Today we interview Ramón Soler, psychologist and therapist, and we are going to deepen, from his hand, in what we should understand as respectful upbringing, in the violence towards children, in the consequences of the scourges and above all, in the way in which we can help our children to grow as free, conscious and peaceful people.
Ramón Soler is a psychologist, specialist in autism and clinical hypnosis, and expert in Reconstructive Regressive Therapy. He specializes in child and perinatal psychology and came to this by confirming that most of his patients' problems come from that stage.
He also edits and writes, along with my wife Elena Mayorga, the online magazine of psychology, respectful parenting and attachment, Free Mind.
How would you define respectful parenting?
It could be defined as an accompaniment that attends to the evolutionary development of each child, relying on the internal process of regulation of each person and respecting, without forcing or conditioning, their maturation times.
It is a definition that I share, but I know that many parents consider that what is called natural or respectful parenting has its risks, because children end up becoming capricious beings without limits. Does respectful parenting involve consenting to children?
It is a very common mistake to think that respecting children means spoiling them all. Many people have suffered restrictive childhoods with very authoritarian parents and do not want their children to live the same as they lived, they yearn for the freedom they lacked in childhood and, therefore, deny anything that resembles a limit and allow Let your children do everything they want.
Both one option and the other are equally destabilizing for children. Many parents live the upbringing of their children with fear of setting limits and, with this, what they achieve is not to provide a safe environment adapted to their needs where the child can fully develop.
What do you mean when you talk about limits?
When I talk about limits, I mean physical limits, but, above all, emotional limits that allow them to define themselves and, also, understand that there are other children with needs and rights equal to theirs.
I understand, but tell me, how can parents accompany the child in their process of facing and understanding the limits?
First, we must understand that life has limits. There are some physical limits (we cannot cross walls or fly) and, also, in our society, we have moral limits (we cannot steal what we want from a store or hit someone when they don't think like us). Educating a child means showing them these limits and also providing tools to be able to assume them in a healthy way and without frustration.
But, Ramón, talking about limits is often misunderstood and parents or society consider that limiting is to make children obey or adapt to our wishes or adult arbitrary conventions without understanding many natural things in childhood.
The limits are not something capricious or arbitrary, but try to give the child a reference of what the world is, what is safe and what is not.
In all likelihood, many of us have grown up between too strict and absurd limits that responded to the discretion of our parents or teachers. Surely these restrictions came from their own traumas and frustrations, derived, in turn, from the educational patterns they received. Our childish experience with these limits can make us, when we are parents, suspicious of setting limits, but we must understand that children need to be taught consistent limits in order to live in society.
Life is hard sometimes and if we give them everything they will not be prepared for it, they consider many people, who seek that obedience and frustration act to model and harden the child. Do you think that children have to be prepared for the hardness of life by hardening them with emotional deprivation or punishment?
It depends on what kind of society we intend. We know that violence breeds more violence and it is proven that abused children are more violent in school than those who have not been. When these children are adults, they will be aggressive with their children, in their work and in their relationships.
If we want a more just and peaceful society, we must break with this feedback fed back generation after generation. I know it is difficult to break that inertia, but we must educate children in respect, empathy and dialogue.Society is a reflection of the individuals that make it up and, if people are violent, we will have a violent society.
You say that for a violent society it is born that people are violent, but, tell me, where is the origin of violence in society?
It can give us the feeling that we live in a violent world and that we cannot do anything because it is what we have always known. But, if we go a little deeper, we will see that the origin of the violence is inside the house, in the mistreatments, the insults, the humiliations and the abandonments that many children from inside doors suffer.
These children will carry with them the seed of violence for everything they suffered in their childhood and, as adults, they will repeat those same patterns wherever they go. Society may seem like an abstract concept, but it is made up of each one of us. Each one contributes to society with their attitudes and personality. If we are violent, society will be violent. If we multiply what I said before by hundreds or billions of people around the world, we will understand why violence in our society.
But then, you mean the parents reproduce the violence they suffered, right?
Effectively. All the acts of violence that we receive in childhood, not only the scourges, but also the insults, the oppressive gazes, the humiliations and the abandonments, are kept inside us. Whether we are aware or not, we carry that violence. Perhaps, our rational part can keep it at bay, but in moments of tension or extreme tiredness, that control fails and the same attitudes that we live in our childhood appear: a bad gesture, a scream or a scourge. For many people, this violent education is the only model they saw in their childhood and, therefore, being parents, they repeat with their children the same thing they suffered from their parents. It is necessary to be aware of all the emotional ballasts with which we have been carrying throughout life to be able to deprogram the violent patterns and replace them with others much healthier for us and for others.
The education of children is an opportunity to do this work, if we are attentive to what causes us to react violently. And if the situation overcomes us, I recommend seeking external and professional help to accompany us in this process of self-knowledge and liberation.
We will continue talking and publishing this long interview with psychologist Ramón Soler. What he has told us so far has seemed very interesting since precisely the limits and children without limits are a matter of which I have spoken to you.
I hope it helps you to understand, in the following publications, the mechanisms that influence the upbringing of our children.
