind of household, over time, children become ever more disappointed and frustrated at having their feelings ignored, and tend to withdraw, emotionally, from their parents. Worst of all, at some point in their lives (usually adolescence), most of these children will be driven to rebel against this unchecked parental authority. Thus, in the more pronounced cases of parental emotional abandonment of the child through "listening neglect," the parent/child bond erodes in ways that are all but impossible to repair.

Dr. Gordon writes:

Rarely do we find a parent in our classes who does not think of conflict resolution in terms of someone winning and someone losing. This "win-lose" orientation is at the very root of the dilemma of today's parents - whether to be strict (parents win) or to be lenient (child wins).

When parents use [dominance as conflict resolution: "win-lose"], they often miss the chance to discover what is really bothering their child. Parents who jump quickly to their solutions and then use their power to enforce those quick solutions block the child from communicating feelings that lie much deeper and are much more significant determiners of his behavior at the time. [This] prevents parents from getting to the more basic problem, and it won't let them contribute something far more significant toward their child's long range growth and development.

Parents who rely on [dominance] to resolve conflicts pay a heavy price for "winning." The outcomes of [this] are quite predictable - low motivation for the child to carry out the solution, resentment toward the parents, difficulties for the parent in enforcement, no opportunity for the child to develop self-discipline.

The opposite of the "win-lose" approach to parenting is the "lose-win" method of conflict resolution. In this permissive style of parenting, the parent usually gives in to the child because he or she becomes "tired of arguing about it." Or, the parent has difficulty watching the child suffer through the process of learning to deal with being "denied" - a reality we must all eventually learn to face. This parenting style also occurs when the parents' own feelings of low self-esteem cause them to be overly concerned that the child will stop loving them if they do not give him everything he wants. Of course, this end of the parenting spectrum also has serious consequences for the child's emotional development. The most common negative result of permissive parenting reveals itself in the child who has learned to always insist upon getting his way (improper empathy development), even into adulthood, due to a lack of "healthy limits" being set for him in childhood. By always being given in to, the child develops a hyper-focus on the self and a lack of concern for the needs of others. And unless he can change his predisposition toward self-absorption, his future relationships will likely be doomed to shallowness and conflict.

Dr. Gordon continues:

These children learn how to throw temper tantrums to control the parent; how to make the parent feel guilty; how to say nasty, deprecating things to their parents. Such children are often wild, uncontrolled, unmanageable, impulsive. They have learned that their needs are more important than anyone else's. They, too, often lack inner controls on their behavior and become very self-centered, selfish, demanding.

These children often have serious difficulties in their peer relationships. Other children dislike "spoiled kids" - they find them unpleasant to be around. Children from homes where ["lose-win"] predominates are so accustomed to getting their way with their parents that they want to get their way with other children, too.

Few parents use either [dominance] or [permissiveness] exclusively . . . One of the most common patterns . . . is to let a child win for long periods of time until his behavior becomes so obnoxious that the parents move in abruptly with [dominance]. They feel guilty and gradually move back to [permissiveness], and then the cycle starts all over again. One parent expressed this clearly: 'I am permissive with my children until I can't stand them. Then I become strongly authoritarian until I can't stand myself.'

Active listening takes us beyond the "win-lose" or "lose-win" methods of parenting and into the uncharted waters of "win-win," where both parents and children gain during the resolution of conflict. But in order for both sides to gain, they must first be willing to give a little, too. Isn't this the essence of good conflict resolution: negotiation? Both sides must "lose" a little in order to win a great deal more - in the case of parenting, the most important being a strong parent/child bond. For we "dominance parenting" adherents, we lose our "iron fist." We give up our unchallenged authority and claims of absolute righteousness in our confrontations with our children. And children in this family system type give up relying on their parents to solve all their problems for them, and must begin thinking and making decisions for themselves. As for "permissive parenting" advocates, we give up our weakness, our helplessness, our inability to provide our children with the strong, confident, limit-setting parents they need. And as challenging as this will be in an established permissive system, the children must learn to give up getting their own way most of the time. In both camps, we each give up our easy way out of conflicts with our children (dominating or submitting), and now must put in the time - negotiation time - in order to help them mature into emotionally strong and capable adults. True, it takes enormous effort to break free from our old habits of dominating or submitting to our children, but the benefits of real conflict resolution - which, again, are engendered through active listening - are immeasurable.

Dr. Gordon explains:

In active listening, then, the receiver tries to understand what it is the sender is feeling or what the message means. Then he puts his understanding in his own words (code) and feeds it back for the sender's verification. The receiver does not send a message of his own - such as an evaluation, opinion, advice, logic, analysis, or question. He feeds back only what he feels the sender's message meant, nothing more, nothing less.

[Active listening] usually starts a chain reaction. The child is allowed to get down to the real nitty-gritty problem that causes him to behave in a particular way. Once the real problem is revealed, an appropriate solution to the conflict almost becomes obvious. [This] actually is a problem-solving process: it generally enables parent and child first to determine what the real problem is, which increases the chances that they will end up with a solution that solves the real problem, not the initial "presenting" problem, which so often is a superficial or symptomatic one.

The following was submitted by a P.E.T. graduate:

DAD: I have a need for us to work out something about bedtime. Each night mother or I or both of us have to nag you and worry you and sometimes force you to get you into bed at your regular time, eight o'clock. I don't feel very good about me when I do that and wonder how you are feeling about it.

LAURA: I don't like for you to nag me . . . and I don't like to go to bed so early. I'm a big girl now and I should be able stay up later than Greg [brother, two years younger].

MOTHER: You feel we treat you the same as Greg and that to do that isn't fair.

LAURA: Yeah, I'm two years older than Greg.

DAD: And you feel like we should treat you older.

LAURA: Yes!

MOTHER: You have a good point. But, if we let you stay up later and then you fool around about going to bed, I'm afraid you'll really be very late getting to sleep.

LAURA: But I won't fool around - if I can just stay up a little longer.

DAD: I wonder if you might show us how well you can cooperate for a few days and then we might change the time.

LAURA: That's not fair either!

DAD: It wouldn't be fair to make you earn the later time, huh?

LAURA: I think I should be able to stay up later because I'm older. [Silence.] Maybe if I went to bed at eight and read in bed until eight-thirty?

MOTHER: You would be in bed at the regular time but the lights could stay on for a while and you could read?

LAURA: Yeah - I like to read in bed.

DAD: That sounds pretty good to me - but who is going to watch the clock?

LAURA: Oh, I'll do that. I'll turn the light off right at eight-thirty!

MOTHER: Sounds like a pretty good idea, Laura. Shall we try that for awhile?

In this example of effective conflict resolution - where both sides give a little - we see that each side is willing to hear the concerns of the other. When one party in a conflict will listen to the other and then consider their feelings, the other side will usually respond in kind. As teachers and mentors to our children, we parents must first start the cooperation ball rolling by listening to our children. They can then follow our example, listen to our concerns, and both parties can come to a reasonable solution. As for the aforementioned bedtime conflict, the father reports that they had very few bedtime problems thereafter. Occasionally they would have to remind their daughter to turn out the lights at eight-thirty, but she always accepted this without a fight - that is, after her parents mentioned that she agreed to this compromise and actually helped to create it. In fact, the daughter is the one who came up with the solution of reading in bed for an extra half-hour each night. Her main concern was that she "should" be able to stay up a little longer than her brother, who is two years younger. Like all emotionally healthy children, she is naturally pushing to expand her boundaries on her march toward autonomy in adulthood (I decide when I go to bed). And her wise parents agreed with her.

I must tell you, from one parent to another, that of all the Building Blocks of Emotional Nourishment discussed in Empowered Parenting, validation is the one that we need to pay particular attention to. This is it! Effective validation for our children's emotional reality and life experience is the parenting trait that allows us to break the "cycle of negation": an unhealthy energy that has run rampant in parent/child relationships throughout the ages, and has forced children to conform to parental and societal expectations at the cost of their "authentic selves." It is our one chance to give our children support for the self-generating internal resources they will need to be able to reach for the stars. It's true, their lives may be substantially different from ours: different thoughts, different feelings, different dreams, different political views, different religious views. But it is within their uniqueness that we will find our children's supreme value. Unique thinkers are often the ones who create the greatest value in our world. Because of their original ideas - such as, advancements in medical treatments and vaccines, new techniques to increase farm yields, the creation of and advancements in new technologies, the revolution in psychological thought over the past century, and so on - our lives are significantly improved. Beyond what a unique thinker can accomplish, the rareness of a human being who is deeply in touch with who he or she is as an individual, and who possess a burning desire to give of him- or herself to family, friends, and the community at large, is a uniqueness all its own. It took me ten or fifteen years of intense "feeling work," mainly through the use of therapeutic grief meditations, to unloose the shackles of emotional repression that were keeping me from expressing my authentic self to the world. And it was the invalidation of my core "self" in childhood, due to severe parental neglect of my developmental needs, that was keeping me "from myself" and my dreams.

To be sure, all the other Building Blocks are valid and necessary in their own right. If a parent is giving a child very little attention, for example, there will be few opportunities for parental validation of the child's experience of being human. Through the proper understanding and use of the vital concept of validation, however, we parents can offer our children the most beautiful gift that one human being can give to another: ACCEPTANCE. Or unconditional love, as some call it. Most psychologists agree that parental acceptance forms the foundation on which our emotionally vulnerable children will learn to accept themselves just as they are, with all their weaknesses and shortcomings. This acceptance will enable them to focus on their strengths and abilities, rather than obsess over the real or perceived "flaws" that we all possess. If our children are to live emotionally balanced lives filled with peace of mind about who they are, arriving at this state of self-acceptance is crucial. A strong acceptance of "self" is what allows people to follow their "life quest," as they fulfill their unique human roll by making their unique contribution to the world.

We humans are emotion-charged beings. Emotions are the electricity that powers every human endeavor. It is our emotional commitment to our lives that motivates us to work at getting our various life needs met and achieving our goals. Our children express their emotions with every breath of their lives, in every thought, word and deed. We all do. There is no getting away from the emotional reality of being human. We feel and express a wide range of emotions in our communications with other people. On some level, all of our thinking is emotional. We "think" joyfully, for example, when we are envisioning our dreams or feeling love for our friends, spouse, or children. At other times we "think" aggressively, like when we are angry at an injustice that has been done to us; or with sorrow, when we are dealing with the loss of a loved one. And in what we would consider to be our more mundane thoughts, planning our day, for instance, there can be rushes of emotion as we try to juggle the demands of modern life. "Will I be able to get all my errands done and still make it on time to pick up my son from soccer practice?" we wonder, with some anxiety. Or when we struggle over something like a "sterile" mathematical equation, there can be angst as we forge ahead, and satisfaction when it is solved. Even when we think we are resting from the pressures of daily life, while sleeping, our dreams are filled with emotions of all shapes and sizes (although when we can't always remember them).

We humans also hear with "emotional ears." Really "hearing" another person's emotional reality is what allows us to connect with them, through our shared experience of being human. As discussed, our children pay particular attention to our emotional cues and naturally look to us for confirmation of who they are. So every utterance, every look, every emotional exchange has relevance to them. We parents are what psychologists call "source figures" to our children. That is, we are the source of most of what they will learn about the emotional reality of being human and how to feel about themselves as individuals. We are the ones who will teach them their important life lessons (hopefully), such as, how to feel valuable and necessary to themselves and to the world of people (self-esteem), how to feel comfortable with who they are (self-confidence), and how to emotionally connect with others (empathy). Whether we know it or not, we are continually sending messages that either "confirm," "deny," or "ignore" our children's emotional experience - and thus who they are! So every parent needs to make a conscious decision about how well they intend to nurture their children's developing emotions. We all make this choice on an unconscious level, which is largely determined by how well we were nurtured in childhood ourselves. Wouldn't it be better for our children if we brought this important life decision up to the level of conscious thought?

All of our emotions, when felt and expressed in healthy ways, have value for our physical and emotional survival. Our children therefore need to have all their feelings validated - even the so-called negative ones - in order to learn how to express their full range of emotions and to become emotionally whole adults. Healthy anger is our dignity emotion; it lets us know when we are being used or neglected. Sadness and crying provide ways to grieve our losses and disappointments. Our fear protects us from danger. Healthy shame is the basis for our conscience; it lets us know when we have erred. Our enthusiasm propels us to activity. And our joy enables us to celebrate life.

In his book, Creating love, John Bradshaw discusses the critical nature of having our emotions validated in childhood, using the word "soulful" to describe a state of being that fosters healthy love for ourselves and others:

Children need to have their emotions recognized, named, and affirmed . . . As you looked into your source-figures' faces, you were psychologically born. Your original oneness with yourself was either soulfully mirrored and validated or rejected and invalidated [or neglected and invalidated]. If your source relationships were soulful, your relationship with yourself became soulful . . . If your self-relationship is soulful, you can create soulful love relationships with friends, lover, and spouse [and children].

When we experience a loss, for example, we now understand that it is important to deeply feel the resulting sadness and grief "all the way through," instead of trying to avoid it by either not thinking about it or becoming involved in some activity. This catharsis is what helps us get beyond our grief, so that we can move on to other things with a lighter heart. When our children are sad, they need us to be "with them" in their sadness for a time and not, as most of us were taught, immediately try to cheer them up. Because if we don't allow our children to experience their normal human sadness fully at the appropriate times - before the cheering-up process begins - it will likely foster in them some of that "unfinished business" we've heard so much about: the emotional baggage that we all carry, to some extent, that hampers our ability to build and maintain successful human relationships. Sharing our children's sadness supports their natural grief process and gives them time to finish a particular piece of "business," no matter how trivial their disappointment may seem to us. Of course, we will want to tailor our validation of their sadness to the degree of their loss: more time and support for more serious losses (the loss of the child's best friend, who has moved), and brief periods for those that are less consequential (the child can't go to the circus with his friends because it is sold out).

For validating our young child's sadness, we can use words like: "I see how sad you are about . . . I feel so badly for you, Sweetheart. Would you like to tell me about it?" Depending upon the child and the circumstances, it may take a few trys to elicit a response, or they might open up right away. Either way, when they begin confiding in us, the next step in validating their sadness is to do a lot of listening. Of course, it is also helpful to include "physical validation" by holding them, rubbing their backs, and so forth, if they are receptive to it. Psychologists tell us that many adults suffer from a kind of "skin hunger," or the need to be physically comforted a great deal, because of a lack of this kind of physical validation in childhood - which children not only need during sadness, but at any and all times. (Another reaction to touch deprivation in childhood can be found in adults who do not like to be touched at all because it feels alien to them.) It's true, we can't force our children to open up to us and accept our validating emotional support. But if we will keep trying, ever so gently, they will usually avail themselves of our comfort and understanding (if not this time, then next). After we have listened for awhile, we can add more input: "It's okay to feel sad sometimes. In fact, it's good to feel your sad feelings when something bad happens. If you'll let me, we can feel sad together for awhile. In time, you'll feel better. You'll see." As all parents know, except in cases of trauma, tragedy, or clinical depression - in which case the help of a good professional becomes necessary - it is tough for a kid to stay sad for too long. Our children will let us know when their sadness has passed and they are ready to move on to more optimistic pursuits. And they will be able to do so with a refreshed spirit, after we have supported them in the expiation of their sadness using effective validation.

Although it is considered by some to be a negative emotion, anger is a normal and necessary part of our human emotional make-up. In its healthiest manifestation, anger is our dignity emotion. When our human dignity is being challenged in some way, our anger is stirred within us and we say, "Hey! Wait a minute! That's not fair!" Our anger is often ignited when there is an injustice in our midst, and can motivate us to action both for ourselves, and in its highest form, for the sake of others. In its dysfunctional form, however, misdirected and unrestrained anger is the cause of many of society's ills. If this trend is ever to reverse itself, we parents must learn to do a better job of understanding and nurturing this powerful emotion within the lives of our children, as well as within ourselves.

Early childhood is the best time to help our children learn how to express their anger in appropriate ways. Good anger lessons early on will help them avoid many problems later in life. An essential element of teaching good anger management is learning how to confront our children's fury without becoming (too) angry ourselves. Because if we don't, we are defeating our own purpose by modeling poor anger control, a trait they will likely copy. One difficulty in dealing calmly with our children's anger is the fact that we never know when an emotional outburst is coming. As we have all experienced, everything can be going along just fine for hours, then POW! A tantrum is thrust upon us, without warning. At times, it feels as though we've had a bucket of cold water splashed in our faces. And for many of us, our normal reaction is to get mad over this "disturbance to our peace." For those of us who have a tendency to become angry whenever there is disruption in the household, we have to be willing to learn new habits, more consoling habits, when dealing with our children's rage. We must also be willing to drop whatever we're doing, whenever possible, and tend to our child's current anger issue when it occurs. Timing is everything. It is the child's angry outburst that determines when their anger management lesson will take place. Of course, it is also helpful to talk to him (or her) about it after he has calmed down. But if he is to derive the greatest benefit, we must seize the moment and confront his anger at its inception.

As is the case with so many aspects of effective parenting, helping our children learn to manage their anger is a question of balance. Teaching anger management involves modeling both the use and control of our own anger, the validation of our children's healthy anger, and the moderation of their out-of-control anger. For some children, anger is a powerful internal force that troubles them (and we parents) throughout childhood. Their anger overwhelms them, for example, when they can't have what they want or when they have to do something they do not want to do. If these volatile children are allowed to express their anger without restriction, however, it only fuels their raging because they are not being taught the emotional skills they need to be able to calm themselves down.

Anger is actually a secondary emotion to the sadness and hurt we feel when we do not get our way, or when we perceive that our dignity is being harmed. My own daughter is a good case in point. Although her anger management skills are continually improving, I watched her anger repeatedly overwhelm her in a dramatic way, when she was between the ages of one and three years old. The anguish that she felt and expressed when, say, she had to leave some place where she was having fun was incredibly powerful. She would clutch herself, hunched over, and with bended knees, let out guttural sobs and loud "N-o-o-o-o-o-o-o's," like her disappointment was killing her. I could see that, in some related way to her emotions, it was actually physically painful for her. I could also see that she was trying to deal with her inner turmoil the best way she knew how, even as she continued to beg and sob not to leave. But armed with new knowledge from a variety of parenting sources, my daughter's intense anger was something that I learned to prepare myself for. When we parents accept the fact that there is always the potential for a tantrum within our young children, it helps us avoid being thrown off balance when they inevitably occur. Parental unpreparedness is often what causes us to react to our children's tantrums or defiance in ways that are not emotionally beneficial to them or to the parent/child bond. It is also important to remember that learning self-control can be a particularly arduous process for some children, and one that may take them many years to master. So, within limits, I let Camille have her anger when she needs to. Because allowing our children to express their "appropriate" anger when it occurs is shown to have the best overall effects upon their ability to manage their anger throughout their lives.

When we validate our children's aggressive feelings - in age-appropriate ways - we are simply acknowledging their right to feel angry about being denied what it is they want, or do not want to do. At certain ages, for example, throwing temper tantrums is normal behavior. And it is important that we parents understand that fact. At this developmental stage, our children do not yet possess the emotional skills to be able to calm themselves down when they are upset, so tantrums are to be expected. But it is our job to teach them self-control, and not make matters worse by screaming at or hitting them. In this way, our children will acquire a valuable tool that will serve them well throughout their lives. If we simply force them to calm down when they are tantruming with threats or the use of punishment, we are robbing them of the experience of learning this necessary life skill for themselves.

A prime component in the lesson of self-control is helping our children learn to focus their attention on that little voice of "sanity" within them that says: "Is this thing that I want and can't have, or this thing that I have to do and don't want to do, really worth getting so upset about? Is it worth the headache I'm feeling? Is it worth being this miserable over?" This internal voice is what psychologists call the "observer," the core part of our being that, when developed in a balanced way, helps us monitor and direct our behaviors from within. It is the part of us that allows us to step back, if you will, and observe what we are doing in any particular situation, rather than merely being a slave to our emotions. Our "observer" is what stops us from over-reacting in a moment of passion, and keeps us from saying and doing things that we know we'll be sorry for later. We as parents must therefore learn to validate our children's healthy anger as we help them focus on their "observer" within - and do it without becoming too angry ourselves. It is no easy task. But it is the only way that we can teach them how to have their anger available to them when they really need it - like when young boys are insisting that our adolescent daughters have sex with them, even though they don't want to, or when our sons turn down a dangerous dare because they have their anger available with which to resist negative peer pressure. And at the same time, we are teaching our children how to carry themselves beyond their anger, when they are in the midst of an emotional upheaval.

Allowing our children to express their anger in appropriate ways, even toward us, is a major step in helping them learn to manage this explosive emotion. When they do become angry, it is an important parental task to learn how to validate their anger without giving in to them. With young children, we can say things like: "Boy, you sure get mad when you don't get your way, don't you? It's okay to be mad at me, but you still can't have (so and so) because (of whatever reason). But it's not okay to break things or name call (or whatever it's not okay to do in your household). Maybe you need to go to you room for some quiet time to help you calm down." (Note: Removing children from the situation and giving them quiet time in order to calm down was the original idea behind "time out." It has since evolved into yet another form of punishment. Better than screaming, threats, or using violence as discipline, no doubt. But using "time out" as discipline was not its original intent.)

A major difficulty in teaching our children good anger management is that their anger management lesson is happening while a great deal commotion is going on. Everyone is talking much louder than usual, with parents becoming ever sterner as the problem persists. Sometimes I have my daughter look in the mirror when she is having a temper-tantrum and say: "Wow! Look, Camille! Look how angry you are! You can sure get angry when you want to." This usually snaps her out of it for a moment, which is the essence of what I'm trying to do: slow down the runaway freight train of emotion within her and get her focused on a way out of her temporary emotional prison. Then I tell her (loudly, of course): "It's okay to be mad for awhile; we all get mad sometimes. But then let's figure out how to fix your problem, or discover something else to do (other than the thing you are being denied)." With this part, I want to show her that being angry is a normal and necessary part of her emotional life. Sometimes I even look in the mirror with her and offer to have an "angry contest." I say: "Look, Camille. I can get madder than you can." Then I go into my foot stomping and crying and shouting routine, always being careful not to mock her. Occasionally this shocks her out of her rampaging emotions, which are temporarily on automatic, and back to a state of self-control. It even makes her laugh sometimes, which is a great antidote to anger run amok. To be sure, it often takes more than this to calm her down when she is in the midst of a serious tantrum. And so I keep working with her, always directing her toward that little voice inside her head, her "observer," that can help her calm down. In various ways, I repeatedly ask her if her temporary obsession is really worth getting this upset about. Sometimes I allow her to work through her anger on her own, hoping she'll find her "observer" within to use to calm herself down. If she cannot calm down in a reasonable amount of time, however, I continue to help her through her anger.

A different anger problem that some people face is the inability to express their healthy anger at all, or to a small degree, at best. In some ultra-religious households, for example, where anger is seen as one of the seven deadly sins, children are often forbidden the expression of their anger. And in families where children are terrified of one or both parents because of their volatile personalities, many children will learn to stifle their anger so as not to elicit their parent's rage. These children who are not allowed to express their anger often develop the problem of repressed anger, which is carried with them into adulthood. Then, for some, their inability to identify, express, and sometimes even feel their anger causes them to put up with being used, physically abused, or having their "rights" continually trampled upon without protest. As with a woman who repeatedly returns to an abuser, their anger is simply not available for use to protect them from harm. This emotional mindset of being willing to put up with abuse for "love" is also caused by deep-seated feelings of self-worthlessness within the individual. That is why psychologists call anger our "dignity emotion"; it protects our sense of self-value.

John Bradshaw writes:

Children cannot always have what they want, but their anger needs to be acknowledged. Anger is the stuff of revolutions and the passion for confronting evil and injustice. Without anger a child becomes a doormat and a conforming people pleaser, often standing up for nothing. This is what every patriarch [authoritarian parent] wants - a person who obeys and will not make waves.

When children consciously suppress their anger because of fear of parental disapproval or reprisal, it causes that anger to become bottled up inside. It has to go somewhere, so it goes "in" instead of "out." In this type of family system, the repression of anger often becomes a habitual, unconscious act that takes place within these fearful children. And when carried into adulthood, their stored anger is the cause of a variety of emotional and even physical problems for many such people. For some adults, fits of rage over small injustices is one way that stored anger eventually reveals itself. Have you ever seen someone "go ballistic" over nothing? That's often repressed anger rearing its ugly head. It is not just the current dilemma that is causing the over-reaction in such an individual. Rather, it is an expression of the current problem mixed with all the unresolved anger they carry inside them. Many of these people tend to "gunnysack" their anger, as it is referred to in psychological parlance. That is, they don't express their more moderate and appropriate day to day anger when offenses (or perceived offenses) occur; but rather, store up grievances against individuals and the world at large. Then finally, when they can't take is any more, there is "one small straw that breaks the camels back," and they are pushed over the edge into a fit of rage. If you are the person who happens to be the cause of that last straw, it is you who will be the object of their fury.

Recurrent raging behaviors in adults are also the result of suffering a great deal of humiliation and loss of dignity in childhood because of the "shaming" and blaming behaviors of parents or caregivers, peers, or other unmonitored adults in isolated situations, as well as the use of violence as discipline. In conjunction with the repeated modeling of raging behaviors by one or both parents, this type of early dehumanizing treatment - all forms of invalidation - can cause an individual to develop what we all know as the stereotypical "hot temper" or "volatile personality." Severe emotional neglect in childhood also causes internalized rage within some individuals, and has similar effects to direct emotional and physical abuse. Much of the raging that I did as a young man was the result of this kind of emotional neglect during my childhood, which was compounded by direct shaming and blaming by my mother. Most of the time growing up, I was emotionally ignored. And at those rare times when I did get attention, it was usually negative attention. As a result, I became angry at the world (as well as chronically depressed) for much of my early adulthood. When I lashed out at people from time to time, it was because of the extreme desperation and loneliness that I felt inside, not the relatively minor offense that was "committed against me." (Of course, big offenses really set me off.) So beyond setting limits on our children's anger, it is also important to keep in mind that dehumanizing scolding and punishment, the modeling of out-of-control anger, and emotional neglect will all likely contribute to some degree rage build-up within their psyches.

The balancing act of effective parenting again reveals itself in regard to a rarely discussed issue. It is clearly our job as parents to limit our children's boundaries, allowing them to expand in age-appropriate ways that are conducive to their emotional health and growth. Our use of the word "No" is our first line of defense in insuring that these boundaries are adhered to. There is, however, another crucial factor in teaching children the essentials of good boundary setting. And though it is a seeming paradox; within limits, it is also important to allow our children to say "No" to us about certain less important issues in their lives. By doing so, we are validating their right to have their own boundaries. Indeed, our children are separate, autonomous beings, and will one day need to rely on their own good boundary setting skills in order to maintain healthy relationships. Carefully enabling our children to expand their "emotional power base" by allowing them to have more autonomy is an effective way to accomplish this goal.

In some ways, it appears as though the "parenting pendulum" in our culture has swung too far in the direction of permissive parenting. And it is more likely than not that we parents will hear our children say "No" to us far more often than we would like. All new parents soon discover that their children have a natural affinity for saying "No." They regularly defy us, and try to get out of doing what they either need to do or we want them to do. There are scores of times when our children do not know what is best for them, and we have to assert our authority. (A through discussion of boundary setting and enforcement follows under the Building Block heading: Structure). But the converse bares mentioning because there are still great numbers of parents who adhere to the old parenting model of demanding strict obedience from their children - no matter what - which robs them of the valuable lessons of learning how to make their own decisions. Simply put: Allowing our children to establish their autonomy and practice their decision-making skills by refusing some of our directives prepares them for life because it teaches them to set their own boundaries. And since setting good personal boundaries hinges on our ability to say "No" to ourselves and others, children must practice this skill in order to perfect it. If we parents make all of their decisions for them, how will our children ever learn to make good ones on their own? Children who are not encouraged to feel confident about making their own decisions often flounder as they mature. Lacking the emotional skills they need to make their own decisions and set firm boundaries, as more responsibilities and expectations are heaped upon them, they are unable to successfully address the myriad problems of adolescence and young adulthood.

Psychologists tell us that a common aspect of all addictive behaviors is a core inability to say "No" to life-damaging activities. Whether it's alcohol, food, running up our credit cards, early sexual activity, or what have you, our inability to delay gratification by saying "No" to ourselves often becomes our biggest obstacle to personal happiness and the attainment of our goals. "I have met the enemy, and it is me" rings all too true for so many of us. Therefore, allowing our children to retain some of their natural feelings of autonomy by giving in to them sometimes in areas of less importance will bolster their ability to say "No." So that later on, when they are under the gun of peer pressure, they will be more confident in saying "No" to activities that are detrimental to their physical and emotional well-being. Or when they feel like buying something they can't afford, eating that second piece of cheesecake, or running to the store for yet another six-pack of beer they don't need, they will be better able to say "No" to themselves.

John Bradshaw writes:

The Terrific Twos marks the beginning of solid selfhood . . . The child starts saying "No" and this is wonderful. If we allowed children to say no the way nature and God designed it, we wouldn't have as many molested children and we wouldn't have [had] to have a national campaign to teach teenagers to "just say no" [to drugs].

Child molesters are like hunters going after prey. A man convicted of child molestation once told me that he learned to look for the most needy and most obedient child on the playground. [Because a child who is denied his autonomy by rarely being allowed to say "No" to his parents or caregivers is more likely to go along with a stranger].

It is also important to validate our children's excitement and enthusiasm for life, without being too rigid about a clean house, clean clothes, or too much noise. It is all too common for people to lose their natural sense of fun and joy for life when they move beyond childhood and into the responsibilities of adulthood. For many of us, much of our loss of spontaneity has to do with the burdens of survival and the witnessing of so much suffering in the harsh reality in which we live. I firmly believe, however, that validating our children's zest for living will greatly increase their chances of maintaining that enthusiasm throughout their lives. A good validation message for our children's enthusiasm, in addition to their joy of achievement, would be something like, "Wow! You're really having a great time with that project. I'm so happy for you, the way you enjoy your school work so much." Then, we must listen intently and give them effective feedback as they tell us all about it. For empathetic, emotionally attuned parents, this is as natural as breathing. My hope is that for some other parents who do not use much validation with their children, this will serve as a valuable reminder to help us realize that all children need praise, appreciation, expressed love, and emotional support in order to maintain a hearty spirit. It may be a difficult adjustment to make - giving our children warm emotional input when we are not accustomed to doing it. In time, however, with enough patience and practice, all but the most severely dysfunctional parents should be able to supply their children with genuine validation for their inner lives, as well as their outer accomplishments.

Another critical factor for parents to consider in regard to validation is the need to tailor our validation messages to a child's particular developmental stage. Validating a two-year-old's anger during a temper-tantrum as we try to propel him toward a state of self-control is appropriate and effective. For a fifteen-year-old, however, validating a tantrum of this magnitude is probably not the best way to promote his emotional growth. Conversely, expecting a two-year-old to have the same degree of self-control as an adolescent is unrealistic. And insisting upon it will cause our toddler to suffer harm to his emotional health.

On developmentally appropriate validation, Virginia Satir writes:

To validate a [child], parents must be able to recognize when a developmental stage has been reached and so appropriately time the validation.

• They must not expect the child to be five when he is eight or eight when he is five.
• In other words, for validation to be validation, it must fit the needs, abilities and readiness of the child. And the acknowledgement of this validation must be clear, direct and specific.

If a parent does not validate a child's ability, or inappropriately times his validation, the child has trouble integrating the ability. It remains a fragment of the "unimportant me" or the "inadequate me" or the "secret me."

Parents may:

• Fail to see abilities when they are obvious, or give no opportunity for their expression, or show no approval . . . when the child manifests them.
• See abilities prematurely and anxiously urge their expression
• See abilities incorrectly (abilities which are simply not there) and anxiously urge their expression
• See abilities but discourage or punish their expression.

At this point, it should be noted that validation in no way gives a child carte blanche to get away with anything that he or she pleases. Virginia Satir has these words to insure our thorough understanding of the purpose of validation - that it does not mean a completely open, anything goes parenting style:

Parental validation does not imply uncritical approval of everything a child wishes to do. Parents are the socializers; they must teach the child that he is not the center of their world or of the world at large. He must learn to fit in with the requirements of family living, how to balance his needs with those of others, how to fit into the demands of the culture. He may scream and complain at restrictions and rules, but accepting restrictions and learning rules is part of growing up. "Restrictions" and "validation" are not opposing terms. Nor does parental validation mean intense, over-solicitous attention to a child's every need. Parents are people, too. Johnny may be ready to walk, with mother's encouragement, but mother, at the moment, is busy at the stove.

In the family system in which I grew up, parental ability to validate their children, both for their achievements and for their experience of being human, was all but nonexistent. Although, as a young child, I do remember my father complimenting and praising me from time to time for my accomplishments or abilities. I also recall having the feeling that he loved me, just because I was his son, just because I was me. But it wasn't a very strong feeling within me, I believe, because he was so distant or preoccupied most of the time. But it was there. He never verbalized any of his feelings of love for me, but I could tell from his occasional nonverbal cues that he did have loving feelings for my brothers and me. As I began to mature, however, and especially after he and my mother's divorce, over the long term, his interest in his children became less and less and his admittedly limited validation of us all but disappeared. Even when I was going through years of chronic depression in early adulthood, he never came to seem me to encourage me, or just to show his emotional support by being there.

The unusual thing about my father's minimal praising of me is that I never really "believed" him, anyway. In other words, I never felt that I or anything I did had any value. I now understand the reason behind this. Consistent with birth order theory, I was taking my emotional cues primarily from my mother because I was a second born child. This is not merely some abstract concept that I read in a book and am arbitrarily applying to my life. From as far back as I can remember, I always felt as though I was on my mother's "side" in the marital dynamic (which, sadly, allowed her to readily use me in her emotional war of attrition with my father during their marriage). And it was her opinion of me that counted, not my father's. But my mom doesn't "do" validation, and as a result, I always felt "invisible" to her. As I'm sure she will tell you, however, I didn't give up my need to be acknowledged easily. For years, I continued to fight for every scrap of attention that I could get from her, even if it was negative attention (which it usually was) - in order to try to feel "visible," like I counted for something! Had I known what I know now, I could have saved myself a world of grief. The self-absorbed have only one validation agenda - their own. So even though I couldn't believe my father's positive comments about me because of the emotional conditioning coming from my mother, I have to give him a great deal of credit for his limited attempts to emotionally nourish me. Because his loving emotions are so repressed, it is amazing that he could even do this much. It was the only parental praise that I remember receiving as a child, and I do appreciate it.

Typically, first born children identify with the father, second born children, like me, with the mother, and third borns with the marital relationship, often emotionally rising and falling with its success or failure. As more children are born, this rotation continues. Only children take on parts of all the birth order rolls. If you will look closely at your family system and those of your friends and relatives, you should be able to witness this for yourself. And though it may not be readily observable in every case, it is uncanny to see just how often it is. My younger brother, Matthew, was a third born. And though I always suffered because of our parents' failed marriage, I believe that it affected him even more deeply than it did me. When I first read about birth order theory, it immediately struck me that the dissolution of our parents' union was probably a contributing factor to his self-inflicted "corporal dissolution" in early adulthood. Because of his birth order position, on an unconscious level, he was more strongly identified with the marital dynamic. And in some way, in conjunction with all the emotional neglect that he suffered as a child, because the marriage couldn't go on, he couldn't go on either.

As I think about the emotional nourishment that was rarely forthcoming from my parents to my brothers and me, I am still dumbfounded by it. My intent is not to be harsh. But to this day, I sometimes wonder, "What is wrong with these people? And why did they bring children into the world, if they were just going to allow them to stumble, falter, and even die from a scarcity of nurturing?" I suppose the answer lies in their emotional dysfunctionality, their unpreparedness in regard to their parenting abilities, their lack of commitment to improving their emotional health in order to properly nurture their children, and their inability to "see" any of this.

Years ago I would confront my mom, from time to time, about her inability to listen to me - merely listen to me when I talked to her. That's all. Predictably, as with so many parents who have fragile egos to protect, she would deny any and all fallibility in herself and her parenting skills. (Everything that my daughter tells me about my "lack" as a parent - that is, in regard to my ability to fulfill her emotional needs, and not in the realm of "buying her things," or other such areas of little importance - I intend not to deny, but will consider and deeply examine. She knows better that I how she feels in regard to the emotional nourishment that is or is not forthcoming from me. Learning to face the pain of my own human fallibility was the key that unlocked this attitude in me, which, ironically, made the associated pain and discomfort go away! I also used to play the denial game in order to protect my own weak ego. Fortunately for my child, it is no longer necessary.) As for my mother's inability to listen, in particular situations, she always had an excuse as to why she could not. She was always "busy" doing something else when I tried talking to her, mundane things like putting away the groceries, which she gave as her reason why she was unable to listen "right now." Then, when I would wait for her to stop what she was doing so that she could sit down, get comfortable, and thus become "ready" to listen, her response was not much better. Telling her my "news," as I looked into her eyes, I could see her become uncomfortable with our eye contact. Then, after a process of repeatedly looking at me and looking away, she would always get to a point where she was mostly looking away, then appear to mentally drift off. This would cause me to repeatedly ask her, "Are you listening?" At those times, I believe that she was actually trying to listen to me; she would even give the occasional obligatory nod or "uh-huh" as I was speaking. But there was always some kind of invisible wall between my words and the emotional receptors within her brain. Even if I discovered something phenomenal and won a Nobel prize, all the response that I would get from her would be one or two sentences (maybe five or six for a world-renowned cancer cure) of congratulations. Then the conversation would bounce back to her, about how "she knows someone who has cancer," or whatever. This emotional dysfunction is so profound within my mother that it must have arisen at a very early stage of her emotional development. During her psychological birth, she needed a "source figure" to give her eye contact in order to mirror her emotionally reality - something her own emotionally distant mother was incapable of giving her. I believe this to be the root cause of her emotional or "conversational" self-absorption. She can be very generous in other areas of her life.

Beyond my mother's inability to listen, her inability to emotionally support and validate other human beings, even her own children, is deep-seated and all-pervasive. In my mother's family system, this trait is inexorably tied to their problem of self-absorption. She and her siblings had self-absorption and the resulting inability to listen modeled for them by their domineering mother; their father, my grandfather, was meek and passive and stayed mostly in the background. As difficult as it is for me to believe, when you converse with my mom, she uses virtually no acknowledgement phrases to let you know that you are being heard. I'm talking about simple phrases, such as: "Oh really?" or "You did?" or "Oh, I see." They are simply not part of her emotional vocabulary. Her conversational style is still very disconcerting to me. She just waits until you are through speaking (sometimes), then continues on about herself, often with little or no acknowledgment that you said anything at all. It's really sad that her mother was not able to listen to and validate her feelings as a child, and that this trait was passed on to her. It has been a detriment to her life and her relationships. I feel badly for her, for the person she could have been, for the emotional life that could have blossomed within her had she been properly nurtured. It's funny, however, when I talk to my mom now; even though it's tough to get a word in edgewise, there is more emotional nourishment coming from her than I have ever experienced. She's really trying. She even says "I love you" at the end of our telephone conversations. And stunned, I say it back.

Although she has begun to let her guard down and take an honest look at herself and her family system, all of these observations were routinely denied when I was a young man looking for answers. I occasionally pressed her for validation of my observations during my late teens and early twenties, sometimes quite angrily, I'm sorry to say. This was years before my emotional recovery, when I was still desperately searching for some kind of emotional support for my existence from at least one of my parents. And I must admit, I gave them an extremely hard time about it. As I write this now, I have virtually no anger at either one of them for their inability to validate me; I just think it's sad. But I barely even feel sad about it any more. At the time, however, I was suffering badly. And it made me very angry with them that they continued to deny me. I pushed my mom over and over for years, looking for answers as to why she did not give me the expressed love and emotional support I needed. One day she couldn't take it any longer and finally blurted out angrily, "I'm not demonstrative, okay? I'm just not a demonstrative person!" And the discomfort, anger, and embarrassment with which she said these words showed me that, or at least as I understand it now, just how deeply buried those feelings are within her. At a core level, she feels profoundly embarrassed about expressing her loving emotions, and is ashamed that she cannot. But on a conscious level, she just accepts this about herself and will not face the reality that her emotional neglect, however unintentional, caused harm to her children. It is simply too painful. So she will not look at it! Introspection, for her, is as scary as death; in this case, the death of the false self-perception that she uses to get through life with such a severely damaged psyche. So I know that for her to admit there was this large piece of emotional functionality missing from her life - when she said, "I'm not demonstrative, okay?" - was a huge step for her. Even though she refuses to accept the obvious fact that it was a detriment to her parenting abilities and therefore her children's lives.

My question for those parents who blindly accept their inability to validate their children's "emotional reality" is this: Would you accept your inability to physically nourish your children? Would you just casually accept the fact that your children were starving to death? Or would you go out and "bust you butt" trying to get food for them, doing whatever it takes, even stealing it if you had to? Look at the world around us. Our children are floundering, beyond childhood and throughout their lives, and even dying for lack of a crust of emotional nourishment. Being "non-demonstrative" to our children is no more acceptable than being "non-food-providing." If we find that we have a problem in this area, we have no choice but to do whatever it takes to learn how to fulfill our children's critical emotional nourishment needs. These are life needs! As much as the naysayers try to dance around this fact, they cannot change it. Just as our children cannot be physically healthy without the proper fulfillment of their nourishment needs; they will never be optimally emotionally healthy unless we fulfill their emotional needs! And if our loved ones tell us that we are not giving them enough human warmth and emotional support - and that it is causing them pain - do we have another choice but to courageously face ourselves and work toward change? Because if we do not, it will take an unspeakable toll upon all of our precious lives. "Man does not liveth by bread alone," a wise man once proclaimed. In other words, beyond our bodily needs, we have inner needs that must be tended to, as well. Sadly, the validity of this statement is proven to us each and every day - mostly through negative examples of what happens to people when their emotional needs are not fulfilled in childhood.

Our failure to listen to our children is a cultural and institutional product of our less enlightened past, ala, "children should be seen and not heard." Thus, my mother learned it from my grandmother, my grandmother from her mother or father, or both, and on back for many generations. When my grandmother was still alive, the conversation would occasionally turn to the topic of psychology. Many times, I recall her saying, "I don't even have an ego." She always pronounced it "egg-o." And it was strange; none of her adult children ever corrected her so that she would know how the word was actually pronounced. (I always got the impression that they were just humoring her most of the time, and didn't really care much about what she said. Quid pro quo?). So on some level, this woman, who was born during Sigmund Freud's lifetime, recognized her primary emotional dysfunction as a human being: no well-developed, balanced sense of self on which to base her existence, or from which to emotionally nourish her children. Her weak, poorly defined "self" was needy and craved constant attention, like a child, which formed the root cause of her self-absorption and inability to listen. Unfortunately, however, she did not see he lack of an "egg-o" as a problem. But rather, believed that it was something to be proud of, like it made her humble or something.

Coming from a family system where listening was neither modeled nor taught has caused me to focus on this area within myself. Consequently, I have had to do a great deal of work in order to make improvements in my own listening skills. And though I still have an enormous amount of work to do, I have made great strides. I'm not sure why, but thank God or genes or luck or what have you, at least I feel comfortable telling Camille that I love her. I also enjoy teasing and tickling and playing with her (my parents also have little capacity for spontaneous fun and play). But in the area of listening and validation, my main problem is giving her the attention she needs when she needs it - even if it's only for a minute or two. Mine is a timing problem. Like my mother, I tend to be preoccupied and hyper-focused on what I'm doing, even mundane things. And sometimes my daughter has to make far too great an effort to get my attention.

A short while ago, for example, as I pulled my vehicle into the driveway after a long day at work, I began gathering my things from the car. I like to take everything in at once so that I do not have to make a return trip. Just then, my beautiful daughter came running up to me in a state of pure joy. I usually get an excited greeting from Camille when I return home from work, but today she was particularly exuberant. As she approached, she shouted, "Mommy enrolled me in dance class today, and I got a new leotard and a new tutu and everything!" Looking at it after the fact, I can see that I reacted in a way that was similar to how my mother reacted to me when I needed her attention in childhood. (The difference is that I realized it and tried to change it). And it was an eye-opening experience. As I continued to gather my papers, I did at least say "That's wonderful, Sweetie Pie!" But I didn't look at her when I said it. I was focused on making sure that I had gotten everything from the car - only for five or ten seconds. But it was in that ten seconds that I had "lost" the connection with my child because of my lack of an immediate response. Getting out of the car to hug her, I could see that she was in a daze. As I watched her stare into space, I realized that I had missed my moment to validate her joy. I continued to hug and congratulate her, but to no avail. Her trance state continued. Even when I followed her into the backyard, where she resumed play with her friend, I could not revive that exuberant state with which she originally greeted me. Some of you may say that we can't drop everything instantly every time our child needs our attention, which I agree with. My point is that, in this case, which was more important? Avoiding another trip to the car, or giving my child the attention and validation she was seeking? I opt for the second! Had I listened effectively to what she had told me, I would have realized that this was more than the usual greeting. I could have then made an instantaneous decision to forget about my papers, jump out of the car, and give her the emotional nourishment she craved.

With validation, timing is often crucial. This incident showed me that effective listening first to our child's "news" - to discern whether it is worthy of our instant attention - is the initial requirement of effective validation in spontaneous situations. If it is something routine, we can say, "Just a minute, honey. I'll be right with you." But if it's something that is really important (to them), we can drop what we're doing and give them immediate validation for a minute or two, which is all they're really looking for. Many of us have to improve our ability to listen carefully to our children so that, in only an instant, we can decide which is which. It is a habit that I am determined to learn.

The easiest way to think of validation is in terms of expressed emotional support for another human being's inner experience. Validation is all about the other person, not us. When we are validating someone, we aren't thinking about ourselves at all; we are thinking about the other person and his needs. In fact, this is a good test to determine whether we are validating our child in regard to a particular issue: Are we thinking about our child and what is best for his or her emotional growth? Or are we thinking about ourselves and the easiest way (on us) to handle the situation?

An effective means for understanding the value of validation is to put ourselves in the position of the one who is looking to be listened to and supported. It is also helpful to exaggerate the circumstances in order to heighten our feelings and our reaction, and thus our awareness. Say that we go to a friend with some dramatic news in our lives, good or bad. We knock on his front door, either bursting with excitement or crushed with some tragic news. When our friend answers the door, he is faced with a highly charged, emotion-filled being: us. Now, there are only three categories of emotional response that our friend can give to us. The first is a completely neutral in response. That sounds innocuous enough. But when looked at in terms of validation, a neutral response can be devastating in its impact upon an emotion-charged being. Another word for it is neglect. If you go to a friend in grief or happiness to share your news and he or she completely ignores your powerful news and your emotional state, or at best gives you a one-sentence response. How would this make you feel? What would it make you think about your friend?

The second category of response that we can receive from someone is a negative response, which is characterized by sarcasm or shaming, and always with the denial of our feelings. As I'm sure you can imagine, getting hit with negativity every time you went to your friend for emotional support would not do your self-esteem much good. Imagine what it does to a child, whose self-image is still being formed and thus highly susceptible to outside influences. (The negative effects of sarcasm, shaming, blaming, and denial of our children's emotions will be explained, further on, in the chapter entitled, Some Specific Causes of Low Self-esteem.) Besides, you can find another friend, which you'd be well advised to do. A child can't pack his things and move to another family with more supportive parents. When he's not being supported in the home, there is nothing he can do about it (except unconsciously "warp" his emotional reality in order to try to feel that he and his thoughts, feelings, ideas and opinions MATTER).

Which leaves us with the third and only acceptable response that we can give to other people, especially our children, when they come to us in a spirit of good will to share their life experiences. Or even when our children are giving us problems along their journey to emotional maturity, we can meet their negativity with positive emotional support in order to lift them up, as opposed to sinking down to their level. In our example, if our friend is emotionally attuned to other people (possesses well-developed empathy), when we arrive at his door in a heightened emotional state, he will be able to tell from one glance that we are filled with emotion. If we are suffering, he will quite naturally ask, "What's wrong?" Or if we are exuberant, he will say something like, "You look positively ecstatic! What's the good news?" He will then listen to us and validate our experience, as well as share in our delight or sorrow. He will also listen to and validate the more mundane issues in our lives, as we will do for him.

In the field of psychology, there are a few well-known issues concerning validation that are fairly obvious to most parents. But because of the invalidation that some of us received in childhood, we carry internalized feelings of shame in regard these issues and thus may have difficulty validating our own children in the following areas. Validating our children's instinctual drives of orality, defecation, and sexuality (psychological jargon mentioned earlier in one of John Bradshaw's quotes) means helping them learn to deal with the realities of being an animal, for lack of a better term - or maybe "biological entity" sounds better to those of us with more delicate sensibilities - and all that our biological functions and drives entail.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, believed that all children progress through consistent, identifiable stages of emotional development that are related to specific physiological characteristics of each stage of human growth. First comes the oral stage, where an infant's primary focus is on his mouth (orality). Via the intake of nourishment and the warmth and closeness of mother's breast, the child's core feelings of love and attachment, quite naturally, come through his mouth and the satisfaction he receives there. Freud theorized that if there is any substantial interference with the flow of nutrients into the child's mouth or access to the comfort of mother's breast, disruptions in the early development of the child's personality will likely result. Then, these early "traumas" manifest later in life as neurotic and/or moral anxiety (what we now call emotional dysfunctions), and, if not addressed, may haunt the individual throughout his life. Freud also devised similar theories in regard to his second stage of child development, the anal stage, when a new focus on the muscles that are used for bowel control occurs within the toddler. Freud believed that either extreme of a too rigid and harsh method of potty training, or conversely, an oversolicitous attitude by the parent toward the child during this learning period, may also cause anxiety that will likely be carried within the individual into adulthood.

In recent years, much has been made about Sigmund Freud's oral and anal theories. My dad's third wife, for example, has picked up on these ideas and turned them into a thinly disguised game of putting others down by classifying them as either "anal" or "oral." To her, "anals" are emotionally repressed people who have little capacity for spontaneity and fun in their lives. "Orals," on the other hand, have a natural zest for living, are free and open about their sexuality, and are emotionally warm and generous people. (All of which shows me that she doesn't understand Freud's theories). Of course, she proudly considers my father and herself to be of the more desirable "oral class." But from the perspective of a son who has received little attention, expressed love, or emotional support over the years from his father, I would have to disagree. It is clear to me that he is highly repressed, emotionally. I must admit that as the emotional leader of the relationship, she does bring out these qualities in him. From my experience, however, very little of his warmth and exuberance is spontaneous or self-generated. She is the catalyst that enables him to express his feelings - in response to her feelings. This is typical codependent behavior (I discuss Codependence, in detail, in a following chapter of the same name), which helps me understand why he cannot handle being apart from her for any length of time. When he is away from her, it must feel as though a part of him is missing.

The best known of Freud's anal and oral psychological concepts, anal retentiveness, reached the point of absurdity some years ago with Phil Hartman's portrayal of the Anal Retentive Chef on NBC's Saturday Night Live. As Phil approached every task on his mock cooking show in an ultra-fastidious fashion, he had many of us laughing at his performance. Even the food scraps that he threw away had to be triple wrapped in aluminum foil, plastic wrap, then placed in a paper bag and folded neatly before they could be discarded. In fact, Phil's character was so obsessed with neatness and cleanliness that he never had time for actual cooking; each show was comprised solely of the Anal Retentive Chef disposing of cooking scraps "properly." And though some of us found his portrayal quite amusing, for those people who are trapped in their obsessions of orderliness and perfection - in order to feel a sense of control in their lives - I presume that Phil's characterization of a compulsive personality was difficult to watch.

Numerous viewings of Phil Hartman's Anal Retentive Chef eventually made me curious about the origins of the concept, and I began to investigate. After reading Sigmund Freud's anal and oral theories, as well as many extrapolations by others in the field of human psychology, I am not quite sure about how many of their details represent what actually happens to our children's psyches when they are treated as such during breastfeeding or potty training. But the general principles ring true to me. I read about cases of children who used their bowels as a means of protest against how they were being treated by their parents. One young boy, who would not evacuate his bowels for four or five days at a stretch, found at least one way to control and change his parents' insensitive attitude toward him. With his resulting distended stomach, his parents became very concerned about their son's condition and sought out treatment, first from medical doctors, and when they couldn't help, from psychologists. In his own way, the boy was forcing his parents to treat him with the care and concern that all children so richly deserve. In another case, after already being successfully potty trained, one young girl reverted to an earlier stage of development and began to defecate only in bed or while fully clothed, often in public. Because her emotional developmental needs were not being fulfilled in her current stage of growth, she made a "decision" not to use the toilet at all, and reverted back to an earlier developmental stage of needing diapers. As with the boy, she forced her parents to show her the attention and compassion that she needed in order to feel safe and loved.

In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson writes:

If outer control [of bowel regulation] by too rigid or too early training insists on robbing the child of his attempt gradually to control his bowels and other ambivalent functions by his free choice and will, he will . . . be faced with a double rebellion and double defeat. Powerless in his own body (and often fearing his feces as if they were hostile monsters inhabiting his insides) and powerless outside, he will again be forced to seek satisfaction and control either by regression or by false progression. In other words, he will return to an earlier, oral control - i.e., by sucking his thumb or becoming whiny and demanding; or he will become hostile and intrusive, using his feces as ammunition and pretending an autonomy, an ability to do without anybody to lean on, which he has by no means really gained.

As Erikson's words suggest, psychologists interpret a bowel dysfunction, if there is no apparent physical cause, as symptomatic of deeper emotional problems within the child - which is usually an expression of a larger disorder within the family system and the way the child is being parented. In the case of anal retentiveness, where parents use punishment and humiliation to toilet train their child, the result may be an individual who has compulsions in regard to order and cleanliness. In a household of the other extreme, where the child "controls the parents" and is basically king of the house, the effect of an oversolicitous potty training method produces the opposite effect, the anal expulsive personality. As in other areas of child rearing, these parents use begging and cajoling to teach their child bowel control, with marked fluctuations in their emotional state, depending upon whether the child "succeeds" or "fails." According to Freud's theory, anal expulsive people tend to be disorganized, sloppy, and overgenerous. And though he was probably not writing with Freud's theories in mind, Neil Simon's Felix Unger and Oscar Madison of The Odd Couple fame aptly describe the anal retentive/anal expulsive dichotomy.

Since neither of these parenting styles is particularly healthy for children, what we are left with for a potty training method is validation. Validating our children's elimination habits (defecation) is as simple as not making a big fuss over "the mess they made" when we are changing their diapers (which some people do), or shaming them for wetting the bed or not making it to the toilet on time (which some people do). Moreover, in the beginning, giving our children praise when they succeed (urinating and defecating in the potty), as well as understanding and emotional support when they "fail," helps them integrate and accept the admittedly distasteful reality of being an animal who must expel the waste products from his nutrient intake in order to survive. Our defecation habits are a highly personal issue for most of us. Even for the emotionally healthiest among us, it is natural to want privacy while performing this necessary biological function. Given its sensitive nature, when children are potty trained with little patience and understanding, it can be especially traumatic for them. And as psychologists theorize, may contribute to a variety of emotional dysfunctions within their lives. I agree completely, with the addition that children need to be treated with the utmost patience and understanding in all areas of their lives.

My observations of older people, who belong to a generation or two before mine, leads me to believe that, in the past, it was more common for children to be shamed for things having to do with the genital and elimination areas of their bodies. One rather bizarre example of this involves my mother-in-law. Over the years, she and my own mother have been the principle caretakers of our daughter while my wife and I are away at work. One day, we came home to discover that there was an incident with Camille that was very upsetting to my mother-in-law. As we entered the house, she blurted out the following: "You can fire me if you want to, but I spanked Camille today. I caught her peeing in the backyard, and I told her that she was a nasty girl and I spanked her." My mother-in-law knows that we don't allow people to spank our daughter, and she was more than a little worried that we would be mad at her. Well, my reaction was not to get mad. I just wanted to find out what happened and then rectify the situation. So I said, "Well, did you ask Camille why she was doing this?" "Um, no," my mother-in-law replied. Clearly, the next thing to do was to ask Camille why she was peeing in the backyard; maybe she had a legitimate reason, from the perspective of a three-year-old, that is. So as my wife talked to her mother about not shaming our child with physical discipline and name-calling, I proceeded to the back of the house to talk with Camille. It turns out that she had seen our dogs doing this, and was pretending that she was a Yorkshire Terrier. Actually, this made perfect sense to me, and we had a pretty good laugh about it. I told Camille that it was okay to pretend that she was a doggie, but it was probably not a good idea to pee in the backyard. I also told her that her "Nonie" was sorry that she spanked her and called her a nasty girl (I hope I was right. My wife's mother kind of clammed up about the whole thing. Which, to me, indicates a lot of shame about the situation).

Several days later, when I looked out of the window and saw Camille again peeing in the backyard, I realized that I had not done a thorough enough job of explaining to her why she shouldn't. It was really quite comical, watching her. She was crouched down behind the porch so that no one could see her, with her eyes darting around to insure that she wasn't being watched. I waited until she was finished so as not to startle her, then had another, more emphatic talk with her about her bathroom habits. I told her that, for people, toilets were much better than using the grass for peeing. And I explained to her why. I also pointed out that, although she thought that no one could see her, I could see her. And that the neighbor over on the other side, where she was not looking, could probably see her, too. And thus ended Camille's minor escapade of peeing in our backyard like a Yorkshire Terrier.

In regard to orality, there appears to be far fewer feelings of internalized shame within people about this part of the body than are caused by the opposite end of the gastrointestinal system. So there are usually fewer discomforting "issues" surrounding orality within the psyches of most parents. Early mother/child bonding through breastfeeding, however, is a critical area in the emotional development of our children, so it does bear mentioning. After leaving the protection of the womb, mother's breast becomes the infant's new lifeline to her, both physically and emotionally. And thus, infants use breastfeeding for both sustenance and security. Or, where breastfeeding is not possible, this lifeline is established through the use of the bottle, with baby cradled securely in mother or father's arms in order to simulate breastfeeding. If, instead, an infant is bottle fed at a slight distance from the caregiver, the same degree of intimacy and resulting feelings of assurance in the child may not occur.

Erikson writes:

At this point [the infant] lives through and loves with his mouth; and the mother lives through and loves with her breasts.

Psychological theories of orality tell us that if there is an early impediment to an infant's closeness with mother's breast or the flow of milk into his mouth, the child may develop oral-passive characteristics. This can happen, for example, because of difficulty in suckling, if a mother lacks gentleness in her nursing habits, or through pyloric spasm, where food is expelled shortly after it is taken in. If this is an infant's experience, because of his frustration, he may develop an excessive dependence on others for comfort, as well as an exaggerated need for oral gratification. When carried into adulthood, these heightened oral cravings are made manifest through excessive eating, drinking, cigarette smoking, and the like. These self-destructive habits are an expression of the classic feeling of never being able to get enough to feel satisfied inside. Not matter how much a food addict or alcoholic puts into his system, it is never enough. Or no matter how much a "shopoholic" buys, the need to buy still more never subsides. The ability to gratify our needs with more moderate doses in all areas of our lives - physically, emotionally, and spiritually - is the key to balanced living.

Between the ages of five and eight months, infants begin teething. And their natural tendency is to bite down on things to alleviate the discomfort in their gums. What more opportune object is there to bite down on than mother's nipple? And thus, according to theory, anyway, the oral-aggressive personality may develop because of too early weaning, before the child is emotionally ready to separate from mother's breast. These children are apt to chew and bite on things well beyond the teething stage, which may be expressed through classic pencil biting, excessive gum chewing, and even biting other children. In the emotional realm, they tend toward verbal aggressiveness, sarcasm, and have difficulty letting go of arguments.

Again, I'm not so sure how much of this is an accurate description of personality development within human beings. Common sense, however, tells us that gentle and thorough validation for our children's orality must surely be the right way to go in order to avoid any of these potential problems. Fulfilling our children's oral needs through ample time with the breast or bottle, then, is the first step in satiating those needs. And the importance of a gradual weaning process cannot be overstated. Mothers who abruptly return to work, for example, without providing a patient, gentle, caring, "mother substitute," who physically cuddles and holds the child with the same or greater frequency and tenderness that she does puts her child at risk for some form of separation anxiety. In a perfect world, willing mothers could stay home with their children for as long as needed. The next best thing for those mothers who either want or need to work, however, is to make a slow, methodical transition back to the workplace.

As our children mature, the next step in good oral validation is to ensure both their proper nutrition as well as dissuasion from an "emotional attachment" to food, especially junk food. And though an abundant supply of milk to an infant may indeed be beneficial, in this land of plenty in which we live, it is vital that we teach our children moderation in their eating habits. Unbalanced "oral habits" in our culture are responsible for a variety of health risks for both children and adults. Eating disorders and obesity are among the largest contributors to an unhealthy America, with alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking not far behind. Therefore, one practice that we parents should avoid at all cost is giving our children food for comfort when they are feeling upset or lonely. When our children are sad or frustrated, the consistent use of the old standby, "Do you want some ice cream, Sweetheart? That will cheer you up," is no longer considered to be an effective parenting strategy. Instead, if we will teach our children to face their painful feelings head on, as opposed to "escaping" through their comforting junk food favorites, both their emotional coping strategies and their physical health will be greatly enhanced. In one poll, the favorite taste among American teenagers was found to be "grease and salt": potato chips, French fries, fried children, and so forth. This does not bode well for the future health of our children's cardiovascular systems.

A particularly bad habit that many parents have inherited from our forefathers is making their children "finish everything on their plates" at mealtime. Although it served a useful purpose at one time, when food was scarce. The main problem with food in western culture today is that people eat way too much, not too little. Because this practice disrupts a child's normal feelings of hunger in relation to his or her food intake, in this era of overabundance, its effects can be disastrous. And so, the delectable treats that beckon to us from billboards, bakeries, restaurants, magazine and TV ads, and the grocery story isles speak more loudly to those people with desensitized physical and emotional inhibitions against gorging themselves. In this way, teaching children to continue to eat when they are no longer hungry may contribute to a weight problem sometime in the future.

Another issue concerning our children's orality is to be careful not to tease or shame them if they suck their thumb, pacifier, or even drink their bottle longer than "normal," as a way to get them to stop. My daughter drank milk from a bottle, for example, slightly over twice as long as is standardly advised. (My wife had difficulty breastfeeding, so we used the bottle. She felt duly guilty as a mother for not being able to breastfeed. But I told her to "Forget about it. If it's not working, it's not working.") Of course, what with we humans being the busybodies we are, several of my wife's "friends" made some behind-the-back comments about it. One woman in particular, whose criticizing habits have reached monumental proportions, was aghast at this. (By the way, this woman is an equal opportunity "shamer"; she shames everyone. Although, it's funny. I've never heard her criticize herself.) She managed to "break" her child from the bottle by the age of eight months. I wonder what she thinks is so distasteful about a child taking milk from a nipple (not even a human nipple) that she would deny her child this pleasurable activity and describe its cessation as breaking a bad habit. Personal issues about orality would be my guess. I'm also curious if she bottle fed her child out of necessity, or rather, because of internalized shame about breastfeeding. When my wife expressed concern about what this woman was saying, I told her to just do what she felt was right (in conjunction with me), and to heck with what other people thought. Every child is unique. And when Camille stopped taking milk from a bottle and began drinking it from a glass, it was easy for her because she was ready. We didn't have to "break" her from it.

As for developmental sexuality, this is a subject that entire books are written about. The reality of our children's sexuality is an area that tests the metal of most parents. It is therefore an issue that we must prepare for by arming ourselves with as much knowledge as possible. In her book, Conjoint Family Therapy, Virginia Satir writes of the sexual and gender realities of human life and the importance of recognizing those realities and validating them for our children:

Many people, when they think of families, think of them merely as small groups made up of individuals performing similar or interchangeable role-functions. Family members are not sexless, ageless bodies interacting. They are adult males and females interacting with little males and females. The whole world is made up of males and females. The most psychologically influential roles people play are sex-linked roles. Males are somebody's son, somebody's brother, somebody's boyfriend, somebody's husband, somebody's father, etc. Females are somebody's daughter, etc.

Virginia Satir, who is universally recognized as a pioneer in Family Systems Theory, believes that there are two primary areas in which a child needs to be validated: as a masterful person and a sexual person. She first recognized these separate yet interconnected aspects of our inner lives when she noticed that it was relatively common for people to be functional in one area, while they remained dysfunctional in the other. In childhood, becoming a masterful person entails learning the increasingly complicated skills of taking care of ourselves in the physical world: feeding ourselves, potty training, dressing ourselves, and so forth. But self-mastery also includes emotional lessons, such as, learning to get along with others, how to make decisions, how to reason and problem-solve, and how to deal with frustrations and disappointments.

In Conjoint Family Therapy, Virginia Satir discusses the various details of validating our children's emotional lives in these two areas. As to becoming a masterful person, she writes:

[The child] will develop esteem about himself as a masterful person (able to do for himself) if at least one parent validates his developmental growth.

As the child grows and learns, he becomes increasingly able to do more things for himself. He can feed himself, go to the toilet by himself, tie his own shoes, anticipate and avoid dangerous objects; in other words, he can handle his own body in relation to the environment and he can manipulate objects.

Mastery grows to include the ability to make decisions, to reason, to create, to form and maintain relationships, to time needs in relation to reality, to plan ahead, to tolerate failure and disappointment.

As Virginia Satir points out, some individuals have a mastery over a number of areas in their lives - career, friendships, rational decision making abilities, and so on - yet struggle in the area of sexuality or gender issues. These run the gamut from not even feeling comfortable with one's own sexuality - which often results in the individual avoiding all sexual contact - all the way to reckless, even self-destructive sexual "acting out," with the individual using multiple sex partners as a means to feel loved (confusing sex and emotional intimacy). Others use sex for such things as a way to dominate and exert power over others, to get even with a controlling parent, to attempt to build self-esteem, and so on.

It is also common for people to be relatively functional with their sexuality, yet have little mastery over other areas in their lives. This was a particular problem for women in previous generations. In a male-dominated work world, with few options available for supporting themselves, women were routinely encouraged to use their allure as a career opportunity. Hence, many women became trapped in loveless marriages for the sake of a "meal ticket." Another problem for these women was that, as we all know, physical beauty fades. Especially today, in an era of societally acceptable divorce, woman who use their allure to land a good husband are routinely abandoned for a "newer model," one who possesses the kind of beauty they once had. And when these women do not possess a mastery over their ability to provide a living for themselves, many will suffer dramatically for neglecting this aspect in their lives. Fortunately, female expectations and roll models have changed significantly in recent years. And young girls are being encouraged to learn to take care of themselves, financially, instead of being taught to allow men to do it for them (This is a theme that my daughter will here from me again and again throughout her life: education, education, education). Moreover, with the advent of birth control, family leave laws, and a new attitude toward motherhood, women are largely freed from the fear of a career-ending pregnancy. And now able to decide when they will have their families - often waiting until they have built a career and worked through many of their emotional "issues," thus maturing to a point of readiness - planned parenthood creates a better environment for the emotional health of everyone in the family, especially our children.

Quite naturally, sex and gender issues are an enormous curiosity to children. Indeed, they become interested in gender differences as soon as they notice them. Children play gender role-playing games almost from the time when they can walk and talk. For example, while playing "house," they take on the rolls of mother, father, even the male and female children. And as our children mature, they begin to show a keen interest in their sexuality, which is revealed in endless discussions about who of the opposite gender they think is cute, who "likes" whom, who's going steady with whom, and on and on. And then there's the "I'll show you mine, if you'll show me yours" curiosity games that so many young children play - and so many parents dread. If we catch our children doing this, the point is to not shame them for it. Shaming children for their sexual curiosity can cause them to feel ashamed of their normal human sexuality. And when carried into adulthood, this internalized shame can wreak havoc upon their adult sexual relationships. Instead, we can validate their curiosity, while at the same time teach them that it is not appropriate to show their private parts to others. If our children are playing these games, it is a good indication that it's time to begin telling them about anatomical differences between boys and girls. Then their need to see it for themselves will usually decrease. Conversely, the more we try to hide sexual issues and shy away from sexual discussions with our children, the more intensely curious they will become.

Whereas only one parent is needed to validate a child's mastery, it is necessary for both parents to validate a child's sexuality and gender identity. Because our human gender identification functions in relation to the opposite sex (for heterosexuals), healthy gender messages and modeling must come from each parent. That is why organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters of Americasm and other mentoring programs have proven to be so useful for children who are missing a same sex role model. These "substitute mothers and fathers" (my characterization) model their gender's adult behavior for children directly, as well as in relation to the opposite sex.

On sexual identity and functionality, Virginia Satir writes:

A child will develop esteem about himself as a sexual person only if both parents validate his sexuality. He must identify with his own sex, yet the very identification must include an acceptance of the other sex. Males validate females as females, females validate males as males. Identification, in this sense, is a two-sided affair: I am a male in relation to females. It is good to be a male because of what females are.

It is also important for parents to present a united front in regard to sexual matters, as well as model healthy validation for each other's gender identity, in order to strengthen their children's gender identity and influence healthy sexual development. Mixed messages from parents about sexuality are extremely confusing for children, whether from one parent or between the two. Virginia Satir observes that children pay keen attention to the sexual messages coming from both mother and father. And that if those messages are substantially different, how such children will be faced with a monumentally perplexing challenge, as they try to integrate the numerous issues concerning their own sexuality:

The child asks himself, in effect: How does mother (or father) react to the fact that I have genitals, that I manifest sexual feelings (in masturbation, nocturnal emissions, erections, etc.), that I manifest sexuality toward others (in sex play, kissing, petting, and later on, in intercourse)? How does mother (or father) react to my interest in toys ["boy toys" vs. "girl toys"], my choice in clothes, my fights with boys [boyfriends or girlfriends]?

This the child can size up for himself because it is a matter of fairly direct experience.
- He listens to what each says to him. Mother may tell him it is not natural to masturbate. Father may tell him there is no harm in it.
-He listens to what each says about him to the other. Father may say, "Johnny is a weakling." Mother may say, "He is not. He's just a boy."
-He notes how each behaves with him. Father may laugh when he "plays the field" with the girls. Mother may scold him for kissing any girl.

When the child is thus left with unexplained contradictions, he will try to explain them to himself, often coming up with incomplete or incorrect conclusions. In order to come to conclusions, he may dangerously distort or ruthlessly discard the facts of his experience.

One notable yet rarely discussed aspect of validating our children's gender identity is to indicate to each child that we are supportive of his (or her) gender, and that we are happy he is the one he is. In this age of open gender struggles, it has become acceptable to air our complaints about the other gender. When parents routinely make derogatory comments about the opposite sex (or even their own sex), however, it always takes a toll upon our impressionable young children. Mothers who constantly disparage men, for example, teach their daughters to distrust men and to look down upon them, as they mature into womanhood. If this happens to a female child, then how can she be expected to have a satisfying relationship in adulthood with a member of the opposite sex, someone who she has learned to disparage? And when mothers continually criticize men around their young boys, these boys will likely internalize some degree of self-loathing. They know that they will grow up to be the very thing their mothers despise, so they must also be disdainful in some way. Most of us have either read or heard stories about fathers, for another example, who try to make their daughters into the sons they wished they had - in order to have a buddy to pal around with. These dads involve their daughters in sports, hunting, car mechanics, or other traditionally male pursuits - and thus shape them into the image of a boy. If a young girl becomes a "tom boy," not of her own volition but in order to win the love of her father, she is basically being told that her gender is not okay.

In my own case, I am fortunate to have wanted a girl, then to have gotten one. My daughter loves to hear me tell the story about being in the birthing room when she was being born. And how I was so excited when I found out that she was a girl. She even asks me, "Why are you glad that I'm a girl, Dad?" I answer that I think little girls a really cool. I tell her that little boys are cool, too. But that I just happened to want a little girl more. (Although, for whatever reason I am partial to little girls, I don't tell her that one of the main reasons I preferred a little girl is because the male role models on both sides of my family of origin were so poor that I lacked confidence in being the gender roll model for a male child. As of late, however, with so much emotional growth happening within me, I believe that I would be okay with it.)

Another avenue of healthy sexual growth for our children is to teach them that each and every part of their body is okay. One part of accomplishing this goal is to not make a big deal out of nudity (theirs or ours) during those inevitable glimpses family members catch of one another - while we simultaneously teach them a sense of privacy and modesty. It is also helpful not to make a fuss over "self-touching" by young children (as we all know, there are a lot of nerve endings down there and it feels good to them). As we avoid invalidating their sexuality by making them feel that certain parts of their bodies are not okay, we are indirectly validating their full acceptance of all parts of their bodies. And though all emotionally healthy parents want their children to wait until they are mature and ready before they engage in sexual relationships. Making them feel ashamed of the sexual parts of their bodies is not an emotionally healthy way to achieve this aim - as was commonly done in the past. Instead, teaching our children to feel comfortable with their bodies and their sexuality throughout childhood will help them have a fulfilling, shame-free sex life in adulthood. The issue of waiting to have sex is only one part of the larger issue of healthy sexual development, and we can discourage our children from early sexual activity in healthy, positive ways. Shaming our children in any area of their lives is no longer considered to be a valid part of parenting.

It seems to me that many more members of the older generations were shamed about their sexuality in childhood than happens today. This fact is revealed in some older people's current attitudes about human bodies and sexuality. My mother-in-law, for example, actually becomes embarrassed if Camille has to scratch an itch "down there." She tells her to "stop it!" And that it's nasty. Of course, when I'm around, I tell her not to say this to Camille. And I tell Camille that it is not nasty. Instead, I tell her that it's private, and that it is better to go someplace where people can't see her, if she has to scratch an itch in that location. Another indication of this past generational sexual shaming can be found in my own mother's attitude about certain sexual issues. Ironically, she prides herself on her openness about sexuality, yet became very uncomfortable one day, for example, when Camille began singing and dancing to the infamous 70's disco classic: "Shake, shake, shake! Shake, shake, shake! Shake you're booty! Shake your booty!" She said to me, "Don't you think that it's inappropriate for her to be doing that?" My answer was to join in with Camille's song and dance, with my mom just shaking her head at the two of us, still looking embarrassed, as we danced away. I do, however, agree with most parents that many music videos and other media images have gone well beyond the bounds of good taste and even teenage appropriateness.

According to some researchers, differences in biology are primarily responsible for the distinctive ways that young male and female children express their emotions and interrelate. They say that these physiological realities account for why, say, boys tend to be more rambunctious than girls, or girls less assertive than boys. (I'd like for them to explain my oftentimes aggressive, highly-spirited young daughter, as well as the painfully shy little boy that lives down the street.) Although I believe that there is some validity to these claims, I further believe that enculturization plays a far more significant role in shaping the gender identities of young males and females than many of these old-school theorists would have us believe. New studies have shown, for example, that even in the earliest years, mothers and fathers tend to treat their little boys very differently than their little girls. William Pollack, Ph. D., has coined the term "boy code" to describe the cultural rules by which a boy is restricted in the ways that he is allowed to emotionally relate to the world. And though no one has named it this, obviously there is also a "girl code," the cultural rules that females are expected to live by. These "gender codes" are all-pervasive - familialy, institutionally, and culturally - and are so ingrained in our society that they operate on an unconscious level.

In his book, Real Boys, William Pollak, Ph. D., writes about the genesis of the "boy code" within the psyches of male infants - as a reaction to how they are being treated by their primary caregivers:

What few people realize is that this shame-based hardening process begins as early as the first months of a little boy's life as a narrowing of emotional expressiveness and then continues during early childhood, following boys right through adolescence and manhood.

Research on interactions between mothers and their babies illustrates how the process begins, revealing that, totally unaware of their actions' consequences, generally loving caretakers dampen their sons' sensitive emotional sides. Boy infants, at birth and for months afterward, are much more expressive emotionally than girls - they startle, excite, cry, and fuss more than girls - though caretakers sometimes believe this infant emotionality is a sign of 'fragility' or a lack of self-control, rather than an enhanced communication of feelings.

Haviland and Malatesta, in studies conducted at Rutgers University, found that in order to keep their sons' more volatile emotions in check, mothers tend unwittingly to mimic and overly reinforce smiling in boys while discouraging more unhappy emotions. Hence without realizing it, in their attempt to be 'soothing,' mothers are participating in the earliest phases of emotional straitjacketing in boys - they are teaching them to smile when they may not feel like it!

In general, the researchers found, mothers were far less likely to mirror their infants' unhappy feeling; but when mothers were interacting with infant boys, the mothers were particularly resistant to recognizing their son's negative emotional sides . . . When their sons showed negative feelings, they ignored them altogether.

These studies show that when mothers (and fathers) relate to their infant children, they tend to encourage their infant daughters to be more expressive and relational than their infant sons. As astounding as this sounds, we are already beginning the culturally accepted toughening-up process within the lives of our infant boys when they are in diapers! It's okay for our little girls to cry when they are sad or when they have to separate from mother, for example, on the first day of kindergarten. Yet many of us become uncomfortable or feel ashamed if our little boys do the same thing. Why? Enculturization. We don't want our boys to be a bunch of "cry-babies." We want them to be strong, strong, strong! But what about developmental appropriateness? Just because a five-year-old boy crys because he is being forced to separate from his mother when he starts school, it doesn't mean that at fifteen he's going to be a whimpering jellyfish. Why can't we allow our boys to progress through the stages of emotional growth at the same pace as our girls? Why do we have to toughen them up at an age when they are clearly not ready for it?

Because our culturally hardened young boys are routinely discouraged from feeling and expressing their "weaker" emotions and are instead taught to repress them, they learn fewer emotional skills than girls - and thus have fewer emotional resources available for conflict resolution or even to relate to one another. As a result, they tend to resort to "physical solutions" to their problems, as opposed to using their emotional skills to resolve them. Their depleted emotional skills also cause them to bond with each other in activity-oriented ways, such as playing sports or even just roughhousing, rather than through intimate chitchat, as with girls. To be frank, none of this sounds like biology to me. And although there are surely some mothers and fathers who do not ignore or discourage their male infants "weak" or "negative" feelings, on some level, most of us expect our boys to be emotionally stronger than our girls. So we unconsciously do things like encourage our boys to smile in direct opposition to their sad feelings - expecting them to be tough, even in infancy and toddlerhood - then wonder why males in our society have repressed emotions and use violence as a means of conflict resolution. Indeed, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world!

It is possible for these stealth cultural mores to form within us without our even noticing because in early childhood, when our own gender identity is being "born," our conscious awareness functions at a pre-logical level. At the earliest developmental stage, for example, we can't even differentiate our physical selves from the rest of the physical world. Then somewhere around four months, we begin to realize that our bodies are distinct and separate objects. We notice that if we pinch our leg, it hurts. But if we pinch our teddy bear's leg, we can't feel a thing. And we learn. It is not until we reach the age of between fifteen and twenty-four months that we begin to differentiate our emotional self from the rest of the emotional world. Up until then, there is no perceived psychological separation between our source figures and ourselves; we think we are one and the same. Then, somewhere around four years old, we develop a "conceptual self," with which we can now interrelate the "symbols" that began to emerge in our minds at around two years old. And thus we can formulate more complex ideas about ourselves and the world we live in. As we take on these expanded powers of our new "existential world view," however, we also gain the ability to repress and dissociate our earlier developmental life experiences. So after internalizing all the messages from our parents and society about how we are expected to be as the gender we are - in the early stages of life - we then forget how any of this enculturization happened, as we mature into further stages of emotional development.

Even as we are beginning to awaken as a society about the forced repression of emotions in our boys, the male cultural rules or "boy code" continue to function strongly within "boy society." And the irony is, now that we are finally trying to teach our boys to be as sensitive and in touch with their emotions as our girls, within their adolescent peer groups, for example, all the old expectations about "conquering women" as a way to prove manhood are alive and well - and strongly supported by the grotesque images that they see in rap videos and such that objectify women (and now men) into undulating slabs of meat. These mixed messages are very disorienting for our adolescent boys (and girls), and many less sexually experienced teenage boys still tend toward face-saving fabrications of sexual experiences, and so forth, in order to be accepted by boy society.

In Real Boys, William Pollak writes:

'At school,' Ralph, sixteen, told me [the author], 'they teach us to respect girls. We're supposed to treat them like women. They also teach us about AIDS, which is very scary. They say we shouldn't rush into sex. But, if we do have intercourse, they tell us, make sure you wear a condom. Everybody listens very carefully, and agrees in class. But, then, a lot of guys go around bragging about how many girls they've done it with. Everybody wants to know if you've scored or not. There's just a lot of pressure to have sex with a girl.'

With the emergence of increased hormone production in adolescence, real physiological differences, in fact, do begin to create significant variations between the burgeoning sex drives of our boys and girls. Therefore, some understanding of differences in biology between our male and female teenage children will help us prepare them for the inevitable obstacles they will encounter as they make their way into sexually functional adulthood. For example, there is a reason why most adolescent boys are keenly interested in and continually fantasizing about sex: testosterone. It's true, girls are equally interested in boys, but usually not in the same primal-urge way that boys are interested in girls, because adolescent boys are "chemically motivated" to desire sex! Their obsession with sex is not some sort of mass perversion among the males of our species. There are real substances coursing through their veins that stimulate their intense interest.

An occasional glimpse into male physiology is an eye-opening experience for many women who are prescribed testosterone for medical reasons. As one woman who was given a series of testosterone injections put it, in Ken Wilbur's A Brief History of Everything:

I can't stop thinking about sex. Please, can't you make this stop?

Ken Wilbur goes on to explain, in rather graphic terms, the evolutionary reasons behind the advent of our powerful male and female sex hormones, as well as their effects on our gender differences in regard to how we think about and relate to one another:

Most sexual intercourse in the animal kingdom occurs in a matter of seconds. During intercourse, both parties are open to being preyed upon or devoured. Brings new meaning to "dinner and sex," because you are the dinner. So it's slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am. None of this shared feelings, and emoting, and cuddling - and that about sums up men. [Yet, I wonder how much of this is caused by repressing our boys' caring emotions during childhood].

Studies on testosterone - in the laboratory, cross-culturally, embryonically, and even on what happens when women are given testosterone injections for medical reasons - all point to a simple conclusion. I don't mean to be crude, but it appears that testosterone basically has two, and only two, major drives: fuck it or kill it.

And the female equivalent? We might point to oxytocin, a hormone that tends to flood the female even if her skin is simply stroked. Oxytocin has been described as the "relationship drug"; it induces incredibly strong feelings of attachment, relationship, nurturing, holding, and touching.

And it's not hard to see that both of these, testosterone and oxytocin, have their roots in biological evolution, the former for reproduction and survival, the latter for mothering [and a strong desire to solidify the nuclear family bond in order that mother and children will continue to be protected and provided for by the male].

To make the job of validating our children's healthy sexual development increasingly difficult in our modern era, most parents will agree that there is far too much emphasis being put on sex in our society because "sex sells," as the marketing gurus repeatedly demonstrate. But do they have to use it to sell so many things? And do they have to be so graphic? I suppose that's one of the costs of living in a free society. And I could care less, personally. It's the children that I wish did not have to be exposed to this garbage. No matter how diligently we try to insulate them from the sexually dehumanizing images emanating from Madison Avenue and Hollywood - whose messages routinely cheapen this warm and beautiful aspect of our humanity - there is no way to completely protect our young, unprepared children from the endless barrage of scantily clad women (and to a lesser extent, men) prancing around the television screen, or in still shots on billboards, magazines, CD covers, and so on.

With the recent changes in media ethics, and journalist's ensuing zeal to expose the sexual lives of our public figures, we all watch helplessly as our airwaves become a forum for sexual witch-hunts as a means to gain political leverage - from Supreme Court Justices to Presidents of the United States. We've reached a point that, no matter how intimate or inappropriate for children a public person's sexual activities may be, these supposed journalists, and now congressionally appointed "councils," continue to dig up this filth because there are publications who will print it, and television networks who will air it. I suppose the media is simply giving us what we want, because this tawdry business does increase ratings and magazine sales. My question for the media moguls, however, is this: Regardless of their perceived "moral duty" to expose the sexual proclivities of public officials to we adults, why must our children be privy to this questionable material? Isn't it our moral duty to protect them from being bombarded with the intimate details of our public officials' sexual deviancies? Our children are paying the price because cash is king, and sex means ratings and sales!

In her book, Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher, Ph.D, discusses the negative effects of our culture's degrading sexual messages upon the emotional lives of our teenage girls. And why, because of our unfamiliarity with what it's like to come of age in a more sexually explicit society, we parents are having a tough time relating our own experience of our emerging sexuality to that of our teenagers. She writes:

Because of the media, which Clarence Page calls "electronic wallpaper," girls all live in one big town - a sleazy, dangerous tinsel town with lots of liquor stores and a few protected spaces. Increasingly women have been sexualized and objectified, their bodies marketed to sell tractors to toothpaste. Soft- and Hard-core pornography are everywhere. Sexual and physical assaults on girls are at an all-time high. Now girls [and boys] are more vulnerable and fearful, more likely to have been traumatized and less free to roam around alone.

There are more magazines for girls now, but they are relatively unchanged in the thirty years since I bought my copies of Teen. The content for girls is makeup, acne products, fashion, thinness, and attracting boys. Some of the headlines could be the same: GET THE LOOK THAT GETS BOYS, TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR HAIR, THE BEST PLACES TO MEET AVAILABLE MEN . . . TEN WAYS TO TRIM DOWN . . . WHEN YOU'RE HIGHLY SEXED, IS ONE PARTNER ENOUGH? and ADVICE ON ORGASMS.

A friend told me [the author] about talking to her eleven-year-old daughter about sex. She was embarrassed, but wanted to give her daughter more information than she had received [from her mother]. She struggled through the mechanics of sex and then shared her values about healthy relationships. She confessed that she had had sex before marriage. The daughter listened as her mother shared her sexual values.

An hour later she went into her daughter's room. MTV was showing a nubile young woman clad in a leather bikini crawling all over a muscular young man. She mouthed song lyrics in praise of their sexual experience the night before. The young man had been too drunk to remember, so she was refreshing his memory with salacious details. My friend said, 'I realized then that we were in different worlds with different languages. My daughter could no more understand my shame at being sexual before marriage than I could understand this girl in a leather bikini. It was a hard discovery.'

Mary Pipher paints a grim picture of the minefield that our children must navigate in an age where attracting a member of the opposite sex is presented as the be all and end all of everything. With the increased emphasis being put on sex in our society, many adolescents have come to believe that a boy- or girlfriend is the primary source of their self-esteem. Which doesn't even make sense; the word is self-esteem! And for some, sexual activity is seen as just another harmless pastime. Almost a lark, to be used to attract and keep a boyfriend or girlfriend and to impress one's friends. For this frivolous attitude about human sexuality to be rampant at a time when sex can kill defies all logic.

Alas, these are the cards that we parents have been dealt, living in this time and place. But short of throwing away the television, putting blinders on our children, and locking them in their rooms when they reach adolescence, what are we to do? First and foremost, we must help them deal with the continuing influx of graphic sexual content they face on a daily basis, and to see it in its true light. We as parents must be the voice of reason amidst all the insanity! And if we have been doing a good job of maintaining and even strengthening the parent/child bond throughout their childhood, it will be that much easier to influence our children when they become teenagers - the exasperating time when they think that they and their friends "know it all," and we parents just don't get it! A key factor in helping our children analyze all this misinformation is to begin showing them, right from the early years, exactly what's going on in this sex-mad, materialistic culture that flaunts sex in order to sell its wares: music, booze, clothing, perfume, cars, you name it. We must routinely reinforce our message that Madison Avenue cares nothing about them: not about their health, their self-esteem, their values, their safety. Nothing! Oh, wait. They do care about one thing: their money! They care about separating them from their money. And they will use any legal means necessary to get it!

We parents must battle these media monsters through our continuing validation messages to our children about the precious nature of both their bodies and souls. We must somehow impress upon them the fact that they are not mindless pawns, whose primary function it is to fill the coffers of major corporations. Although my daughter is only five years old, I have already begun to inform her, in a gentle way, about the motivations behind the inundation of fantasy images in toy commercials she sees on children's television. The stronger our validation for our children's sacred nature, the less they will desire all the junk that Madison Avenue wants to sell them - because they will already feel "filled up" inside and will thus not have the same need for it. And the stronger they will be when they reach adolescence and are expected to become sexually active as a way to gain acceptance from their peers. Emotionally healthy children are not as willing to sacrifice their "selves" just to fit in; but rather, their strength of character compels them to follow their own desires! If our validation messages of faith in our children are powerful enough, they will realize, for example, that their ability to attract members of the opposite sex is not the most important thing about them. To some degree, necessary; but far from defining their value as human beings. And if our sincere, loving message truly blossoms within our children's hearts, the constant drone of the media and the voices of their peers will not impact them to the same degree as the child whose parental support and sense of self are weak. This is a battle that must be fought with diligence because the odds are stacked against us. But it is battle that we can win; and with enough dedication, will win!

To end this chapter on validation, I will revisit the issue of parental listening because its importance cannot be overstated. The following was presented to me as an anonymous piece. The author's understanding of the profound value of listening to our children is indeed remarkable:

Will You Please Just Listen?
A Child's Plea to Adults

When I ask you to listen and you start giving advice, you have not done what I have asked.

When I ask you to listen and you start telling me why I shouldn't feel the way I do, you are invalidating my feelings.

When I ask you to listen and you start trying to solve my problems, I feel underestimated.

When I ask you to listen, it does not mean I am helpless. I may be faltering, depressed or discouraged, but I am not helpless.

When I ask you to listen and you do things which I can and need to do for myself, you hurt my self-esteem.

But when you accept the way I feel, then I don't need to spend time and energy trying to defend myself or convince you, and I can focus on figuring out why I feel the way I feel and what to do about it.

And when I do that, I don't need advice, just support, trust, and encouragement.

Please remember that what you think are irrational feelings always make sense if you take time to listen and understand me.

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©1996 Mark A. Reuther, All rights reserved.