Children need solitude – Touch The Future

When you come to visit you see kids in different spaces, places where you hardly knew where they were, under the stairs, up in the lofts, in places where you can be by yourself. I just can’t imagine, I don’t even know what the ramifications entirely of people having people peer at them all the time, not being able to have any kind of privacy. It offers no dignity for the child, a place of your own. Solitude, the ability to be alone, to be satisfied with yourself. A place where you get renewed.

Things to think about

Do you worry about children who are sitting alone? Do you try to intervene?
Do you have places for kids to be alone or even the illusion of being alone?
Do you wait silently for a child to ask for feedback or do you intrude with suggestions?
What does this intrusion do?
Do you regularly spend time alone without interruptions?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

The first time I met Joseph Chilton Pearce I described how attunement or bonding comes in through the senses and telepathically, from the inside out. The attuned child is like a television set and the adult is the broadcast and vice versa, this stream flows in both directions. The program, using a television metaphor, is the moment-by-moment emotional meaning of the adult’s experiences as they move through their day. Is this encounter safe or scary? Do I touch it, eat it, play with it or run away? Every moment this program is broadcasting and is being watched and felt by the child, not just the tone of voice or facial expression, through the senses, telepathically too, shared directly from the inside out.

If we are quiet and listening, not to words but for that quiet inner knowing, this attention we share with children informs us just as much as it provides context, meaning and direction for our children. Attention opens our hearts to empathic resonance. Like radar, we track the physical and emotional states that make up our children’s changing experience moment by moment. And just like being watched, we and our children know when this resonate connection is there or not. We feel safer, seen for who and what we really are. We feel understood and appreciated when the light of shared attention shines. We don’t feel as good when it is not. I can’t help it. I feel sad and sometimes even mad when I see a baby or those big oversized kids slouched in fancy strollers, eyes glazed, staring, Mom or Dad lost in their hi-tech virtual reality, texting, surfing the net, or babbling away like the Mad Hatter. The moment-by-moment meaning of shared attention isn’t there, and neither the adult nor child knows what they are missing. Missing this shared attunement etches its way deep down. This absence of complete attunement is fertile soil for those addictions Gabor Maté writes about in his book; In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

And then solitude is such a, I’ve come to believe that if I could do anything with the list that I have of conditions that have to exist I would move solitude up to almost the top and mostly because of the world we live in. We never have time alone. We don’t respect that in children. I think about myself as a young child and I think I was a very different kind of a kid. I didn’t learn to read really young. Lots of things I didn’t understand. It took me a long time to process things. I weighed less than ___ when I was born so I was a funny little kid. But one of the things that I needed and that I knew I needed, I needed time alone, time to kind of daydream, to be weird, to just sit and be by myself. And I cannot tell you how it shakes me to the very core of my existence to hear people say we have to have all the children in our center, in our vision, always. We always must be able to see all the children. That means that you have no place to get away from anybody. One of the things that I think is really important for kids is cave building, the ability to make a place for yourself, to nest, to make special spaces. We have about 100 old sheets and blankets for which we have a huge staple gun that only adults can use and we have clothespins and when children say I need a space, I need a place, bring the stapler, I need the sheets, we know that they need a space of their own. When you come to visit you see kids in different spaces, places where you hardly knew where they were, under the stairs, up in the lofts, in places where you can be by yourself. I just can’t imagine, I don’t even know what the ramifications entirely of people having people peer at them all the time, not being able to have any kind of privacy. It offers no dignity for the child, a place of your own. Solitude, the ability to be alone, to be satisfied with yourself. A place where you get renewed. A place where there’s no, I guess there could be noise but just a place of your own. And again, when I see the way the world is some of these conditions for human growth, what I do is move them to a different place. But I always had passion way up there. I still believe in it but I think solitude is before that. The ability to be alone and to be satisfied with yourself and how we start that when kids are little is important. A whole lot of adults come home at the end of the day and walk in and turn on the television. Can’t stand to be in a quiet place with their own thoughts, or click on the computer or go to a chat room or email somebody. And I think that we’ll get to a place where we think that, play has disappeared, well also just even being alone, being satisfied with yourself is treated as something absurd. Why would a kid want to do that? Why aren’t you out doing this? And you sometimes see those kids when you watch organized sports. There’s a kid that just wants to be by themselves. Just wants to be respected and honored. I think it’s a really important thing to think about in this time.