Reinventing the extended family

When my kids were growing up the woman across the street had six children and the woman around the corner had seven and I had five. It was wonderful to sit and talk and to hold each other’s hands and to cry, to run over there with a load of clothes for their washing machine when mine broke down. I see people not having those kinds of connections.

Things to think about

Does your school or program have a community?
In what ways can you help parents to create that sense of community that has been lost by family members being split up?
Does the community include the staff?

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

World War II was the water shed of a number of radical changes in our society. Hospital technological child birth being one and within about ten years we invented a device which eliminated family talk, talk around the table that fascinates children. We eliminated sitting around the fireside where parents tell their childhood stories. The device is, of course, television. Now, the damage caused by television [and computers] is neurological, and has very little to do with program content. For years the debate about television was over content. Recently, there has been very serious medical and scientific studies coming from Australia, from Europe, England and from people doing research in the United States, not on content, but looking at the damage the device itself causes… The damage that television and computer screens do first of all must be contrasted with storytelling. Narrative story with all its descriptive words comes in as a vibration we call words which demands the brain respond by creating a flow of inner images. Instead we came along with a device which gives both the stimulus and the response as a paired experience coming into through the sensory motor system. The flow of imagery coming in through the sensory system floods the developing brain with a synthetic counterfeit of what the higher brain centers are designed to produce. Therein lays the major damage done. Joseph Chilton Pearce

Sometimes when you have a brand new baby it’s really, really sweet to sit and talk to somebody who’s been through this. You know, my baby’s doing this, my baby’s doing that. I also think that when you have a teenager you want to sit and talk to somebody who has just gone through that or is going through it now. How are things going? Is this the way a 15 year old acts, which is a really hard age? And I think that that’s really, really helpful to be with people. I think you can be friends. When you have a teenager you can be friends with somebody who has a brand new baby but they don’t think their brand new baby is ever going to be a teenager and so it really helps when you’re with people who are going through the same things. I think that sometimes you can commensurate too much and make too much of a deal out of it, but I think it’s helpful. And I think one of the things that I see in this world of ours is that the sense of community is so lost, has been so lost that we don’t have that. When my kids were growing up the woman across the street had six children and the woman around the corner had seven and I had five. It was wonderful to sit and talk and to hold each other’s hands and to cry, to run over there with a load of clothes for their washing machine when mine broke down. I see people not having those kind of connections. A lot of the people come to this school to make those connections and I think how we build this community is really important. You can depend upon me.