Love and the Development of the Social Self of the Child

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

Each child is unique and there well never be another child born with the same inborn arrangements of physical, emotional and mental inheritance. These designs lay out the potential for the child's temperament and her interactions with her family. The health and the direction of the child's life depend on the child's culture, community and family. Development proceeds like a conversation. So a child's development depends on the quality of the conversation that she learns to have between herself and other people.

Different parenting approaches use different kinds of conversation styles. Explorative and creative parenting styles say "yes" to dialogue. Permissive and authoritarian parenting says "no" to dialogue. An excessively manipulative conversation pattern is used by a parenting approach that is either aloof and permissive, or domineering and authoritarian. Unhealthy, dysfunctional parenting with an overly controlling conversation style stresses subordination and domination of human beings and nature. The conversation style of permissive, aloof parents will tend to produce adolescent children who have identity problems indicated by their lack of commitment to a vocation or future course of study. The conversation style of domineering, authoritarian parenting will tend to produce adolescents who stifle their potential by choosing a vocation and making decisions about a course of study too early on in life, in an attempt to satisfy parental expectations.

Parenting styles that are functional and healthy are the explorative style and the creative style of parenting. Both patterns use a flexible conversation style in conjunction with varying degrees of acknowledgment and encouragement of love. Explorative parenting encourages solid scientific experimenting with one's life and confirms love in the family context when it emerges. An example is a boy whose father is an M.D. and who is interested in biology. They have a conversation about the biological nature of man and find that they are experiencing a moving sense of oneness between them. In the explorative style of parenting the father would bring their mutual experience to the foreground, commenting on and valuing their connection--the love. This parenting style will raise adolescent children who select and try different vocations and areas of study. Although they will have difficulty with their identity, as do adolescents from the permissive and authoritarian families, they will experience their search for identity as a challenge, and not a crisis.

The creative pattern of parenting stresses self-responsibility and self-direction in relationship. It encourages a creative, narrative approach to life using cultural and family stories to describe reality, to strengthen and deepen the family bond and to help the child relate meaningfully to the inevitable experiences of being human. The creative conversation style invites emotional expression and passion along with scientific exploration. Flexibility and flow, rather than over control or absence of influence, are used to inspire the children, leading them to be free individuals. Adolescents raised by parents using the creative mode of parenting have a high sense of self-esteem, a strong identify, a personal direction for vocational expression and the probability of a high level of achievement as adults.

Creative style families have healthy and flexible distance or boundaries between members that allow for a healthy and safe love relationship. The children have enough support for individual differences that they feel free to explore their own unique reality. Their personal direction seems to be innately addressing them and they are responding to it out of their own unique pattern of wholeness. The strength of the value of their uniqueness is confirmed in conversation with their parents.

Role-playing is a term that refers to the child's ability to imagine what her peers are thinking, feeling and experiencing in her relationship with them. The peers act as a social mirror reflecting the self back to the child. From middle childhood on the child is increasingly able to sense what her peers are imagining and feeling about her. A social self is developing in relationship with other people. Telling cultural and family stories that contain the spiritual and social dimensions of life prepares the child for the ability to take the role of the other person in conversation or dialogue. Role-playing a character in the story helps to develop the social self of the child.

When love flourishes between child and parent, both of them feel a creative energy that stimulates laughter and joy, and they sense an emotional, mental and spiritual creative flow. A feeling of fellowship is developed in the creative parenting style, which encourages trust. This presence of basic trust helps the child feel competent and industrious. The child's high self-esteem in middle childhood leads to strong self-identity in adolescence and young adulthood. The creative family style makes sure both experience the feeling of love between child and parent. In permissive and authoritarian parenting a real feeling of love is not felt by the child. She feels a lack of confirmation for her personal direction or her particular emotional and mental expression. The lack of love is experienced when a person feels racism or sexism--a clear indication of a misunderstanding taking place in the relationship. The love produced by creative parenting changes the people involved and makes parents realize they are moving away from domination and into true partnership and love with their child.

Martin Luther King, Jr. experienced creative parenting when he was told stories as a child about the Exodus and how God liberated the Hebrews from Egypt. Stories of the prophets from biblical stories made the African-American children feel like a "somebody" in a world that tried to make them a "nobody." The same worldview that tried to destroy those children is continuing to destroy children today. We have to consider drug, alcohol, physical and sexual abuse to appreciate the lack of love that children are experiencing today. War, poverty, racism and sexism are telling children in our country and all over the world "no" to love. As Marvin Gaye would say, "doesn't anybody care to save the children, to save the children of the world?"