Lora Docherty
Parenting and Grandparenting Today: Do You Protect or Prepare Children to Handle the Difficulties of Life?
Lora Docherty - Parenting and Grandparenting Today: Do You Protect or Prepare Children to Handle the Difficulties of Life?
- Right. Okay, so welcome everybody once again. Actually I am sitting in the study where we first started lockdown university almost, almost 18 months ago or 19 months ago, and this is the first time that I’m sitting right back here, and it’s a great pleasure to welcome all of you. And we are especially lucky tonight to have Lora Docherty, who is the sister of David Piemer. We all know David very, very well. So Lora was, as you know, was born in South Africa, and did her postgraduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has lived and worked in Jerusalem in the field of child psychology for many decades. She has run courses in her area of specialty in London and Israel, and has been educational supervisor of child daycare centres in the greater Jerusalem area. She has worked with directors, parents, and colleagues in clinics all over Israel in the field of early childhood education, including the Hebrew University. She had been active in working with integrated Jewish Arab institutions along with Ethiopian, Russian and other immigrant children, where she evaluates the different programmes that were implemented to foster optimal integration into Israeli society. This evening, Lora is going to talk about parenting and grandparenting today. Do you protect or prepare children to handle the difficulties of life? A very, very warm welcome Lora, and I’m now going hand over to you. Thank you.
- Thank you very much. Lauren, could I have number one? Okay. I want to start with a quote from Nelson Mandela. After all, I came from South Africa. “Our children are our greatest treasure. They’re our future. Those who abuse them, tear at the fabric of our society, and weaken our nation.” I’m going to start with the history of parenting. If we look at the history of parenting, for many, many years, children weren’t considered something special or different. Children were there all as mouths to feed, or as future help in order to survive. In fact, the schooling in America, the July and August that we have the break was at the beginning, the first time, because they needed children to help in the agricultural society, and those were the two months that were most important. I’m going to leave the history of parenting till the last 150 or 200 years that we have, because of the advent of psychology, children became very important, and parents became more important. So I’m going to leave the history of the Rome and Greek times where children were rarely just chattels of the father, of the family, and could be done to them whatever the father or the mother wanted to. The state didn’t interfere, there were a lot of abuses, a lot of problems. I will leave that for another, that can be done another time. I want to get onto the modern parenting, which I would say would begin in about the 1800s. What’s important in the 1800s was the sharing of parenting with daycare centres, with the kindergartens, with the state.
Now parents weren’t the only guardians of children, they weren’t the only ones responsible, the state also started to interfere, and the first man who did kindergartens was Frederick Froebel. We can have that slide, we can see the picture of him. Okay, thank you, Lauren. He was a pastor in Germany about the 1860s, and he thought that children needed to play. He was very influential in opening up kindergarten, sets the kindergarten ‘cause he saw children as a garden, as needing to be watered and looked after. And that what we needed to do was to create an environment where children could play and learn, because children learn by playing. I think we know that, that today it’s accepted that in order to learn something you actually have to do it. And not by watching TV, or watching it on a iPad, or on a computer, it doesn’t help one always do something, especially children. They have to actually do it physically in order to learn it. And he was very successful. But unfortunately the church didn’t like what he was doing and closed him down. However, he had taught quite a few teachers, and they spread all through Europe, coming to the Montessori in Spain, and also Rudolph Steiner in Austria. And these schools and these ideas, and in the influence of them are still to today. The Montessori particular was a way of teaching children how to do certain things according to their needs and their interests. Beyonce was one who went to a Montessori school, and at age seven she was given her first dancing lessons, because they saw that she had the talent to do it. Okay, in Israel, of course, there were a lot of daycare centres. The first one was from a group called , and it was for orphans, later it was for all parents that went out to work, and it was based on the kibbutz system, or the kibbutz attitude.
I’ll go into that a tiny bit because it’s very interesting. It was the only experiment when actually the kibbutz itself interfered, and the parents were less important. There is always a difference with religious and the kibbutzim, where the group is more important than the individual child, which is one way of parenting. And this was actually in the experiment, it worked. The kibbutzim began in the beginning of the, sort of about 1912 with Deganya. And what happened was that they lived in tents, and then they started to get married, or have children and then have children. And in the tents there wasn’t enough electricity and water and they needed women to go out and work with the men. So they decided to put everybody in one ten, all the children in one tent, and have one person look after the children. And so that everybody, that was also efficient, because financially, and it meant that women could go out and work. That was the beginning. It wasn’t an ideological reason that they needed to take children away from parents. However, once they had done that, they had to somehow rationalise it, and it became very, very strict. Mothers had to give up children after three days, they weren’t allowed to see them at night, the children were looked after by somebody who was called a caregiver who often never had children herself. She was younger and she was the one who was supposed to educate the children to work in groups, to become tough. If we were going into my next part, which is where the one should protect children or not, and it was very, very difficult. The children who grew up, and then had children of their own were very angry with their parents, and couldn’t understand how they could have done such a thing.
And a lot of courses been written about the inability for some of them to cope afterwards with certain kind of attachments, although others enjoyed it. There is a new film art, which I can recommend if anyone’s interested, called “Four Hours A Day” where an Israeli woman director takes 88 women who put their children in this kind of, in the kibbutz, and what they felt and what happened to them. What was interesting was that the one said that she used to go rushing up every night and sleep under the bed of the child, even though it wasn’t allowed. Another one had her husband fix up some kind of recorder so she could hear from her house when he was crying so she could go there. A lot of them suffered and when they did- And then one of them there tried to- One of them, one of those women started to say it wasn’t good enough, and it had to have the children a term. There was a lot of opposition. And in fact on one of the kibbutzim’s day, the women actually decided to refrain from sex with their husbands till it was done. It took about eight weeks on that kibbutz, and the children were then brought home. Which is today of course that doesn’t happen on any of the kibbutzim. Okay, the other question that we had to look at, the other question, when we look at parenting or the cultural differences, we know that parents have different values according to culture, according to religion, according to the geography, according to the times. In different groups we see totally different parent, totally different values. Just to look at a few, in Japan for instance, children of six and seven are allowed to go on subways by themselves. If we look at what I’ve seen in Israeli society, when Ethiopian immigrants came to Israel and they tried to teach the women, the mother’s Hebrew, and put the children daycare centre next door, they refuse because it’s being a very bad mother to leave your child. So they had to have the children with them.
Eh, South Americans that come to Israel could do what’s called adaptation, and might sit for six months in a kindergarten watching their child till they adapt. While Russian immigrants usually leave them after half an hour. Neither is better or worse, that’s just the way that the different cultures relate. What I can also say that different parents are different. I mean we had a Chinese delegation once, and they looked at the daycare centres, and they looked at the children and then they said to me, “What’s that plug?” And I said, what do you mean? They said, “The plug in the mouth of the children, they’re not allowed to talk?” And I said, that’s the dummy or pacifier. And they said, “We don’t have anything like that.” And I thought, well that’s a startup for somebody. But Chinese children actually speak much, much earlier than any other children, which is something to think of as well. I dunno who introduced the dummy or the pacifier, but it’s interesting from a cultural point of view. Okay, now I want to look a little bit about when psychology came into existence in our world with Freud. And he started to look at the early childhood, and I find that the most fascinating because as the Jesuit said, “Give me a child till seven, and I’ll let you know what kind of man he is.” It is very important, even in Judaism from a biblical perspective, one of the fact, one of the instructions perhaps, or perspectives is that one should look at children and understand their development, because they see children as not knowing the difference between good and evil. And one has to teach and educate, and one needs to do that in order to have the legacy carry on. And what happens is that there was an acceptance that it’s difficult to bring up children, it’s difficult to know what to do, and the best way to understand it is to understand child development.
Because if we understand how children behave, or what’s age appropriate behaviour, it’s much easier to be a parent. Which is a problem, because today what happens, I think for parents, and I think it’s very difficult for parents today when they do have problems, they go into the internet or whatever, and are told if they do A and B, C will happen, and C doesn’t always happen. And then they feel that they’re not good parents because there is no one recipe for every child, or for every parent, everyone is different. And all these people that are sleep counsellors, or nutrition counsellors, or play counsellors, or whatever else, tend to give certain recipes for how to behave. And it doesn’t really work, and it makes it very difficult for parents. A little bit about child development. If we look at the child, obviously the child develops as one person, but we separate the different aspects. We have the cognitive aspects or the emotional aspect, the motor aspect. We know today because a lot of work has been done that children develop the same, whether they’re Begawen child, a Japanese child, or Mongolian child, all over the world, nevermind what one does, there’s a certain stages in development that every single child will pass. Obviously, some children will get stuck on a stage and then there might be problems, but it is universal. In fact, it’s a very, very good film called “Babies” by a French director, which is the documentary, who takes four children from different places in the world. I think one is America, one is Mongolia, one is Japan, and one is Africa. And they have totally different background, totally different parenting. And each child at age one gets up, and starts walking to start his life. And it’s very interesting to see it. When I look at child development, of course we look at this, we look at psychology, and Freud who did the emotional aspect, of course, or what he called, the oral fixation that at the beginning the child needs to either have the bottle or the nipple in order to feel the attachment to the mother.
Afterwards we have Piaget, who looked at the cognitive aspect, how children understand, which is also fascinating, because children, for instance, at two or three don’t understand cause and effect. So when parents tell their children, but you have to wear, I don’t know, a coat because it’s cold, but when they’re inside the house and it’s warm, they’ll say, but I’m not cold. We can take a two year old who we can put a nice- We can put a nice sort of, I’ve forgotten the word. Okay, on the table, something as a nice cloth, and put a vase on it, and the child will pull the cloth at two but not understand that what he’s doing will make the vase fall. Also, what Piaget would do was that he, we understand from him too, that children can only look at one criteria when they’re checking anything. So if we take five suites that are the same, and put them close together in a line, and then take another five suites that are exactly the same and make a longer line, more space between them and ask where there’s more, they will say where the longer line is because they can’t look at the amount and the length at the same. And once we understood that, once we understand that it’s easier to know how to deal with children, what to tell them, and how to do it. Same thing in Israel, for instance, children are not allowed to cross the road till they nine. And people say, but a six, seven year old can cross the road, I mean they can walk. But they’re not able to judge the distance that a car can take to get to them. So once we’ve understood all these things, it becomes easier to be a parent rather than thinking the child is being stubborn, or not understanding. But moment we understand how they see the world, and how they think, it makes it much easier. Sometimes it’s very interesting because I remember when my daughter, when we had gone to South Africa, and I think she was three or four, we came back and she saw a plane and she said to me, “Oh, I know what that’s for, that’s to bring a food to the aeroplane.”
Because that was her reference in life. And often it’s fascinating to hear how they look at things. Okay, the next aspect I want to look at is we come now after the first world war, we come to the beginning of, or before the second World War. And in Germany at that time where there was a doctor, I think that’s number three, Johanna, who wrote a book. That’s Bowlby. There she is, yes. She was a doctor, she wasn’t a paediatrician, but she was one of the first doctors. And she wrote a book that over, I think half a million Germans read, or bought, and many, many more read, and brought up their children like that. And it was on this question of really protecting, making children cope with life. Very, very, very, very strict. The child came home and had to be put in a room on their own for 24 hours, you weren’t allowed to go in. Afterwards, she would feed the child for 10 minutes if it was- Or 10 to 20 minutes depending if it was a bottle or not. The child could cry for the rest of the day, she believed it was good for the lungs. And you weren’t allowed to hold or touch the child. Children should not be, their needs should not be met, they should learn that life is difficult from the beginning. They should have no attachment to anyone. And this is how children were brought, when she was of course part of the Nazi group, or Nazi doctors, and she did everything to discourage any relationship. And many children were brought up like this. Obviously, one daughter, her children, she had five children, they didn’t talk to her. I think her husband committed suicide. She lived to quite a late age. She never changed her ideas. But that the idea of making life as difficult as possible for a baby, where psychologists today would say that the furthest a child should be when they’re born is as long as one’s hand, again, it should be very close to for the first six months because the children need it. The babies need the, the attachment. It’s interesting, it’s interesting that’s what she did. She said that way they will adapt. If we ignore their needs, they will have to learn to cope on their own. I don’t know, nobody really checked it out afterwards, if that’s what happened or not. At the same time, just before there was a woman who came to Israel called Malka Haas.
She died actually last year 101. And she came from Berlin, she also came from Berlin. She left at 15 just before the war, two years before the war, and found herself afterwards on a Kibbutz, and started working with children. She actually was the one who said that, “Children shouldn’t be in the homes.” And I think on her kibbutz it was earlier that they stopped it. But she had the same idea that children need to be able to adapt to different situations. Because she had been, and she’d seen what happened, she started to do, to make certain playgrounds from junk that allowed children to play with quite dangerous things. Not toys, things that were real, that we can see it in the picture in the little clip later. And she allowed, and what was important to her was that the children would learn to cooperate on their own, to make different worlds, to have all unexpected things happen, and to be able to cope, and to take initiative. So in one way it was similar to what the doctor from Berlin did in terms of making them adapt, but it wasn’t as strict in terms of not having the parent around. I think we can see that now, if you want it’s the junkyard one, I think it’s number four. No, that’s not it. Yes that’s it, thank you. I’ll read it for the people who can’t. “The Junkyard’s, an open space intended for Sociodramatic play. Once a week the children dismantle, rebuild the elements of the junkyard, organising the space anew. She’s developed this idea in the 1940s in the Kibbutz. We can see her speaking, she’s about 90 something here. Really did influence the way that the Israelis bring up children. 'Cause on the one hand, Israeli children are very important, and the centre of attention, and on the other hand they have to learn to cope with the difficulties of life here.
And this is the junkyard, as one can see, she used all sorts of things that were not used. Now we will see, and the children had to build their own world. We’ll see it in a minute. As you can see they played with all sorts of dangerous- Thank you. As you can see, it was a way of expressing the idea that children had to learn to deal with what was unexpected. And I think that’s of course after the war, and during the war and it did work. These children grew up to take a lot of initiative, and work together, and without a lot of parental influence or guidance. On the other hand, there was a very safe environment, and was very, very- There was this framework for them to work in. Now what happened too was it happened in Denmark, Sorensen who was a landscape gardener, had also made a junkyard after the second World war, because there was all this junk in the cities. And he decided that same thing as she did without knowing each other then to do it in Denmark. And the children were also given places to play, and learned to take the initiative.
They were unexpected things they had to do. They had to take initiative and build things on their own. It even happened in England. There was a woman called Lady Allen who was another landscape gardener, but also very, very interested in children, and protection of children, and the rights of children. Because after the second World War there were orphans, and that there were children who needed some kind of, needed help. And what she did after she had seen Sorensen in Denmark, she opened places in England, because she said, "Enough of the four Ss, Swing, Slide, Sand, and See-saw. That’s not enough, we need to build a junkyard, and we need to allow the children to play.” And she did it also for disabled children. We can watch three or four minutes of the clip. I just want to warn you, it’s not what we would call one- It’s not so perceived today because of the way she talks about the children. But it’s also interesting from a historical perspective to see how people talked about children then in the 1950s. So if we could have that one, I think it’s number four. Yes, thank you.
CLIP BEGINS
[Narrator] These children are handicapped, some of them severely. Some are nearly blind. Some have severe physical handicaps. On different days, you can find here autistic children, spastics, the educationally abnormal, in fact every type of handicap, mental and physical. They are learning to grow and to develop in an extraordinary new playground in London. Of all the new work which is being done in Britain today for handicapped children, nothing is more dramatic than this. And it is the creation of one remarkable woman, Marjorie Allen. Lady Allen of Hurtwood, to give her her full title is no idle member of the aristocracy. She has built an international reputation as a propagandist for children’s play, and for the theory of play. Above all, she gets things done. Since her latest work on play for handicapped children is based on her earlier work on unconventional playgrounds for normal children like this one, it’s worth going back to the origins of this kind of play theory.
I’m really a landscape architect by profession, and I’ve always been interested in the places where people live, their environment, but especially the children. And I think they get a pretty raw deal. What do we give them in our great cities and towns, look up with asphalt. We give them an asphalt square playground with a few pieces of mechanical equipment, and there they’re expected to spend all their adolescent lives swinging backwards from forwards on a swing, it’s not good enough. It’s a problem that had to be solved somehow. But then I had a lucky break. I got to Copenhagan in 1945 just after the great War. And there I saw the first waste material playground in the world, and I realised in a sort of blinding set of understanding that they’d really solve the problem, because they are with the playground that had been made entirely by the children themselves. So when I got back to England, we were all determined to start them over here. And gradually and slowly we created the adventure playground. We know them in this country today. And I think it’s opened people’s eyes really to what children really want to do in their little time. You see here, they can play with very dangerous tools. They can create their own.
CLIP ENDS
- Thank you very much. What I do find interesting that in Israel, in England, in Denmark, there was some connection between them. She went there to see it. But the same idea after the war where they realised that they could allow children to do dangerous things, because the world was dangerous, and that they had to learn to cope. After the war a little bit later as well, we had Bowlby, who was a psychologist, we have him, I think he’s number six. If you can put the picture up. No, she’s the woman. No. Yes, Bowlby. One more. No, next one, yes, John Bowlby. Well, he was a psychologist, and he was interested in the connection, or what he called the maternal deprivation because what happened after the war, there were, as we said, a lot of orphans and children on their own. And he saw that they didn’t have enough emotional stamina, or resilience to grow up properly, and to develop cognitively, and emotionally as he thought they should. And he started to look at the connection between the child and the mother, or child and any carer. He wasn’t the only one, there was another woman Ainsworth who did it too. There was also Mela in America who’d come from Hungary who did the right parenting, where you look at the child and you see what the connection is. So that was different.
This was not the same as looking at the child, and giving them the initiative and everything, but how to help them. The best example of this perhaps is an orphanage in America where there was a psychologist called Spitz, who noticed that the hygiene was very good in the orphanage, there were no problems with food, and the children and babies just didn’t thrive, there was a failure to thrive. They didn’t develop as they should cognitively and emotionally. And what he decided to do, there was a institution next to the orphanage of of young girls or teenagers that had some kind of cognitive, that were cognitively challenged, and he decided to bring them in, and let each one look after a baby for some hours a day. And after about six months, these children started to thrive, and they started to- The gap between what the age appropriate behaviour was fulfilled very, very quickly. And that made the psychologist think and realise how important it was to have one caregiver. And they did another experiment, which was a little bit different, where they decided to see, and they put cameras in people’s homes, so the mothers who were prepared to do it, where for the first six months of the baby they checked to see if the mothers, they asked them to go to the child every time they cried, and what happened the next six months, and the other one where they went sometimes and they didn’t sometimes. What happened was where the mothers went to the child every single time they cried, in the next six months they cried far less because they started to trust the environment.
They knew that if they were in distress somebody would come, and therefore they could delay gratification. What happened when the parents came sometimes and other times not, they were in stress. I sometimes explained it when I was used to teaching to saying, if we know our salaries coming on the first of the month, we’re fine, if it sometimes comes on the first, sometimes it doesn’t, we’re stressed, but we not only stressed on the first of the month, we’re stressed the entire month. So this seems to be the opposite of what we said about how children should be protected or not. But it’s the difference, and that’s where it’s very difficult with parenting, because the first year the child does need, the child that cannot do anything for themselves. So when they’re in distress, they need to know that they can rely on the world, otherwise they’ll never be able to take the initiative and go further. Okay, so that was another aspect that we saw. Then we got another psychologist, Diana Baumrind, which we have a picture of her as well. And she did something else, she looked at what she called parenting styles. Now what was important about parenting styles was that for the first time what she said was, that what parents do creates certain behaviours in children, up to then it didn’t always follow that parents were to blame, or not all were successful in bringing up children according to their parenting style, or what they did.
And I think psychologists in a way have not really, it made it very difficult for parents because their attitude has been that what parents do affects the way children behave, which means that most of the onus of bringing up children on the child and on the parent, and we don’t take the genetic aspect into consideration, because after I’ve worked for many years, I really do believe that’s obviously an interactive, the way children develop, also the parents and also the genetics. But genetics are a part of it, it’s not only what the parents did. Anyway, she decided that there were four different kinds of parenting. If we can see it, we had the authoritarian, we had authoritative, we had permissive, and we had uninvolved or negligent parent. Now the authoritarian parent was very strict and inflexible, high expectations, and blind obedience. The authoritative parent was nurturing, and affectionate, discipline through guidance and communication. Permissive parent was nurturing and affectionate, few or inconsistent boundaries, and takes the role of friend rather than parent.
The uninvolved parent obviously is emotionally detached, self-absorbed, inconsistent, and slight interaction. Now what is interesting is what kind of children does this- What kind of behaviours do we have? With an authoritarian parent, the children had very low self-esteem, had difficult problems with, had emotional problems and difficulties. It’s a difficult social problems because they were told to do, they were not allowed to, their needs were never met. The permissive parent of course also the child was very impulsive, and didn’t take anyone else into consideration, often what we call egocentric today. The uninvolved parent, these children often were, had problems with the drugs, alcohol, etc. They had no idea who they were, and how they were supposed to behave in society. The authoritative parent on the other hand had children who were very, very successful, in terms of being able to be resilient, get on in life, and cope with the all different kinds of situations. If I want to give an example of something very small with early childhood parent, early childhood education, something that’s very practical and simple, but parents found difficult. I used to say to them, you want a child to eat, child is two or three, you want a child to eat an egg for supper, what do you do?
If you’re an authoritarian parent, you say, “This is the egg, I’ve made it for you, eat it, like it or not. Otherwise, no food.” If you have permissive parent, you’ll probably spend an hour asking a child what they want to eat and how they want the egg, and where they want the egg, and on what plate they want the egg, and I dunno if the egg will be eaten at the end. Uninvolved parent doesn’t bother if there is food or not. The authoritative parent will say, “Do you want scrambled egg or a hard boiled egg?” In other words, you’ll give the framework, and you’ll allow the child to make a decision between two things that you’ve decided that you want. Now it’s not easy to do that all the time, but that does really work. And then one finds that one has lot less discipline problems. She also went into the question of discipline, different countries, different cultures. Britain was one of the worst in terms of discipline in canning, but still allowed later than any other country almost in Europe. And in America today there still is canning in certain countries, it’s allowed, in certain states it’s allowed by law. Most of Europe it doesn’t happen too bad. What she found was that about 25% of parents are authoritarian, about 50% of parents are the authoritative parent, which mean, which is quite a good idea, and then we have about 18 to 20 permissive parents, and 10% of parents who don’t really, be parents as one would consider, don’t take the responsibility to be parents .
Another aspect of parenting, which is interesting, where they did some kind of research to find out where children are the happiest, in what country in the world. And it is Holland. And when they looked at Holland, when they decided to see why are children the happiest in every aspect, and also become adults that are happy, they found that first of all, parents work no longer than 29 hours a week, then so they have time and energy for their children. Because today, of course both parents work often and it’s much more difficult. They also use bikes a lot. So they’re outside and not using the computer, and all sorts of other machines all the time. They are allowed to be part of the decision making process in the house, and are given freedom, and to initiate all sorts of different games and plays. Just, it’s interesting that the idea that the outside, and the biking, and the less work, and pressure the parents have on them makes for better appearance. There’s also, of course a very good social welfare system that helps parents there in Holland. I haven’t gone into parenting of the divorced parents, same sex, couple parenting, and the different problems that are all in that. What we can look at more is the relationship between the parent and the child.
When we look at children who need help, and very young children that need help because even young children can have mental problems and cannot develop as they should. There’re different models, and different ways of looking at it. We can give parents, we can educate parents, which sometimes works or not. Sometimes we can use certain drugs to calm children down, sometimes we look at the child and the parent separately, and we see what we can do. But the best way of looking at it is to look at the relationship between the parent and the child. We are actually looking, when we do therapy with the young children and with parents, we are looking at their relationship. That is the client. The client is not the child and the client is not the parent, it is the relationship, which does put a lot of pressure on parents, because we might have, children are different, and I really do believe this from a genetic point of view, and we have seen it from day one. We can see that some children are more active, some children are not. Some children get sicker, some children don’t.
Some children are very sensitive to light or to sound, and others are not. Now if we get a parent who’s similar to the child, a hyperactive parent, or a very active parent and an active child, or an active child and a passive parent, or two passive, a passive child and a passive parent, we’ll have different kind of relationships, and sometimes a child needs something else than what they get. And we’ll have to then adapt ourselves to what’s going on. Because in the end, what we want is a child that’s able to adapt to different situations and to cope with life. Sometimes we, and that’s- I really believe that everyone does try to do their best, and hopefully it does happen. Now I want to do a little bit on grandparenting. I don’t think we’ve got too much time. Till about 30,000 years ago, they say looking at fossils that they’ve found, grandparents weren’t part of one’s life. Today we have grandparents, the average age in America, Europe is about 50. That’s one other thing that I wanted to say that today up to almost 20% of women over 50, also in America, and also in Europe, don’t have children, which is something very new, it’s different. So once again, parenting will change, and not everyone is having children. With nuclear families, we have grandchildren, we have different types, of course, we’ll have grandchildren who live in the same city that can see their children once every day or every week. We have ones that live further away in the same country. We have what they call transnational grandparents that don’t live in the same country even, and so will have a different kind of relationship with their children, with their grandchildren.
You look at grandparents with five different styles, they call it detached, where grandchildren don’t take much interest in their grandchildren. Passive where they do take interest but don’t do anything. Supportive, which is most of them authoritative, where they tend to take over, and influential. What they found in terms of ecological role, that when grandparents, especially grandmothers take an interest, children seem to have better, bigger brains, even better bonding and use and better skills. Grandparents are also very important in terms of allowing the children to see history, allowing the children to see that they’ve come from somewhere, and they’re going somewhere. And certain things that grandparents give can only be learnt from experience. And the stories they tell the children, and the love they give the children helps them also to be much more, have much more empathy as adults. That’s what they call the grandmother effect. The children will have fewer behavioural problems and better grades. Now we come to the the question of whether grandparents spoil children their, spoil more than their parents. Sometimes, but giving, I think sugary sweets as treats are not necessarily spoiling. Sometimes that does quite the opposite. Grandparents will have a better relationship with their grandchildren depending on their relationship with their own child.
Often, if there isn’t a good relationship with the child, it makes it more difficult with the grandchild. Most grandparents, 70, 80% say that it’s one of the most important things in their lives as they become grandparents because they get a lot of love, and they can give a lot of love, and they’re very happy to do that. Certain things that perhaps grandparents shouldn’t do, which causes conflict sometimes is of course undermine parental authority, or put down one of the two, one of the adults, the mother or the father, depending who they feel is not doing the right thing, never take sides like that, never ask. When you’re getting another grandchild, I think most of us, after the first one learned that. I remember that my first granddaughter, I got almost a huge letter telling me what I could do and couldn’t do. The second one I was told that, she thought that I would know what to do. And the third one was, could she stay for a week? Because what happens is the parents start to trust us, it’s easier. The one thing they do say about grandchildren of course is that they make a grandmother look and feel younger, because it wipes out the wrinkles because with younger children, with the parents are very tired, and grandparents can enjoy it, and it makes them younger, and it gives them more energy for life. I’d like to put the last text up from Nelson Mandela if possible, thank you. 'Cause I think that this is really is important where he says, “There can be no keener revelation of society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Because of course they’re the next generation, and very, very important. I think I’ll leave it there and if there are any questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Q- [Host] Thank you so much. We do have a few questions. Someone is saying that they didn’t understand the name of the German pastor, so can you please repeat it?
A- Okay. Frederick Froebel. F-R-O-E-B-E-L.
Another what’s to know-
If anyone wants to look it up. What?
Q- [Host] Sorry, another person’s asking, when did Johanna Haarer spread her ideas?
A- Just before the Nazis came into power, the early 1940s, she wrote the book.
Q- [Host] Thank you. Another question, what about safety concerns in the junkyard? How many children got hurt and what about parent concerns?
A- Okay, that are actually the ministry of Health of course, and the ministry of Education came in, until today don’t like all this happening. Quite, quite surprisingly, not a lot of difficult things happen because the teachers have to go in every day, and make sure that there’s nothing too sharp, nothing too heavy. The children also are in smaller groups, and learn how to cope with it. And what she did say, Lady Allen, was that she prefers broken bones to broken spirit. So even if something did happen, it usually, it wasn’t very, very serious. I know there are certain rules, they don’t allow the children to do everything, and children learn very quickly how to cope with it. But it is true that they have to change it all the time. You can’t leave things that are too dangerous.
[Host] Thank you.
They do it slowly. They take the children in for a little while, they teach them what they’re allowed to do and not allowed to do, and slowly the children learn what’s dangerous and what’s not.
Q- [Host] Another question, is there any evidence to suggest that protecting children from stress, experiencing academic failure, and bullying via social media affects their development and wellbeing in contrast to learning coping mechanisms?
And can you just say that again if they, if?
[Host] Sure. Is there any evidence to suggest that protecting children from stress, academic failure, and bullying via social media, is there any evidence that that affects protecting them, affects their development and wellbeing?
A- I dunno how much one can protect children from that today. Obviously, one should protect children if any kind of, or interfere in playing or games, if they are hurting someone else, or they are being hurt themselves, that’s more or less the way to look at it. If what we try we, we let them cope on their own until it’s dangerous. We obviously even in a daycare centre won’t allow a child to push another child off a slide, or do things like that. And it also depends on the child, it does depend on the child. It’s the fine line between protecting and not. I maybe can tell you a little story that happened to me when I came from South Africa, and my child, my daughter went into a kindergarten here, and it was a holiday and she wanted to be the queen, when you dress up on Purim, which is a holiday. And the kindergarten teacher said that, “Somebody else was going to be the queen,” and she got very upset, and my first instinct was to go and say, why is somebody else and not my child, and you can’t do that, and it’s not right, and you’re hurting her and etc. And then I thought for two minutes, and I said to my daughter, you know it’s very difficult when you’re not always, when you can’t always have what you want, and it’s very sad, but that’s what will be. And she was fine with it. And I think often we overprotect, and we think that we have to come in and defend them, and it often does the opposite, because they can deal with the disappointments, and I think the way to do it is to show them that we also are not perfect as parents, and that we deal with disappointments and life goes on. Any other questions?
Q- [Host] Yes, a few. How should grandparents operate on their home turf when the parent style is very different from the grandparent?
A- Is that I think is a rhetorical question. One should I think, but that of course is up to everyone, try and keep the values of the children. I don’t think one should change the values. One can be a little bit different, and more lacks on certain things because children are to behave in school, or at mommy, or daddy, or grandparents differently. But I don’t think that they should try and change the value. I know grandparents do that 'cause it’s very difficult not to say what one wants and how to do it. Again, from my own experience, I can tell you that when my daughter had her first baby, I went in and sort of showed her what to do, and I saw that she was becoming more and more upset. And then I took a step back actually I asked somebody, because often even if I’m the psychologist, you went to your own child, you don’t know what to do. And she said to me, “Just taste back.” And I said to her, my daughter, I think you’re a very good mother, and I’m sure you’ll know what to do. You’ll know how to do the right thing. And she did and she beamed and that was it. I went and took the step back. Often we think we know better and we often do know better, but the child has to learn on their own and it doesn’t help. And I think grandparents should try as much as they can to keep the same values as the children. It’s a difficult because there are generational gaps in values, and we always think that the way we brought up our children perhaps was the best way, but we have to adapt and learn new ways. Any other question?
Yeah, do you think-
Last one maybe?
Q- [Host] Sure, this can be our last one. Do you think the junkyard concept has created the innovative Israeli culture we have today?
A- I think that it had a huge influence on it because it wasn’t only the junkyard, it was the idea that children had to take initiative, and life was difficult, and all sorts of unexpected things happen. And Israeli children can, not only the initiative and everything that we see as adults, can deal with these changes. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it makes them able to cope in a lot of different countries and do quite well because they have the feeling that it doesn’t matter what happens, they are resilient, they’ll come back. It also makes for a lot of arrogance perhaps, and a little bit of taking too many risks. But one or the other. I think it has influenced it.
[Host] Well thank you so much Lora. Trudy-
Okay.
[Host] Oh, I will hand back over to you.
Lora, that was absolutely fantastic. I was glued. You realise, listening to you just how many mistakes we make. But thank you so much, and I think there’s many, many more questions that could be answered. So I hope you’ll come back. And thank you so much for your time. And be safe. And be safe all of you, take care. Bye.
Thank you very much. Bye.
Thank you Trudy, and thank you Lora for that really much enlightening presentation. Absolutely excellent. And welcome to the Lockdown University family.
Thank you very much.
Thank you everybody-
Bye Wendy.
Thanks Lora, thanks Trudy. Bye everyone.