Child Dianetics - Part I (501108)
Date: 8 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I The data which is available on Child Dianetics is not as extensive as I would like to have it. Three people, to date, have been given assignments to investigate this particular field and so far as I can discover no data has been added to my own which has been almost at random over a series of other investigations during the last four years.
The problem of children is one which is very important. You’re going to find that children will occupy an even greater interest than adults. That is to say, adults are interested first in getting their children into things, particularly when these children are not doing very well. Therefore you should know something about this subject. As auditors you are not going to be able to avoid doing something about children.
I apologize to you to the degree that the projects which have been set up on the subject have not been completed nor carried through to specific findings. So I can give you what I know about them, what I have done with regard to children, and so far as I can tell, how Dianetics affects children, and how engrams affect them, and how an auditor can alleviate a child’s various distresses. Let us first take up the problem of accessibility. It’s very interesting that the treatment of a child and the treatment of a psychotic happen to have parallels, very definite parallels, because they are primarily—both of them present the problem of accessibility. This doesn’t mean that all children are psychotics; they’re only nearly so.
I am serious about that. In this society today, it is quite fashionable in the mores to have a thoroughly blocked second dynamic. This is evidently the thing to have. One looks over the literary products of the past two centuries and he discovers that, to a greater and greater extent, sex has been pretty taboo. This was obviously pointed up by the work of Freud who, observing the societies of the civilized world, was forced to a conclusion that sex was primarily responsible for aberration.
Now, when an investigator of the stature of Freud can look over a social order and decide that just one thing is wrong with it, we have a pretty obvious point-up of the fact that there is a lot wrong with just that one thing.
True enough, aberration spreads over a wider periphery than the second dynamic. Nobody had actually looked bluntly at this problem, looked at it square in the face and had recognized, until Dianetics, the fact that the child is the product of sex and that there was a definite correlation between children and sex. Now that seems to be one of these superobvious remarks. But we find people who just think babies are too, too cute, who at the same time are saying that sex is just too, too nasty. And it’s a wonderful thing to me that they could take the future race and compartment it and divide it up, one, the sex act—and then children didn’t have anything to do with this at all. Well, they are very intimately related, believe me!
I might go so far as to say, “without sex there would be no children.” No amount of test-tube experimentation in our biochemical laboratories could remedy this, I’m sure; not at this time.
When we have advanced a lot further, maybe we can separate these two, but we can’t now. We are hung with the fact that the second dynamic includes not only sex and the sex act but also children. And when we investigate this field, we discover a very interesting datum: that where you have a person with a thoroughly blocked second dynamic, you usually have a thorough, thorough dislike of children. The two go hand in glove. So perhaps the society’s trend in this direction was to so thoroughly block the second dynamic that all our future generations would be insane. Now it is that important to this society that if this dwindling spiral of sexual aberration were not interrupted, you could fully expect the year 2,000 or the year 2,050 to find not one million nine hundred thousand in the sanitariums and institutions, but you could probably find a few sane people running for their lives from a country which was almost 100 percent.
This thing has become very important. Aberration sort of goes by a geometric progression or by the square. In other words, it’s a spreading, broadening thing. It isn’t a narrow line. It doesn’t mean that one person in this society today, let us say, is insane or very badly neurotic—this does not postulate the fact that in the next generation there will be one person—because this person who is severely neurotic or insane in the society today is going to make 50 or 100 in the next generation who have been affected by this one person.
Now, perhaps only 5 or 10 of this 50 or 100 are going to be very badly affected. But now in the next generation we have maybe 5 severely affected people, severely neurotic or psychotic as a result of this one. Now, we take the next generation and for every one of these we have 5 or 10 severely affected and 50 who are only faintly affected by this person. We’ve already gone up to a population there of somewhere around 250 people who have been affected. And it keeps going that way unless it is severely interrupted!
The only way this has been interrupted in the past has been with new land, whereby a race has faced into a new continent or a new country and, by conquering the old inhabitants, has made itself very strong. The necessity level of the new race has become very high. That is to say, the people in the new land—is very high—they have a tremendous goal. This goal is to take over, conquer, improve and set themselves up on a high level. And as long as that impetus would carry forward, the race would be successful and the amount of contagion in that race would be cut down markedly because there were too many other important things to think about. But then we come to a point when nearly everything has been nicely smoothed out, as far as people can see; they look around and they say, “Well, you see we have some means of transport and the food is fairly regular, the government has settled into a nice run of crookedness and, in other words, we are now a civilized nation and there is no higher goal.” At this moment they start down the dwindling spiral, even though their “golden age” may come right after that period. The dwindling spiral has already been begun, and it starts down, down, down and peoples necessity levels are no longer as high as formerly and they become lower, and aberration begins to manifest itself wider and wider, and you begin this process of super-contagion along the line.
Now, that has happened in the field of the second dynamic very markedly. The first people who settled this country brought into it the seeds of future aberration. They were carrying along a line which was very interesting. I don’t particularly care to go into the background of this, however it so happens that there were certain diseases for which there were no cures, and for the disease was substituted a mores.
Morality, any moral, taboo, is based upon the fact that something the society had done in the past was more painful than it was beneficial and the taboo was laid down when they didn’t understand how to remedy it. They just said “Well, you mustn’t do this anymore, because it’s more painful than it is beneficial to society, therefore it’s immoral.” And then by prejudice it’s carried forward long beyond its time. So we look back over the past and we find out that people were faced with problems they couldn’t solve. Those problems are being solved today.
The point is that the second they began to make taboos along the line, they began to have to enforce these taboos and as soon as they started to enforce them, this meant that force was being applied to reason. And what is aberration but force being applied to reason? Turbulence points were created anywhere along here, and, as those points were created, more and more pain was entered into the society, until at last the whole social order was being very, very severely affected; and the children have borne the brunt of this. The dwindling spiral, in other words, finally winds up in the laps of little kids.
It’s an insidious thing. It is something that nobody could trace clearly through before because they didn’t know the source of an aberration. Not knowing the source, nothing much could be done about it. So these two things could stay there widely separated—the innocent little child on the one hand and this horrible thing called sex on the other hand. Now these, of course, were not in the least bit interrelated!
You look over the field though—coming back to what I said at first—you look over the field and you find that a thoroughly blocked second dynamic is accompanied by a dislike for children, abuse of them and general impatience with them.
You can think over in your own field of experience on this same line. Of course, it doesn’t follow that a blocked second dynamic is blocked both as to sex and to children. In other words, it could be selectively blocked. It could be wide-open on sex apparently and very thoroughly blocked on children. Or it could be wide-open on children and thoroughly blocked as far as sex is concerned.
Now, where you have this condition of wide-open on children and blocked as far as sex is concerned, the children resulting there from are unfortunately going to be very neurotic. Most of the children we have today in our society are excessively neurotic.
The child in this society is denied any responsible position of any kind whatsoever. With his first breath, he begins to be denied the independence for which he as an organism seeks.
After that he is cared for one way or the other or he is fitted into some sort of a mold which people think is very desirable. But his independence, his freedom of action, is being cut off in all directions! He has, fortunately for him, one goal—that’s to grow up—that’s his goal. He might have minor goals but they are minor compared to growing up. Well, this one goal of growing up is his one saving grace. He can salvage himself on that alone unless he is carefully taught not to grow up.
If he is taught sufficiently that his growing up is something that will result in a bad state of affairs for him and that the desirable thing is to remain a child, he has been robbed of the one goal which would carry him forward.
You cannot overestimate the effect this has on a child. You look around in the society and you will find that children who have received too large a bonus for being children are those who are progressing least satisfactorily. A modern school, one of very many, gives to children a certain—a state in the home which far exceeds, actually, their actual state in the home. All the concentration in this school, all the concentration in the whole family is given to the child. That child is given importance, as a child, way out of relationship to importance as an adult.
In other words, if little Willy suddenly runs into the room, knocks over a lamp, spills some sticky pineapple juice on a guests suit, why, that’s just fine. We pat little Willy on the head and we take him out and give him some more pineapple juice because he lost it. Then we say, “Well, he’s only a little child, he doesn’t know any better.” And this general line of conduct—this general line of training toward children gives a very high priority to remaining a child. And actually, who in the name of God would want to be an adult in such a family? So the child is left with that feeling that he wants to stay on being a child; this is not rare today. It was rare twenty years ago but it’s not rare today. So now we look over this goal the child has, the goal of growing up, and we find out how he gets the idea that “growing up” is desirable. Well, he only has one model about this, that is to say the grown-up. He looks around and he knows he’s growing. Physiologically he has this big goal. He has enormous energy, he has good repair and healing qualities there with him, he is geared up to be very energetic and active and he has a goal. And he looks around him and he says “Now, let’s see, I am growing up, now what will I be when I grow up?” And natural result is of that—his answer is “I will be an adult” and he looks around and he takes a look at the adults around him.
Oh yeah, that’s great. Here’s Mama, whose whole concentration must be as a sort of a waitress, waiting maid, and so forth to children. “Well, we don’t want to be Mama, she never has any fun!” And we look at Papa, and he drags home from work and he snarls, and maybe he gets a chance to look at the paper and dinner, and so forth, and he finally goes to bed and he complains about the kids because they’re in his road and so forth. And we look at Papa and “Hell, he isn’t very elegant either; well, that’s another grown-up.” By this time a kid starts to scratch his head and he says, “What the hell is this being grown up? I want to stay a kid because look, we get waited on; we get food; we get clothing; we have no responsibility whatsoever and to hell with these adults!” That’s about, actually, what you would get if you summed this thing up.
The child fortunately has a very high reality He has been utterly and completely libeled by delusion. Everybody goes around saying “All childhood is delusion!” The fellow who said that was, I am afraid, all delusion himself No, a child has a great deal of reality He isn’t running on a reality with which everyone has agreed but he’s running on the reality he sees, and he interprets it according to his data, and it’s quite real to him but it’s not delusion.
The grown-up is the one who is suffering under a delusion because the grown-up has been welded into a line whereby he has been forced to agree upon a very solid reality and we don’t know that that reality is real at all.
We measure a child’s reality in this level: his affinity is usually very high, he tries desperately to communicate to the world at large and so on, and his reality is very high. He’s in perfect agreement, if you will notice, in his age group on the reality of things. He agrees perfectly that he is Hopalong Cassidy between the hours of four to six, and somebody else agrees perfectly that they are—he agrees that somebody else is Little Beaver2 in those same hours. In other words, there is no lack of agreement. And actually for him there is no lack of reality. His reality is greater simply because he can take reality on the whole periphery, and he can also select it down to selective realities.
In other words, the mechanism in him which sets up his reality is far more able than an adult’s, who after all has been cramped down to the fact that reality is sitting at Desk 13—that’s reality! Only that is not reality, that is a superartificiality on which this Adolph has had to agree and he has had to agree practically at the point of a gun! Society said to him “If you don’t consider Desk 13 the greatest reality of your life, and the only one, we’re going to starve you, bud!” And so he agreed to the reality, only that’s not reality. That is an agreed upon strata of society; it’s an agreed upon code of action.
You see, reality must be met by the individuals ability to recognize reality when he sees them, and a child has a very great deal of this.
A child is also very sensitive to unrealities. If you question a child very thoroughly, you will find out that he has a very high concept of unreality. If you try to tell him that the reason why so and so and so and so takes place, you’re talking out of your own enforced reality and he will—liable to look at you very blankly; he won’t be able to figure this one out. And you’ll find out that you have to tell him an awful lot; and he has to be told that in grade school; and he has to be told that in high school; and he has to be told that in college; and then he has to get married and be told it by the boss. And by that time—we’re not just talking about Desk 13 now, we’re talking about an awful lot of nonsense that is through the society. And by that time, all of a sudden, he agrees that this thing he has been told all his life, is a reality. At that moment, by the way, he pretty well folds up.
There’s a similarity there of his acceptance of the general reality of a society and the aging curve. I mean it isn’t accidental; a person shouldn’t get old that quick.
Now, maybe I am talking along lines with which you don’t particularly agree, but I will say this: that a child is faced with a very strange world. In this world, the child has foisted off on him other concepts. Continually, people are forcing upon him things which actually don’t make very good sense. They don’t! If you could ever detach yourself from having been attached to this thing we call reality in this society and step back and take a look at it for what it is, we will see that—a viewpoint very like a child’s—he knows that he likes to run and play and he has an idea that other people ought to like to run and play, too. And we look at a large section of this society and it believes that running and playing is very wicked indeed, or it’s not done, or something of the sort. Oh, it’s all right to go out on a golf course and push a little white ball around but don’t really have a good time. Now, the child is continually confronted with these inconsistencies. It is a completely insane world, as far as he’s concerned, when he first steps into it. There are all sorts of strangenesses with which he is confronted. He’s confronted with the strangeness of his own complete unimportance, that’s the first thing. Everybody has agreed that all a child is supposed to do is go and play or go to school and listen; and get rid of him over here; and get rid of him over here; and push him over there someplace; and say, “Well now, yeah, you can go and sit and look at television; yeah, but don’t make any noise.” He isn’t supposed to talk; he isn’t supposed to walk; he isn’t supposed to sit. He’s pretty anchored; in spite of this his own vitality overcomes it.
I point out to you the fact that there is this insidious line in the society which teaches a child not to grow up, by (1) teaching them that it pays a high bonus to be a child, and (2) that grown-ups don’t have any fun so why be a grown-up? He’s confronted with that one, that’s on an educational level He is confronted with a society which is shot through with a blocked second dynamic as a fashionable thing, that’s the fashionable thing today. So he is also confronted with people who don’t like children, and who are willing to put off on this child all manner of barbarisms on the excuse that this obtains loyalty and discipline and so forth where it is needed.
It is absolutely wonderful to watch children who have not been (quote) disciplined (unquote). They aren’t bad children. If you want to get a real, thorough, bad, wicked kid, you get one that’s really been disciplined! They’ve fixed him up. He knows now just exactly what he is supposed to do, and as long as he’s got breath in his body he’s doggoned if he’ll do it. In other words, you’ve set up the whole being as a turbulence.
Now, I’ll give you a little case history of that. There was a little boy brought to me, and this—we’re right on the groove of Child Dianetics— these opening remarks here have just been to demonstrate to you that the child would go along and create one environment, and that another environment is given to him continually, so that he himself is in a turbulence continually. So here is this little boy. He was about four years of age and he was a “bad boy.” There was no doubt about it. How a boy four years of age could be as destructive as this I never could quite figure out, but if he had been six feet tall he would have given Genghis Khan a good run for his money. Because he would go upstairs and he would pull all of Mama’s clothes off their hangers in the closet, and he’d get them down on the floor, and then he would go get scissors and he would cut them up. Now, this would be a small act of the day. He would go into another room, preferably one which was very neat, and he would get a knife or something and slash wallpaper and then tear it off the walls. Somebody in the family would be eating cereal and he would take a cigarette and shred it over the top of the cereal.
It sort of happened that he was awfully clumsy somehow and he seemed to be able to break any valuable piece of bric-a-brac in the house selectively. Anything that had any value would get broken. Now, it just happened that way. He was just naturally a bad boy. What he needed obviously was more discipline.
I looked into the amount of discipline this child had had, and this discipline amounted to about four spankings and a good swift kick in the skull a day. He was really disciplined! The discipline was not particularly inconsistent because it didn’t matter what he did, he got punished. And furthermore, he had unanimity in the family Papa agreed and punished him, and Mama agreed and punished him, and the one grandparent that was around agreed and punished him.
This left him a sort of a target for all hands.
Took one look at this kid, looked into his eyes and saw there a red-hot rebel, a veritable Lenin in the community. And he was successfully making life so hellish for his own family that they were all almost crazy. He was a victorious rebel. He had them up to a point where nobody dared leave anything anywhere where it could be reached. Where, if he started in on some program of destruction, they knew inevitably that it would get carried through. The child, in other words, was leading a successful revolt.
The matter was solved rather simply. I made an announcement. Since these people were not very tall people, I said, “The next person that lays a hand on that child will be accountable to me, personally, and if the kid tells me anybody has spanked him or done anything to him of any kind whatsoever that he doesn’t like, why, I will come over and I will beat that person’s skull in. If you don’t think I can’t do it, look at me.” They agreed with me; this was a new reality. And within twenty-four hours the child was a good boy.
About a week later, he put it to test. Somebody took a kick at him as he was going out the door so he came over and told me. So I went over and told the person who had kicked him as he was going out the door, that if it happened again, I would make sure they wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week, and this person was very meek and apologized and so forth and I went away, and after that the kid really got to be a good boy. He did the dishes. He picked up his own clothes. He didn’t break things anymore. He went out and played.
You see the primary purpose of life is to overcome an environment. It is the attack of little theta on big theta. It is the attack of thought merging with matter and becoming life, attacking the environment. And when life has had set up to it a huge and enormous obstacle, life will attack. And if that obstacle is awfully big and it carries physical pain with it, the attacks will become more and more and more savage and irrational. And if you see some child who is making these accidental breakages, these odds and ends of disobediences, these strange oversights, you can be very well aware of the fact that here is a child that has been pretty badly badgered from some quarter or other. And the person who should have some processing there is not the child but the parents.
This might seem very odd to you; it will until you take a square look at it yourself. And you go and look at a family that has a very bad boy or a sick boy or a sick little girl. This family, by the way, will offer to you the aspect of veritable saints. They’ll all be walking around with their hands held so and great glowing halos around their heads. They’ve never quarreled in the presence of this child, na-ah. They’ve never punished this child; they’ve never upset anything. No, this child has always had the best of food, and the best of care, and had doctors every time he needed them and so forth, and nobody ever quarreled around this child, na-ah.
Well, I warn you, don’t go into the late-life bank of this child because you will find that every one of his illnesses, these so-called “usual childhood illnesses,” which are so very savage and devastating on the constitution—I couldn’t ever find out why they are called “the usual childhood illness.” These things are murderous!
You take things like scarlet fever and pneumonia and whooping cough and all the rest of these things. Kids really get sick. But you’ll find that every single one of those periods of illness has been preceded by a very high emotional upset in the vicinity of that child. Every one of them!
If you want to check this, you don’t necessarily have to go and find a child, but you just look over the prenatal and postnatal banks of people, and you’ll find out that in the prenatal bank, here are these quarrels, upsets and so on, and then postpartum you will find the periods of illness of the child and you can go back—and as a matter of fact this is good Dianetics. If you find that period of illness, track it back two, three days before that and find out what happened before that period of illness and you will get there a clue as to the conduct of the people in this person’s background. That’s good detecting because there is something there. There is a lost ally before these major illnesses, there will be quarrels and so on.
In one family, which was the very model of propriety, where the little child in the family—the child was about three—had been very, very ill from a combination of chicken pox and hives, and which eventually passed over into pneumonia. I was interested to look over the general situation and find out that an obvious quarrel had taken place in the room where the child was ordinarily kept. And how do I know? Because the legs, the steel legs of a crib in which this child slept, were bent; freshly, newly bent so that—no, the areas hadn’t rusted or dirtied up in any way. What the hell happened in there I don’t know. But you looked around there and you found out that the wall, one part of a wall—which was a sort of a beaverboard wall—was dented in, and the outline of three knuckles were there. But this family lived a model life. They never had quarrels around this child! This gives you some sort of an idea of what will happen to a child who is in an area of combat; high emotional stress and so on. As I say, you can check this by going back into your own preclears’ lives, and you’ll find out that these big periods of illness and upset and regression in the business of living are preceded by something on a family level. Something has happened.
Now, I just give you some sort of an idea of a child’s environment. You can take any child and look the child over, and as you know this subject a little better, you can read off the face and body of that child, the kind of home life he has and the general type of activity engaged upon in his home.
These children are not just walking advertisements, they are walking signboards of the kind of families they come from. These little kids who go around gimping on lame legs and so forth and so on, they’re walking advertisements of attempted abortions and so on. In other words, you look at the kids—by their children you will know them. So when you start to treat children and you start looking them over, you actually will find yourself less able in a practical sense, less able to help the children who are worse off, actually, because they are in the most restimulative environment.
Now let’s look at the background of a child. Ordinarily a child’s early bank doesn’t start to key in until considerable time has elapsed. Their necessity level is high, they’re in good shape generally, and they could have a very, very heavy bank, but it would take an extraordinary stress in their environment in order to key this material in, because it’s difficult to tire a child. They appear to be tired but their level of “I’ll quit and go to sleep” comes much sooner than an adult’s. In other words, the mechanism is still in such good shape, usually, that it doesn’t permit itself to become super tired. It’s only when a child is really pushed along and very badly tired out by some extraordinary circumstance that you can get them up to a point where they get a key-in. So reaching that first key-in, whether that first key-in is in babyhood, or early childhood, wherever it is, that was a pretty hard point to reach. It will be the first key-in that brings on the first sickness of the child. I’m not just talking out of theory now, it’s stuff I’ve traced. It seems incredible to me that there would be this much influence, interaction, between the two things.
It seems very difficult to get a child up to a point of physical exhaustion where he can get a key-in. But a child will also take pretty good care of himself from a standpoint of injury. He doesn’t get injured near as easily as you think because he’s quite resilient; he can go down and get a most dreadful bump and just bounce. Sure he cries, because he’s annoyed, not because he hurts terribly. Now, at those moments he can get a key-in. But the problem of the early life of a child is a problem of keeping the child from being keyed in. In other words, almost anything can be done to the child or around the child, as long as his tone is high. He isn’t affected. You can take a child who is wide awake and alert and full of food and so forth and you can holler and scream and yell and rant and stamp your foot at this child and he just grins at you—he isn’t affected—no key-in. But let’s take him out and walk him for a couple of miles when he’s very little and overtire him and so forth, and then let’s just say something rather light to him but still with an emotional, high emotional tone, and the child will break down right there. You can watch a key-in happen in a child.
What I’m bringing forward is, is that there are, in the usual human being, there are tens of thousands of key-ins and restimulations. There has to be a key-in for every engram before that engram is in the least bit effective. The engram just sleeps until it is keyed in. And when it’s keyed in, after that it can be restimulated.
The first principle then, that must be observed in the handling of children, is Preventive Dianetics, The child must be kept from getting engrams in the first place. That requires that the society takes care of Mama, to some degree, and watches certain things, such as saying things around Mama after she’s hurt, or saying things to her when she is ill when a child is on the way—this has a marked effect as you well know. And then the next thing is, the most insidious of course, of engrams, is birth. And when you have Mama rather badly blocked on the second dynamic, you will find somebody whose pelvic region is not well developed, whose endocrine system is in bad shape, and who nervously will have a hard time of birth so you get a rough birth.
There’s the second dynamic sneaking up physiologically. And it does come up physiologically. You look at some woman who has a retarded endocrine system, you look over her bank in general, and you will find out that it is solidly blocked on the second dynamic. And it really takes some blocking; it really takes some engrams and some key-ins to arrest the physiological development of a woman. That requires real force.
Now, so a birth—a bad birth with instruments, Mama worried, ether, surgery and “Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak” all during the birth, lots of restimulative noises and so forth going on . . .
You get a case like a little girl I saw here last summer—the year before—who goes around all the time and she’s only about half-awake, and she is terribly fat, you know, very fat, awful, the physical development of the child is very badly retarded. The fat is white and the physiology is completely out of gear. That child is still being born. So I made an inquiry, I said, “I bet this child had a very, very heavy anesthetic birth.” And I went around and mentioned it to Mama, and just got to talking about things in general, and we finally got around to obstetrics, and found out what sort of a birth was had, and she said “Well, it was all right,” she guessed, for a good reason there that she couldn’t remember a thing about it because it seemed like she was out for about twelve hours, with chloroform. Now, of course, that went right straight through the umbilical cord, and the child was anesthesed too, and with all the holders and bouncers and everything that occurred there during birth, why, this poor little kid gets born and life goes on, but as far as the reactive mind time track is concerned, life’s right there! And here’s this little kid practically sound asleep. She’s in a continual dope-off. Very bad shape.
Her alertness—I thought the child, for instance, was three years younger than the child actually was—had already entered kindergarten and had flunked. Here is coordinative points; and you don’t have to look very far for these coordinative points. So a child should have a very quiet prenatal period, and should have a silent, as painless as possible, birth. Now, there are people around who will say, “Well then, the kind of birth that ought to be the easiest birth to pick up would be a Caesarean. Now that is a very fine sort of a birth.” Except I’ve looked over Caesarean births and I find out that Caesarean births are harder to pick up than an ordinary birth. Not because there isn’t any pain there—they normally wait in a Caesarean until the child is very firmly wedged, and isn’t going to be born normally, and then they leave the child that way for about twelve, fourteen hours, with his skull caved in, and then they throw in anesthetic—oh, five, six gallons—and get everybody knocked out and then comes the Caesarean. In other words, a Caesarean taken right now with a relatively light anesthetic, no harder than anything else, would be an easy birth, but that isn’t the way Caesareans are done, ordinarily. They are done only after a natural birth has been attempted.
I saw an x-ray one day of a little kid, process of birth, and the fontanel bones were over like that. Mamas pelvic region was so small that the kids skull had just folded completely over on itself like that, instead of being out like this. The child was left that way for fourteen hours while people stood around and had long conversations around the child and so forth as to what was going to be done.
Now, the IQ between this boy and his brother, who was just a year older, is fantastic. I mean the little kids slow—he’s clumsy and so on, and his brother is very sharp and very alert. His brother was premature, was born at a time when he was of a size when the restricted pelvic area opening was sufficiently large to permit his being born, and he was a preemie, and so his alertness is very high because he didn’t have a hard birth. In fact, his birth was so unhard that they couldn’t get the doctor there in time, and he was already born by the time the doctor arrived.
So, well, here you have just the difference of birth. Both of these children have an almost identical prenatal bank but the big difference there is birth.
Now after that, one should take care that a child is not dropped, run over by trucks, hit in the head with sledgehammers or otherwise abused. And of course, people normally take this precaution with a child. So that doesn’t have to be stressed. What does have to be stressed is the possibility of key-ins. Preventive Dianetics goes forward into the key-in stage.
Now, the child bumps his head: there for a few seconds is a period of potential key-in. One must be very careful that it doesn’t take place, because there are engrams down the bank which are matched in voice tones to the parents’; just a parent’s voice tone can start to reactivate some of the earlier engrams. So you say absolutely nothing around a child right after it’s been injured in any way. I don’t care if it’s a very small cut in the finger, so on, a bumped head, no matter how light this thing is, no matter how great the temptation is to say, “Oh, you poor dear little baby,” and lay in a nice sympathy engram and restimulate at the same time and key in an earlier engram—leave it alone! Let the kid howl. If you do anything with a kid, straighten him up a little bit, and once the anaten departs and the kid’s a little more alert, do something for the child, do something at that moment and still say nothing. Let minutes and minutes and minutes go by after a bumped head before you talk around a child.
Quarrels and things around a sleeping child are highly destructive. The child, tired, and so forth, goes to bed; Papa and Mama start fighting. I’ve picked up more key-ins as having occurred right after the child went to bed and Papa and Mama were busily quarreling in the next room because junior is asleep. Actually at that moment—key-in!
One case of stuttering occurred in this fashion. A little kid had been playing and had played far—hours beyond when he should have; he had been out to an amusement park and the rides were so fascinating and everything was so wonderful, and very excited, and found out that he had to walk over a mile finally to get home after all of this, and the kid was additionally sunburned during the thing. And the kid comes in and he tries to eat some supper, and he feels too bad to eat supper. He goes up to bed and then he is asleep for about a half an hour, and Papa comes home and a big quarrel ensued wherein “You can’t talk to me! Who are you talking to?” and so forth. And the next morning the kid woke up stuttering, and he stuttered for the next twenty-two years! So we’re not kidding when we talk about key-ins!—when we talk about quarrels, we talk about sympathy engrams. If this kid is luckless enough to get sick, mums the word. Don’t talk around a sick child! And if the medical doctor comes in and decides that he is going to hold a long and drawn-out conversation around this child, your natural feeling of courtesy or awe might restrain you from doing something. Well, would you want your natural feeling of courtesy and awe to be so strong and great that you severely aberrate a child for the rest of his life? No, I’m afraid that the balance outweighs. So a good swift kick in the shins on anybody talking around a sick child—yanking them by the collar, dragging them out of the room and saying you’ll push their teeth down their throats if they don’t learn to keep their mouth shut around the kid while he is being treated or examined, I think was much more to the point!
Because you start going back—that sounds very punitive but it gets punitive at the moment when you’ve been auditors long enough to find out how much talking goes on around sick children. People come in and just thoroughly louse up the child’s life. There he is, he can’t protect himself, he can’t get his guards up in any way. His analytical attenuation is there and an ally comes in, “Well, dear, I’m going to stay here with you until you are well. Now, I’m going to be right back. I will be—now, that’s all right, I don’t think you will die.” “Do you think he will die, dear?” or “Oh, my dear, darling little baby, you are going to die! I know you are going to die. Don’t leave me!” Great.
I’ve run into more of these superhysterical scenes, big scenes where Mama, all worried, talks to the doctor across the baby’s head. The baby’s spinning, completely out, and all of it being beautifully recorded. Later on the baby then slides into Mamas valence. This period of illness maybe lasted five days and keyed in about half of the prenatal bank, and then the baby didn’t get well for months.
One period of whooping cough that I traced was very interesting to me because it lasted for one year. And it started out with a light cold brought about—and I found this period of a years illness in this persons life and I couldn’t find any data and we’d go down into the early area and the sense of reality very bad. Things were pretty bad in this case. And we’d come back up to this year’s illness. And no data until I finally slugged around hard enough and had gotten smart enough to move a few days before the first moments of illness and we find this little kid sitting on the stairs, in the cold, late at night, drafty hall, listening to Mama and Papa scream at each other because they are about to come and take Papa off to jail. And Mama is berating Papa for having been careless enough to have to be taken off to jail.
Papa has signed a note for a friend who turns out to be a crook, and this makes Papa a crook. The child listened to all of this, late at night, cold drafty hall, first thing you know, got the sniffles. Papa was the ally in the case, Mama wasn’t; and Papa went away and Papa was gone exactly that year. Isn’t that a funny coincidence? Just before the sickness really took hold solidly, the child was exhausted, emotionally exhausted and so forth. Nobody knew this little kid had known anything about this situation!
Another ally of the child’s came in and said, “Now, Papa will be here to take care of you and so forth” and told the kid a lot of lies on the subject. And then Mama comes in and threw herself on the child’s bed and says “Oh dear, Father has gone away forever, he is lost to us, he has left us all to starve and sicken and die!” Well, that’s great.
The kid stayed ill one solid year. First it was just a bad cold. This was bad enough, but the cold was perpetuated and turned into whooping cough. The next thing that happened was people came in, again late at night—this family evidently specialized in this sort of thing—they came in late at night and picked the kid up. Now, this kid has had a little room where the furniture had been made for the child by Father, and the child’s name was on all the furniture. And came in late at night and picked the kid up and said “Well, we are moving now.” “But where?” “Well, we’re going to another house. We can’t stay in this house anymore because we are all broke.” And the child said “But, what about my room, my furniture and so forth?” “Oh, well have to leave all that behind.” And the child is carried out through this house where all the furniture is upside down and the packing is going on. In other words, here is home now really shaken. The child is taken and put on a screen porch. She was covered up all right, but the odd part of it was that she woke up the next morning with double pneumonia and almost died.
As soon as she was over that she got measles; meantime not having gotten rid of the whooping cough anywhere along this line. Two days before Christmas, Papa came home. In twenty-four hours the child was well. Give you some sort of an idea of the influence of an emotional crisis or the emotional behavior of people around a child, coordinative with childhood illness.
Now, I tell you these things because you will find one of the handiest ways to put children on a happy road is by a little education of their parents. And you cannot deliver processing to a child without doing some education of the parents.
Now, I wouldn’t advise you to go on as punitive a level of conversation and mood as I have been on this morning. But I have seen children pretty badly beaten up in this society and I like kids.
The point that I’m trying to make is: I’m trying to impress you with the urgency of putting across a communication of this sort to a child’s parents, if that child is badly in need of some aid and assistance from you. There is your first entering wedge! It is the education of the parents.
You have to tell them and demonstrate to them, using possibly as examples their own lives, what happens when certain things happen to a child; what you do to prevent the child from being upset and disturbed. You have to show them the consequences of doing certain things to the child.
Now, for instance it would be—your tenet there is not that you must never punish this child. As a matter of fact, an occasional cuffing around demonstrates to a child that the thing to be is not a child, but an adult. I mean, that’s almost educational. But don’t nag, nag, hit the kid and then nag some more, and then hit the kid and then nag some more. No! If you’ve got to punish the kid, there is a way to do it. You tell him what the score is, and you punish him in absolute silence and then leave him alone. Because the punishment will give him analytical attenuation, and then the content of the lecture goes on a reactive basis where it is no longer available to the analytical mind, so the child cannot rationalize himself into good behavior. And there’s nothing more stupid than punishment along in that line because all the punishment then dives out of sight, and the child analyzes the fact “these people are awful mean to me.” If any sort of liaison is going to be used there, if any communication is going to be established for this child, it’s on the basis of “we have a life to live together and you live with me in peace and I’ll live with you in peace.” Now, that’s a strange thing but children will listen to it.
Now, the insidious part of it is, is when you enter a case or when you take up the case of a child, you are going to pick up somebody who has been very badly abused for quite a while. In other words you’re picking it up beyond the point when you can do anything active about it very soon. You’re going to pick it up at a point where the child is relatively destructive, where they are running around in circles, they’re making noise, they’re doing this, they’re doing that. And somehow or other you’ve got to bring the child across and into a cooperative setup after all this other stuff has been done to the child. Now, that’s pretty tough. That’s a very difficult thing.
However, it can be done. First, by educating the parents at least to the point of not doing some of the things to this child they’ve been doing, and by picking up from the child some various things on Straightwire; we’ll talk about the actual processing of children here in the next hour. But you’re picking the child up late. The dwindling spiral has already started in. The most interesting thing which I know is the child who has never been punished. There is no broken affinity with this child. Maybe this child has broken affinity with a chair and a teapot and a few other things, but that’s only natural and nothing much has been said and the child was never raved at. And this child is in pretty good shape. This child will go along for a long time. And regardless of what somebody may say about how neurotic a person must be to succeed, I’m afraid as we look around the world, we find that the preponderance of the successful people in this world stem exactly from that sort of a background. All of the native independence, the native desires to grow up and to carry on, of course, are left in that child undisturbed.
When one talks about “a spoiled child,” he is talking about something else entirely different. One has to really label and evaluate “what is a spoiled child?” before he can understand the act of spoiling children. The way children are spoiled is to rob them of their independence of action! That is the way a child is spoiled, not by loving the child, not by giving the child things. These things don’t spoil a child. You can give a kid an Empire State Building and it won’t spoil him. But by robbing him of his independence of action—now a child can be robbed of his independence of action in numerous ways. The first way is by “just for his own good.” The method of preventing him from making his own decisions, by inflicting punishment upon him when his own decisions lead him into trouble. In other words, no real adjudication here. This child makes up a decision, makes up his mind he’s going to do something and he gets punished. And then there’s the other one where the child is continually informed how nice everybody is to him, and how the world is all run for him, and how ungrateful he is and so forth, and yet give him everything and then tell him that this is being done for him. In other words, that’s another way to rob him of his independence of action, is to sort of buy him off so he doesn’t dare act independently. And another way is to work on him on the basis of getting sick, getting tired, getting discouraged, whenever the child does anything wrong. Actually, it’s a false ally action.
Have you ever seen a mother who handled a child, with a tyranny beyond any of Rome’s emperors, by simply bringing home to the child that all of Mama’s travail, and all of Mama’s sickness, and all of Mama’s weariness and so on was definitely because Mama gave her all for the child, and now the child is expected to do something in return; at least, be a little bit obedient and not marry Johnny.
This sort of a pattern, that can go back all during a child’s life, is highly disruptive. Because the child, the poor fool, goes along his whole life being caught in this trap continually, and being a naturally responsive, live, warm human being, believes that if he isn’t good or he isn’t this or he isn’t that, he—something dreadful is going to happen to Mama! And the devil of it is, that if he does cut loose from his moorings and suddenly turns on this situation, something usually does happen to Mama, she goes ahead and finishes out the dramatization, because it’s strictly neurosis on Mama’s part that causes her to do this, so she finishes out the dramatization. And I know of at least one Mama that kicked the bucket because of it.
Yeah, one I know very specifically, very clear-cut case. The daughters all got, all of a sudden, terribly tired of this whole thing. They all seemed to have decided on one afternoon that they were no longer going to fall for this stuff! Because two of them remained unmarried; although proposed to many, many times; unmarried at the age of thirty-five; and the third one was being called upon to break up her marriage, otherwise Mama would get sick and die! And they all of a sudden one afternoon decided that this was a hell of a state of affairs, and they told Mama, not without much rancor, that they’d decided that they were just going to go ahead and live their own lives now, and they’re going to move out and get their jobs and so forth. Mama had held money and everything else as a whip over them. So they did and in two months Mama was dead. She finished her dramatization! So its not without peril that a child embarks upon this course. Mama is not just pretending, Mama will actually get sick; that’s her dramatization. She had that laid into her as a child, and she turns around and lays it into her own children, and they in turn will grow up and lay it into their children, and so on ad infinitum. Now that is one of the most insidious equations this society faces.
The punishment one will result eventually in a terrific rebellion on the part of a child. He has nothing to compensate for punishment, nagging and so forth and so will just fly in the face of fate and probably very irrationally become a rebel against the whole system.
The other method of buying the child, of saying, “Well, now, here are your nice new shoes, Johnny. And your . . .” (Get that your new shoes.) “I am going to buy you new shoes; they are now your new shoes.” Johnny says, “Gee, that’s fine. I think I’ll go out and play with Rodger.” And he puts on his new shoes. “No, Johnny, those are your best shoes! You are to wear those only on Sunday.” His shoes? Oh yeah! And so, a child then goes over, and next week sometime, “But I am so good to you Johnny, I always buy you everything you want, new shoes, and everything else.” Well, by this time his wits on an educational level will just start to spin slightly because obviously they weren’t his shoes!
In other words, he is deprived of his pride of ownership. He is deprived of his independence of action, simply by having them bought away from him all the time.
No child ever was spoiled by affection, by sympathy, by kindness, by understanding or even by indulgence. If these three things I just mentioned are avoided, you could give a child Cadillac roadsters or anything else that comes into your head, and this child wouldn’t be spoiled by them. You could give him better toys than anybody on the block has, and you won’t make a snob out of him.
If this child is permitted to grow amongst the society of children, they’ll to some degree make a citizen out of him about these things. He can go forth with his possessions, and he can share them or otherwise; he’ll find out how the world orients itself; that’s something he’s got to learn. So what I’m trying to stress here in the field of Child Dianetics, I’m trying to break an old superstition that love and affection so thoroughly upsets a child as to drive them crazy; that one actually exists in this society, as incredible as it may seem.
A gentleman called me one day and he said “You know,” he said, “I don’t know what could possibly be wrong with my daughter. She has reached the age of sixteen and I have always been very, very careful never to demonstrate my affection for her for fear of setting up a complex in hen And yet today she is convinced that she has no family life or anything and she has run away from home three times.” Boy, this non sequitur type of thought, logic. This guy had been careful all of his life never to be affectionate to his daughter because “you spoil children by loving them.” Well, I assure you that the fastest way to spoil children is not by loving them.
Now, there is another one in the society that might interest you. People have a sort of a belief that parenthood is a biological fact. That the child has no natural affection with the parent, could be raised just as well by anybody else. That, in other words, the parents’ indulgence toward the child is not reciprocated.
It would be an interesting thing to you to observe some six- and eight-month- to ten-months-, twelve-months-old babies with parents who are relatively unaberrated. I made a little survey of this, one of these Hubbard special two-day surveys; you have to cover fields pretty fast. But the difference is maybe with Hubbard’s surveys, is he occasionally looks.
Now, the funny part of it is that there is obviously a natural affection from the child to his own particular parents. Now, you can answer this any way you like to. I have no scientific proof for this. But a child gets along better with his own parents. In other words, the analytical level of thought in a child is more powerful than the reactive level of answering because actually the parents’ voices would obviously be restimulative to the child. All manner of things are wrong with this relationship on a reactive level but the child has enough affinity and affection with his own parents to overcome the bulk of this. A child is very, very full of love and affection. And as I say, I repeat, it’s remarkable to me that the idea of parenthood being only a biological fact is wrong.
The observation, and just observation all by itself, demonstrates that a child has a natural affection for his own particular parents. And when this is interrupted by somebody else or something else, a break of affinity occurs on an analytical level. In other words, a grandparent stepping in and jockeying the situation around until she is receiving the affection has actually had to break a natural affinity span between the child and his parents.
Grandmas way of doing this is historical. She demonstrates to the child that the parents are mean by correcting Mama each time Mama corrects the child, by setting herself up in moments of pain and anguish on the child’s part as an ally, and becomes a reactive ally to the child. The child’s mental efficiency goes down (descending whistle). Boomp. That is a very, to be colloquial, lousy operation.
Anybody, any family which permits to be in existence within it, people or factors which will split up this natural affinity line between children and parents and so on, is asking for future wreckage as far as this child’s mental condition is concerned. This is one to watch.
You may not realize it, unless you have processed an awful lot of people, how insidious the ally is in the sympathy engram and so forth. But it’s matched by the fact that parents are very often mean to children. But a lot of the whipsaw around a child comes about when an ally steps into the family and starts to make large capital with the child. Starts to buy the child and starts to do this and to do that.
Children to whom this has been done really spin. So as an educational level you should look over families and as bad as it is to offer anybody advice along this line, if you could explain to some parents how this situation in which they find themselves gripped has in it certain factors which, if changed, would resolve the situation fairly thoroughly. You have several points now that you can understand with regard to it.
One of them is the exterior ally. Grandparents do not belong in homes. One can look back with all the mawkish sentimentality in the world and say “My dear, dear grandparents” but boy, wait until you get back there in the bank and find out what they did. They were very nice, that’s true, but they often caused enough disturbance here and there and bought the child off, to break the affinity line between the parents and the child, and estrange them.
That’s much stronger and much more important than is ordinarily realized, that a child does have a natural affinity for his parents. It is a mistake that the society has made, a society which was doting a little bit too hard on Darwin, let’s say, and on some other biological concepts, that such a thing as affection did not exist between parents and children. It very, very definitely does, and alone accounts for the fact that we have any sane citizens at all!
Now, let’s take a break and in about ten minutes start in on processing.