Children
How to Live with Children
Working with a Child’s Willingness
Allowing Children to Work
Suggestions for Further Study
How to raise a happy, healthy child is not something most parents are taught. In fact, many just stumble through the entire process, albeit with the best intentions. Consequently, it is all too common to find an unhappy state of affairs in families, with constant friction between parents and children.
It is not a natural state of affairs. In fact, it can be avoided entirely. L. Ron Hubbard developed many methods to bring out the best in a child – and its parents. In this section, you will read about some of these methods and discover how to raise a child without breaking his spirit, how to have a child who is willing to contribute to the family, and how to help a child quickly get over the daily upsets and tribulations of life.
Raising children should be a joy. And can be. In fact, it can be one of the most rewarding of all human experiences. The application of Scientology principles to the bringing up of children can ensure that they are happy, loving and productive, and that they become valued members of the societies in which they live.
The main problem with children is how to live with them. The adult is the problem in child raising, not the child. A good, stable adult with love and tolerance in his heart is about the best therapy a child can have.
The main consideration in raising children is the problem of training them without breaking them. You want to raise your child in such a way that you don’t have to control him, so that he will be in full possession of himself at all times. Upon that depends his good behavior, his health, his sanity.
Children are not dogs. They can’t be trained like dogs are trained. They are not controllable items. They are, and let’s not overlook the point, men and women. A childis not a special species of animal
distinct from man. A child is a man or a woman who has not attained full growth.
Any law which applies to the behavior of men and women applies to children.
How would you like to be pulled and hauled and ordered about and restrained from doing whatever you wanted to do? You’d resent it. The only reason a child “doesn’t” resent it is because he’s small. You’d half murder somebody who treated you, an adult, with the orders, contradiction and disrespect given to the average child. The child doesn’t strike back because he isn’t big enough. He gets your floor muddy, interrupts your nap, destroys the peace of the home instead. If he had equality with you in the matter of rights, he’d not ask for this “revenge.” This “revenge” is standard child behavior.
Self-determinism is that state of being wherein the individual can or cannot be controlled by his environment according to his own choice. In that state the individual has self-confidence in his control of the material universe and other people.
A child has a right to his self-determinism. You say that if he is not restrained from pulling things down on himself, running into the road, etc., etc., he’ll be hurt. What are you as an adult doing to make that child live in rooms or an environment where he canbe hurt? The fault is yours, not his, if he breaks things.
The sweetness and love of a child is preserved only so long as he can exert his own self-determinism. You interrupt that and to a degree you interrupt his life.
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