Not a parent myself, and all I have is opinions, but one thing I've observed is a very early exposure to science and scientific thinking can leave the child feeling very insecure; every age corresponds to a certain part of the child's development. At its youngest, the child needs to be filled with the "numen" of nature. I remember stamping on a piece of paper at 5 or 6, and my father pointing out that I was stamping on a living breathing tree. I think if you break the poetry, the animism, the flow of connections, like paper functioning as a metaphor for the tree in my case, I think something's lost in the 'Science' of pointing out 'this paper is a piece of paper.' In my p.o.v., astrology makes things easy... if you understand the elemental nature of your child, the direction and approach can provide a positive start. Plus good food! Hitler mentions in his book, parents often try to discipline their child by saying if they disobey, a bogeyman in the dark would get them, etc. and such things instill fear and leave impressions from such a young age, it would be hard to eradicate later. Mythology and heroic stories - used to make living with one's grandparents so indispensable atleast for this!, but now that system has gone in the west. But the stories never die. ; )
This is somewhat related; excerpts from Iain Mcgilchrist's The Master and his Emissary.
Quote :
"From this it follows that in almost every case what is new must first be present in the right hemisphere, before it can come into focus for the left. For one thing, the right hemisphere alone attends to the peripheral field of vision from which new experience tends to come; only the right hemisphere can direct attention to what comes to us from the edges of our awareness, regardless of side. This difference is pervasive across domains. Not just new experience, but the learning of new information or new skills also engages right-hemisphere attention more than left, even if the information is verbal in nature. However, once the skills have become familiar through practice, they shift to being the concern of the left hemisphere, even for skills such as playing a musical instrument."
Quote :
"If it is the right hemisphere that is vigilant for whatever it is that exists ‘out there’, it alone can bring us something other than what we already know. The left hemisphere deals with what it knows, and therefore prioritises the expected – its process is predictive. It positively prefers what it knows. This makes it more efficient in routine situations where things are predictable, but less efficient than the right wherever the initial assumptions have to be revised, or when there is a need to distinguish old information from new material that may be consistent with it. Because the left hemisphere is drawn by its expectations, the right hemisphere outperforms the left whenever prediction is difficult."
Quote :
"The right hemisphere is, in other words, more capable of a frame shift; and not surprisingly the right frontal lobe is especially important for flexibility of thought, with damage in that area leading to perseveration, a pathological inability to respond flexibly to changing situations. For example, having found an approach that works for one problem, subjects seem to get stuck, and will inappropriately apply it to a second problem that requires a different approach – or even, having answered one question right, will give the same answer to the next and the next. It is the right frontal cortex that is responsible for inhibiting one's immediate response, and hence for flexibility and set-shifting; as well as the power of inhibiting immediate response to environmental stimuli. It is similar with problem solving. Here the right hemisphere presents an array of possible solutions, which remain live while alternatives are explored. The left hemisphere, by contrast, takes the single solution that seems best to fit what it already knows and latches onto it."
Quote :
"The right hemisphere sees the whole, before whatever it is gets broken up into parts in our attempt to ‘know’ it. Its holistic processing of visual form is not based on summation of parts. On the other hand, the left hemisphere sees part-objects. The right hemisphere, with its greater integrative power, is constantly searching for patterns in things. In fact its understanding is based on complex pattern recognition. For the same reason that the right hemisphere sees things as a whole, before they have been digested into parts, it also sees each thing in its context, as standing in a qualifying relationship with all that surrounds it, rather than taking it as a single isolated entity. Its awareness of the world is anything but abstract. Anything that requires indirect interpretation, which is not explicit or literal, that in other words requires contextual understanding, depends on the right frontal lobe for its meaning to be conveyed or received. The right hemisphere understands from indirect contextual clues, not only from explicit statement, whereas the left hemisphere will identify by labels rather than context (e.g. identifies that it must be winter because it is ‘January’, not by looking at the trees)."
Quote :
"This difference is particularly important when it comes to what the two hemispheres contribute to language. The right hemisphere takes whatever is said within its entire context. It is specialised in pragmatics, the art of contextual understanding of meaning, and in using metaphor. It is the right hemisphere which processes the non-literal aspects of language. It is also why the right hemisphere underpins the appreciation of humour, since humour depends vitally on being able to understand the context of what is said and done, and how context changes it. Subjects with right brain damage, like subjects with schizophrenia, who in many respects resemble them, cannot understand implied meaning, and tend to take conversational remarks literally. The left hemisphere, because its thinking is decontextualised, tends towards a slavish following of the internal logic of the situation, even if this is in contravention of everything experience tells us. This can be a strength, for example in philosophy, when it gets us beyond intuition, although it could also be seen as the disease for which philosophy itself must be the cure; but it is a weakness when it permits too ready a capitulation to theory. The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction, which, as the word itself tells us, is the process of wresting things from their context. This, and its related capacity to categorise things once they have been abstracted, are the foundations of its intellectual power. The left hemisphere can only re-present; but the right hemisphere, for its part, can only give again what ‘presences’. This is close to the core of what differentiates the hemispheres."
Quote :
"It is the right hemisphere that has the capacity to distinguish specific examples within a category, rather than categories alone: it stores details to distinguish specific instances. The right hemisphere presents individual, unique instances of things and individual, familiar, objects, where the left hemisphere re-presents categories of things, and generic, non-specific objects. In keeping with this, the right hemisphere uses unique referents, where the left hemisphere uses non-unique referents. It is with the right hemisphere that we distinguish individuals of all kinds, places as well as faces. In fact it is precisely its capacity for holistic processing that enables the right hemisphere to recognise individuals. Individuals are, after all, Gestalt wholes: that face, that voice, that gait, that sheer ‘quiddity’ of the person or thing, defying analysis into parts. Where the left hemisphere is more concerned with abstract categories and types, the right hemisphere is more concerned with the uniqueness and individuality of each existing thing or being. The right hemisphere's role as what Ramachandran has described as the ‘anomaly detector’ might in fact be seen rather as an aspect of its preference for things as they actually exist (which are never entirely static or congruent – always changing, never the same) over abstract representation, in which things are made to be fixed andequivalent, types rather than individuals. The right hemisphere is concerned with finer discriminations between things, whether living or non- living. As the more ‘subordinate’ categories become more individuated they are recognised by the right hemisphere, whereas the left hemisphere concerns itself with the more general, ‘superordinate’ categories. In keeping with this, despite the well-known right-hemisphere advantage in dealing with the visuospatial, the left hemisphere is superior at identifying simple shapes and figures, which are easily categorised, whereas complex figures, being less typical, more individual, are better processed by the right hemisphere. In general, then, the left hemisphere's tendency is to classify, where the right hemisphere's is to identify individuals."
Quote :
"Because the right hemisphere sees nothing in the abstract, but always appreciates things in their context, it is interested in the personal, by contrast with the left hemisphere, which has more affinity for the abstract or impersonal.The right hemisphere's view of the world in general is construed according to what is of concern to it, not according to objective impersonal categories, and therefore has a personal quality. This is both its strength and its weakness in relation to the left hemisphere. It deals preferentially with whatever is approaching it, drawing near, into relationship with it. The right temporal lobe deals preferentially with memory of a personal or emotionally charged nature, what is called episodic memory, where the left temporal lobe is more concerned with memory for facts that are ‘in the public domain’."
Quote :
"Interestingly the right hemisphere's concern with the personal past may be directly linked to something else we will come to, its tendency towards feelings of sadness. The right hemisphere prioritises whatever actually is, and what concerns us. It prefers existing things, real scenes and stimuli that can be made sense of in terms of the lived world, whatever it is that has meaning and value for us as human beings. It is more able to assimilate information from the environment, without automatically responding to it, and, possibly as a result, the developing right hemisphere is more sensitive to environmental influences. At the same time the left hemisphere is more at home dealing with distorted, non-realistic, fantastic – ultimately artificial – images. Because of the right hemisphere's openness to the interconnectedness of things, it is interested in others as individuals, and in how we relate to them. It is the mediator of empathic identification. If I imagine myself in pain I use both hemispheres, but your pain is in my right hemisphere. ‘Self-awareness, empathy, identification with others, and more generally intersubjective processes, are largely dependent upon ... right hemisphere resources.’ When we put ourselves in others' shoes, we are using the right inferior parietal lobe, and the right lateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in inhibiting the automatic tendency to espouse one's own point of view. According to Simon Baron- Cohen, the right hemisphere is engaged even in listening to words describing the mind, such as ‘think’ and ‘imagine’. But the right hemisphere will empathise with, identify with, and aim to imitate only what it knows to be another living being, rather than a mechanism – a point of interest in view of the roles we have seen the two hemispheres play in the division of the world into the animate and the inanimate."
Quote :
"Insight is also a perception of the previous incongruity of one's assumptions, which links it to the right hemisphere's capacity for detecting an anomaly. Problem solving, making reasonable deductions, and making judgments may become harder if we become conscious of the process. Thus rendering one's thought processes explicit, or analysing a judgment, may actually impair performance, because it encourages the left hemisphere's focus on the explicit, superficial structure of the problem. So the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome. The right prefrontal cortex is essential for dealing with incomplete information and has a critical role to play in reasoning about incompletely specified situations. The right hemisphere is able to maintain ambiguous mental representations in the face of a tendency to premature over-interpretation by the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere's tolerance of uncertainty is implied everywhere in its subtle ability to use metaphor, irony and humour, all of which depend on not prematurely resolving ambiguities. So, of course, does poetry, which relies on right-hemisphere language capacities. During ambiguous stimulation of perceptual rivalry (the phenomenon of an ambiguous figure that can be seen in one way or another, but not both simultaneously) right frontal cortex is more active. Blurred or indistinct images are not a problem for the right hemisphere, but are for the left. One of the most consistent early findings in hemisphere specialisation was that whenever an image is either only fleetingly presented, or presented in a degraded form, so that only partial information is available, a right-hemisphere superiority emerges – even when the material is verbal. In some subtle experimental work Justine Sergent was able to demonstrate this and its converse, namely that when images are presented for longer than usual, thus increasing their certainty and familiarity, a left-hemisphere superiority emerges, even when it comes to face recognition. The ‘functions’ are not arbitrarily housed together in this or that hemisphere: they form, in the case of either hemisphere, aspects of two whole ways of being in the world."
Quote :
"Although relatively speaking the right hemisphere takes a more pessimistic view of the self, it is also more realistic about it. There is evidence that (a) those who are somewhat depressed are more realistic, including in self-evaluation; and, see above, that (b) depression is (often) a condition of relative hemisphere asymmetry, favouring the right hemisphere. Even schizophrenics have more insight into their condition in proportion to the degree that they have depressive symptoms. The evidence is that this is not because insight makes you depressed, but because being depressed gives you insight. Insight into illness generally is dependent on the right hemisphere, and those who have damage to the right hemisphere tend to deny their illness – the well-recognised, and extraordinary phenomenon of anosognosia, in which patients deny or radically minimise the fact that they have, for example, a blatant loss of use of what may be one entire half of the body. The more we are aware of and empathically connected to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, the more we are likely to suffer. Perhaps to feel at all is inevitably to suffer. The Greek word pathe, feeling, is related to pathos, an affliction, and t o paschein, to suffer: the same roots are in our word ‘passion’ (and a similar development leads to the German word for passions, Leidenschaften, from the root leiden, to suffer). This is just one reason to doubt the easy equation between pleasure and happiness, on the one hand, and ‘the good’, on the other."
"Therapists who work with troubled teens often talk about their sense of entitlement as a major hurdle in the struggle to help them. Teens feel entitled to their life-styles, no matter how self-destructive. If a parent reared her child with the attitude “I don’t want to interrupt his happiness for even one moment,” the teen will have a hard time establishing the discipline and willpower necessary to work through addictions and behaviors such as alcoholism, substance abuse, promiscuous sex, mismanagement of anger, compulsive shopping, and so forth.
The advice from experts is for parents to “toughen up” by following some general guidelines:
Put limits on spending by giving your teen an allowance. When it’s gone, there’s no more until next time.
Let your teen face the natural consequences of his behavior. If he bangs up your car, let him pay for it.
Teach your child to apologize to others, to understand their point of view, and otherwise demonstrate “emotional intelligence.”
Watch how you use praise. The late prominent educator John Holt warned parents that praising a child is a massage to parental egos: building up the child becomes a form of building up yourself. Give specific praise for a specific piece of work or action. For example, tell the child, “You did a great job on that picture,” and not “You’re a great artist.” Don’t use praise to manipulate as in “You’re so brilliant, you could be a doctor.”
Let children earn self-esteem from working hard and achieving in a real way."
