Starving kids in the fiat-world

Hey Plebbles,

I had a thought last night that I wanted to put into words:

Back in the 13th century, King Frederick II tried a wild experiment to see what language babies would naturally speak if they were never talked to. He took babies away from human contact, and sadly, they ended up dying because they weren't touched or cared for. This just goes to show how much humans need love and affection. Nowadays, research backs it up, proving that love and intimacy are super important for our mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

What the society we grew up in, live in and we're raising our children in, insists upon is:

- go to hospital to give birth to your baby. There, they like to have the upper hand about induction, drugs and c-sections. They also usually take the baby away from the mother once out to do a check-up and clean him.

- put your baby in a crib and let him cry, at least a little.

- put your baby in a pushchair. Use a Maxi Cosi so you don't even have to pick up your baby when taking him out of the car and into his pushchair

- get him used to sleeping in his own room asap

- use fancy gadgets to put your baby to sleep, give him a teddy or blanket to replace your arms

- use a dummy to replace your breast

- wean him at the age of 6 months

- give him into day care as early as 1 year

- pre-school and school are essential for socialization, learning and to make him further independent from his parents

- after-school activities give children the opportunity to play and learn even more

To me, all this is a cruel con that makes fiat-parents believe they are giving their children the best upbringing for a good life even though many a parent’s instinct tell them otherwise but they have never learned to question the system that raised them.

Children barely receive the necessary sense of touch to get by and parents don't realize the harm they're causing. Kids are being starved of love and attention.

APTB FIXES THIS!

Unschooling makes it possible to give our children the physical attention they need and this is also important for us, adults.

But let me first give you an example of what CIO methods and not receiving the love and care a huma needs, can do to a person:

I remember our trip to Asia when Lima as 6 months old. We stayed at a friend’s parent’s house and the lady told us about the importance of letting baby’s cry it out. She related the story of her daughter’s first day of life: The baby slept all through the night and when she woke in the middle of the second night, the mother said: Uh ah, you’ve done it once, you can do it again. So she let her cry.

We know her daughter well. She’s a lovely person, but deeply damaged. You wouldn’t think so when meeting her but we know of her addiction history and her current ones. She simply replaced once addiction (alcohol) for some others and has difficulties staying in a relationship. How could she when what she learned from the moment she was born was that she’s not lovable, not worth being looked after and who knows what other belief systems and coping mechanisms she created to deal with such trauma since birth?

Here’s my experience with CIO methods:

When Lima was 9 months old - a bad sleeper from day one - and I was exhausted from over 9 months of little, irregular and interrupted sleep, I wanted to try a gentle sleep training, hoping it would be a non cry-it-out method, at least that’s how the lady advertised her services. The ‘gentle‘ part of it was that one of us - in our case Rob, because we knew I wasn’t going to be able to not pick her up - would silently and motionless sit next to the crib in which Lima would be screaming her lungs out, wanting to be picked up, breastfeed and sleep next to me.

All this whilst I was sitting in the living room, crying just as much as Lima, and continuing so even when she had managed to cry herself to sleep.

When she woke up after about 30 miutes, we were supposed to carry on with the same method until she’d give up and sleep until the next day.

My dad was staying with us at the time and was witnessing everything but not interfering in any way, except for a Whatsapp message he sent to me saying something like:
Your motherly instinct (what he meant with this was me crying) is correct because studies show what happens in a baby’s brain when being in such situation.

I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t think it was helping in any way. I had made my decision and he was making me feel bad. However, I quickly realized that I didn’t have to go through with this and so I went into the room Lima was sleeping in, picked her up and took her to bed. I messaged the lady saying that we’ve interrupted the training and won’t proceed with it.

The next day se replied that this had never happened before and that sh'e’ll give me my money back.

I never tried a sleep method like this again. All I did was night wean Lima at the age of 2 by explaining the importance of a good night’s sleep for both of us and that she can have booby all through the day. Every night I explained this and when she cried or got angry for not letting her drink, I took her in my arms, acknowledged her feelings and held her tight until she calmed down. After about 2-3 nights, she was not asking for booby in the night anymore. It didn’t make her sleep better and she used my arm as a means to help her fall asleep but I knew I had made the right decision.

Dr. Gabor Mate on Cry it out

“The question is, what else does a baby learn when treated this way and what

is the impact of such learning?

People cannot consciously recall what they "learned" in the first year of life, because the brain structures that store narrative memory are not yet developed. But neuropsychological research has established that human beings have a far more powerful memory system imprinted in their nervous systems called intrinsic memory. Intrinsic memory encodes the emotional aspects of early experience, mostly in the prefrontal lobe of the brain. These emotional memories may last a lifetime. Without any recall of the events that originally encoded them, they serve as a template for how we perceive the world and how we react to later occurrences.

Is the world a friendly and nurturing place, or an indifferent or even hostile one? Can we trust other human beings to recognize, understand and honour our needs, or do we have to shut down

emotionally to protect ourselves from feeling vulnerable? These are fundamental questions that

we resolve largely with our implicit memory system rather than with our conscious minds..

Unfortunately, it's not parental intentions that a baby integrates into her world view, but how parents respond to her....When the infant falls asleep after a period of wailing and frustrated cries for help, it is not that she has learned the "skill" of falling asleep. What has happened is that her brain, to escape the overwhelming pain of abandonment, shuts down. It's an automatic neurological mechanism. In effect, the baby gives up. The short-term goal of the exhausted parents has been achieved, but at the price of harming the child's long-term emotional vulnerability. Encoded in her cortex is an implicit sense of a non-caring universe....

The baby who cries for the parent is not engaging in "tyranny," she is expressing her deepest need -- emotional and physical contact with the parent. The deceptive convenience of

Ferberization is one more way in which our society fails the needs of the developing child."

How can APTB and unschooling fix this?

For parents who have gone through this, the only way is to heal those wounds:

Go for a walk. Fresh air, sun, do nothing else because this is very important for change. If you have the time to get quiet, have a quiet mind, just go for a walk because when walking it’s much easier to do this, to be by yourself and with your own thoughts because that’s when you become aware of things. 

That's how you can change easier than trying to be disciplined and change something forcefully because everything we do is for a reason. It’s like an ingrained drive that is controlling us and our behaviors. Go right to that grain and change that - and you cannot change it consciously, you cannot just say I change now. It’s really just by observation,by getting to know your own thinking, your thoughts and behaviors and who you think you are. That’s how you move mountains. It brings the quickest and easiest change about because then you don’t have to do anything consciously, then change will happen and it will be easy to not overeat or whatever you do. For me it was always overeating and craving food. Food was what gave me pleasure and it was my kind of addiction that I was using to calm myself. I was trying to fill an emptiness inside. There are wounds inside that we try to ease and instead of looking at them so they can heal, we use things like food, alcohol, drugs, sex, social media, all these addictions.

So if you feel out of balance it’s best to just go for a walk and then watch your thoughts and get to know what's behind all this and this way you’ll change quicker than to try and change by discipline because the subconscious mind is always more powerful and stronger than our will power.

The simple things - back to basics -  just nature. If you really take a look you’ll see that everything we need is free. The sun, nature, walking, being barefeet, doing something that we enjoy, playing. Hanging out with friends and family, everything is free. We don’t need much money, no expensive gadgets and expensive experts that we pay to cure us which they can’t - the only person who can heal us is ourselves. 

Go to the foundation, back to nature and everything else, all the symptoms will just dissolve, everything will fall into place. I’m thinking that in our home at APTB, we won’t even have a TV, no iPad, we’ll spend most of our time outside with friends, doing what we love and at home I don’t even want to have chairs. We’ll have a table for the kids to stand by or lie on. We’re going to sit on the floor, sit on cushions, have yoga mats, just squat, because by sitting down on chairs, the digestive system for example starts going wrong. When one bodily system goes wrong, another one has to take over and then there’s imbalance. Of course, it also comes from the mind and our emotions, so if you just get the basics right, then everything will fall into place. If we take kids as an example, they just sit on the floor, they squat, it’s also the natural position for when you go to the loo. In some countries they still have this type of toilet. There’s just a hole in the ground, you squat and that’s how you do your business. That’s the easiest way for the body. 

Just like when giving birth. Instead of lying on a bed and pushing, just squat down, let gravity help and let the body do what it needs to do to deliver the baby, it's’ the easiest way. 

I want to get more and more back to that. I don’t want to be in the city, I want to be somewhere up on a mountain. I love the UK. It was of course cooler and rainier but I love the fresh air. I do love sunshine, it’s very important, but the more time I spend in town, the less I want to be in the city. We went out for walks with the dog, being with the family.

Lima said Can we live here? But it was because of her grandparents and the dog. She doesn’t mind the weather, she is fine with the cold, all of us are. We’ll have more rain and cooler weather up at APTB but it will be amazing, it will be great! The air will be fresher and purer, the people will be fresher and purer, just the whole environment. 

That’s what I want to go back to. Just nature. I never feel like I need to go on holiday because it’s always nice here - in Madeira and within myself -  and the more I take away from my life - things and people - the better I feel. I’ve just been focusing on the most important things: My family, close friends, APTB and BJJ. That’s all I’ve been doing for months now and it’s been so refreshing and relieving and I don’t want to go back to how it was before: busy and stressful. Just keep it simple, watch the Self and you’ll be fine.

And as for your children, the best way to keep their mental, emotional and physical health in its natural balance, is to meet their basic human needs, interfere and impose as little as possible in their decisions, do the opposite of what the fist-system tells us to do and basically just come to APTB ;-)

We’re waiting here for you.