Why a new mother is also afraid of the dark - A POINT OF AWARENESS by Preciosa S. Soliven

One endearing trait of my husband Max is his good sense of humor. He loves to recount, for instance, how he became a school drop-out, actually a kindergarten drop-out! He started at St. Joseph Academy, then being sickly he continued at PWU, and finally concluded his kindergarten at the Holy Spirit where he graduated as valedictorian. Max’s friends would naturally have a good laugh for he is one of the smartest guys they know.

For others, specially mothers, school drop-outs are a nightmare. It is no laughing matter for most of these drop-outs are likely to become lifetime drop-outs. In an authentic Montessori preschool, the making of such drop-out is more apparent than in traditional kindergarten and thus, the system can remedy the problem in time.

The genuine Montessori classrooms provide a variety of real-life chores called Practical Living. This enables the threes, fours and fives to get things done and discipline themselves. They are pleasantly demonstrated by specially-trained Montessori teachers to individual children – never in groups. (The Montessori apparata are useless without a qualified Montessori teacher.) In the regular kindergarten, the whole class is asked to do one thing at a time instead of providing each child more realistic activities.

Helping kindergarten ‘drop-outs’

To encourage parents and children, I decided to remove the words "failure" and "drop-out" from the O.B. Montessori teacher-training vocabulary on the psychological belief that the three-to five-year-old are still in the process of becoming.

For want of a positive "measuring stick," so to speak, I introduced two Italian names of cities: Perugia and Bergamo. The former is where I took the international Montessori preschool teacher training and the latter is where I continued to study the advanced scuola elementare course. Bergamo is an hour away from Milan. Perugias are children who take time to achieve, while the Bergamos are usually high-average achievers.

My teachers and I were more concerned for the Perugia child than the Bergamo. Although there is an average of only two or three Perugias in a class of 30 children, their lack of concentration and their hyper-activity usually drain the Montessori teacher’s energy. Synthesizing the child’s mental and physical energy via Montessori work, or NORMALIZATION, is the solution.

Mothers and their feelings

No matter how much a new mother has read about babies, or how many Red Cross courses she has taken to try to get ready for the experience of caring for her new baby, it is still a totally new experience. The reality of it all doesn’t hit her until she comes home from the hospital and is actually face to face with this brand new, living, breathing thing: her new baby. There it is, 24 hours a day, and it won’t go away!

You see, the new mother has received all kinds of messages from her culture. The western customs tell her that mothers are somewhat magically equipped with "mother’s love" and a "mother’s instinct" which enable them automatically to love and care for their babies. Meantime, for the Oriental mother, the message is the same but the mother is provided a lot of moral support from relatives who live nearby and helping hand from doting new grandmothers.

In general, the first-time mother is not sure about her mother’s instinct. She doesn’t feel adequate to take care of her new baby. Then she thinks that every other mother has this natural "mother’s instinct," and that she must be the only one who doesn’t have. She is so busy worrying and feeling inadequate that she is unable to sit down and reason out that there is a world of difference between mother’s love for a young baby on the one hand, and information and experience in taking care of a young baby, on the other.

Thanks to Dr. Spock

Dr. Fitzhugh Dodson wrote in "How to Parent", "Your feeling of love for your baby will come naturally. Some mothers may feel an overwhelming rush of material feelings as soon as their babies are born. Others may find their maternal feelings develop more gradually. However, there is no built-in fund of information about young babies and their care which you as a woman have by ‘instinct’. That comes from experience. And until a mother has had her first baby, she may had very little experience in even being around babies."

Thus, Dr. Benjamin Spock’s books on raising one-year olds, two-year olds, etc. are bestsellers. They contain all details of child rearing for infants.

There is another set of feeling which bothers new mother a great deal: feelings of resentment. Many new mothers find that they are feeling resentful of the 24-hours-a-day schedule with which they are suddenly confronted. As one new mother who breastfeeds her baby lamented to me, "No one told me it would be like this!" A mother also tends to assume that a child will automatically bring her and her husband closer together. After all, they have produced this baby together, and she feels that when the baby is born, she, her husband, and the new baby will form a new close-knit threesome.

Unfortunately, many new mothers find that quite the opposite happens. Instead of bringing them closer together, the child seems to act as psychological wedge which separates them. She finds that her husband is often jealous of the attention she gives the new baby. He acts more like a rival to the baby than its father. In addition, her husband may not take an active and supportive part in the psychological responsibility for the new baby. He may leave her with the feeling that 100 percent of the responsibility is hers alone. This could give a European or American mother a persecution complex since she doesn’t have relatives or househelp to help baby-sit. She may then resent the baby for causing this situation.

Parents’ misconception sabout child psychology

Many parents have major misconceptions about modern psychology. Let us talk about what psychology does not believe.

1. Modern psychology does not believe it is good for parents to be permissive, if by permissive we mean letting the child do whatever he feels like doing. No sensible psychologist has ever advocated such strange idea. But incredible as it may seem, I have actually known parents who let their children scribble on the good walls of their home with crayons because they thought it would be psychologically harmful to stop them! What is really happening in most of these cases is that the parent is afraid of saying no to her child and tries to use modern psychology as a rationalization for her fear of being with her child.

2. The second notion to which modern psychology does not adhere is that as children go through certain states of development, the parent must sit back helplessly and let that stage of growth take its course.

A parent is not helpless, what with so many good books on childrearing. She must understand the true nature of children which changes rapidly during the first six years. Their absorbent mind enables them to learn independence – to move independently and speak for themselves.

3. Many parents also have the impression that modern psychology teaches that you should not spank children. Some psychologists and psychiatrists have actually stated this idea in print. However, I believe it is impossible to raise children effectively – particularly aggressive, forceful boys – without spanking them. This does not mean that any kind of spanking is all right for a child. Spanking is necessary and inevitable ingredient in raising psychologically healthy children.

4. There is another widespread notion that the "good" parent is the parent who never gets upset or ruffled. I have never met such a parent. I am certainly not such a parent myself. All parents have emotional ups and downs. There are times when we feel great inside, when we can handle smoothly even the most difficult behavior of our offspring. But there are other times when the slightest annoying thing a child does is enough to set us roaring at them.

Character determines the child’s future

Parents spend most of their time trying to make the world as perfect and as comfortable and as happy as possible for their infants and toddlers. They spend the rest of their time trying to keep away the things that would change any of that. A television actress who has two small children remarked, "You want to let your children grow and run and experience the grass under their toes, but… you wonder if there’s a snake in the grass, a broken glass, anything that’s going to hurt them."

However, it is important to know that the first years of your child’s life are most important years – the formative years. By the time the child is six years old, his character structure has already formed. This basic character he will carry with him for the rest of his life. It will determine, to a large extent, how successful he will be throughout school and in later life. His basic personality structure will largely determine how he will get along with other people, how he will feel about sex, what kind of adolescence he will have, what type of person he will marry, and how successful that marriage will be.

Thus, being a parent is finding the balance between letting go and hanging on their children for dear life.

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