Lions From Lambs

We must ensure that children grow up in such a manner as to trust their instincts. We certainly need to teach them good from bad and right from wrong, but we must also teach them to listen to their own intuitions, especially as they grow older. 

We teach children that they are to be nice and respectful, and they should – just maybe not to everyone!

The human brain is a remarkable machine. It quietly works to maintain our bodies’ homeostasis, it allows us to learn things at an incredible rate, and it reacts instantaneously to threats helping us stay safe. It is the last function that matters right now.

From birth to about the age of 12, the human brain is a sponge, soaking up information it receives from the outside world. The part of the brain responsible for this is the subconscious. The subconscious is infinitely more powerful than the conscious.

Although it has many duties, the brain’s primary program is to keep a person alive. To accomplish this, it must be able to take in and process every single piece of information it gets from the person’s experiences in life. 

The brain of a young child – having limited life experience – is on overdrive in this intake and processing of information. Everything they see or hear, be it in person or on television or in music, is going to be filed away and processed as vital data for that child’s survival in the world. 

As complicated a machine as it is, the brain’s way of processing this massive amount of information is unimpressively simple. The brain takes the stimuli and categorizes it as either “good” or “bad.” Good experiences, such as being fed by a parent, being cuddled, or spoken to in a nurturing manner are categorized as good, while loud noises, scary images, and pain are categorized as bad. 

This is a vital function of the brain, inherited from our distant ancestors, for whom, a loud noise or scary sight meant a more powerful animal planning to eat them for dinner. It wasn’t until relatively recently – on the evolutionary time scale – that the brain has had time and education to teach it how to be more discerning in its filing system. 

As late as the 1800’s, a human had to be incredibly alert so as to avoid disaster. We have not had time to outgrow our primal brain. (This is not a bad thing!)

We like to think of ourselves as civilized, but one session of watching the local news awakens us to the cold reality that the world is as brutal – if not more so – than our ancestors dealt with. While we aren’t as susceptible to minor infections or wild animal attacks, we must be constantly vigilant of our surroundings and weary of strangers. This is not a quality we want to remove from children!  

Children are especially vulnerable in this modern age and they need their primal defensive brains to help them discern when they may be in danger. We must teach them to listen to their intuition. We must make sure they trust their instincts and that they know, if something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.

We must also ensure that we are mindful of the manner in which we speak in the presence of children. Their subconscious will take in and file away our every word, even though the child may not even know he is hearing us. Words spoken in anger or overly complaining about the world, politics, or even sports can imbed programming that can cause the child to be overly argumentative, disagreeable, or on the flip side, overly reserved and passive. 

We can’t predict how an individual child’s subconscious will interpret the stimuli she receives from the world. We see it all the time: negative experiences can cause one child to become strong and resilient, while causing another to withdraw and crumble. 

It is our evolutionary duty to provide the children in our lives with a stable, nurturing, and disciplined environment. They need love, compassion, and boundaries. This is the time-honored and proven way to best help a child grow up to be a strong, capable adult who can improve the world. 

The world is not a nice place, and our generation holds more than a small amount of responsibility for that. However, if we do our job right with the next generation…it just might make this world a little nicer!