Child Dianetics - Part II (501108)
Date: 8 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
The youngest I have ever processed a child is four years of age and the oldest I’ve ever processed one was ninety-eight. They’re equally difficult.
Now, the problem of the auditor in Child Dianetics is first and foremost the problem of accessibility. You can appreciate this. A child does not like to remain quiet. And a child that has been rather badly used in his lifetime is rather prone to resist attention from a grown-up. As a result, that problem of accessibility will stare you straight in the face with any child with whom you work.
A child is a problem in self-control. You see, we talk a lot about control circuits. A control circuit is one thing; that is, an engram which lays into the human being the command “Control yourself” which takes over a part of the analyzer and sort of installs another “I” in the mind.
Now, the problem then of self-control is the ability of “I” to control the organism. That’s natural self-control and as these false self-control units, these circuits go out, “I” is more and more able to control the organism and it goes on up along the line until a person starts to pull in toward Clear; he can exert a self-control that no circuit ever possibly could have given him.
Well, a child is a problem in self-control because he doesn’t have very much of it. He is—particularly if he has been rather badly used—his attention is very badly scattered. And you have to pick up his attention and then channel his attention back into his own locks and engrams. With an adult you could do it fairly easily because there the attention is channeled, and you usually just have to turn it back in against his engrams. Well, here we have an additional step. We have to gather it up and focus it and then turn it back in against these locks and engrams.
The problem of attention is an interesting one and it covers the whole field of therapy, not just Child Dianetics. Attention which is very broadly spread, you might say, all around the horizon, is hunting. It is looking for something on which to fix; it has no targets. This by the way, when it’s too broadly spread, results in a rather interesting psychic condition known as “fear of the unknown.” This is a rather special kind of fear in that there is danger in the vicinity and yet one cannot select out of this vicinity exactly what is dangerous. As a result, he begins to be afraid of the unknown because he can’t target it. His attention will then be very badly scattered and he is looking all the way around him. Then there is the fear of the specific object—there attention becomes too closely channeled and too frozen in one place. This is approximated by being stuck on the time track. It means that attention units are there looking into the interior world at a danger, a menace or a command which makes it impossible for the person to move easily on the track. In other words, that’s too close an attention toward the interior world. And there is also the case where these attention units of the interior world, the engram bank, you might say, are unable to locate any specific trouble. They are just scattered all the way up and down the bank. They are looking everywhere and this person is afraid interiorly of it, of an unknown. So you have your four conditions there: The exterior world, closely fixated attention, closely channeled. Attention gets too fixated, by the way, it reduces the analyzer. That is on the nonoptimum, the suboptimum levels. And then the attention of the exterior world where one cannot locate a danger but knows and feels a danger is present; that’s too widely scattered. In the interior world you get the same two conditions.
Now, a child who is afraid is usually in a highly scattered state of mind, because the child’s data is very light. In other words, his standard banks haven’t enough data in them to permit him to select out what is wrong and identify it and so be able to look at it. Instead of this, he looks at a wide unknown world, merely because parts and portions of this world are not identified to him. Hence the extreme terror, fears of childhood. And they are intense. The world of the child is one of giants and dragons. Not because all childhood is delusion, just simply because childhood doesn’t have enough data, that’s all. They can’t just label everything and you get this spread of attention, so that you get this fear of the unknown. And when you find a child that is neurotic, it is normally this which is the trouble.
Now, you see, immediately that I point that out to you, a whole therapy comes into view, and that is merely the identification of situations and objects on an educational level. You give the child more data. What’s wrong with this child? This child doesn’t have enough data and so he doesn’t understand. So he is suffering from fear of the unknown. And the remedy for it, the first and foremost remedy, is to give the child more data. And don’t give him incorrect data, give him the best data you can give him.
This is actually—it sounds in a super simplicity, but it is just about that.
You start in on this child and start to get him to define, just get him to define words. Get him to define objects and their uses and you will find that he has the most confoundedly weird misconceptions of the world in which he’s living that have been handed to him by the adults around him. And you can straighten out an awful lot with a child just on that level. You fix up his labels for him.
Now, to this degree, the late Count Korzybski was very much down the groove. We follow along the line of relabeling things for people and reorienting them by general semantics, and we find out that this has some small efficiency. But with a child it has a much, much larger efficiency because you’re not just reorienting a child, you are actually labeling the world for the child. And you will find out that most grown-ups are very poorly oriented about the world anyway, and that they have given this child not only poor orientation and general lack of attention, but they’ve given the child bad orientation. They’ve given the child, for instance, Eugene Fields, who, as able as he might be in writing a ballad about Johnny and Frankie (one night when he was waiting for the results of a fight—I think that was probably his great and only poem; the rest of it should be burned), laid into the society a number of traps for poor kids. I think he hated children, actually, and he certainly got his revenge.
You take a child with no data on the subject of death, and then some ally sings the child about a little tin soldier and the little toy dog and the angels song and so forth and they took Little Boy Blue away and he . . . “Well what’s death?” “Well, death is when you go to hell.” “What’s hell?” “Well, that’s where they have fire! And if you’re not a good boy you go to hell, you see, and that’s why all this works out.” “Huh?” I mean, well, that’s data! Now, you wouldn’t consider that data, I’m sure, but to a child it’s data. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” “What’s my soul?” “Well dear, that’s something inside of you.” Now, you catch him late at night, you see. “That’s something inside of you.” And maybe this poor little kid was an AA, maybe, huh? The soul is something inside of him! You’re going to discover this same computation in many a preclear, whereby he doesn’t dare get rid of his engrams. Why? Because the Lord will take his soul. What’s his soul? That’s him! Well, how come it’s him? Because he’s inside of Mama! You see, it computes.
Well, this is the kind of data we give our little children. “Little Orphan Annie” the little poem, “Little Orphan Annie” I have found responsible for more upset in children than any other single piece of work. That’s a gorgeous one. “His daddy heard him holler and his mama heard him shout,” and they went upstairs, there’s nothing there but a pile of clothes, the goblins had gotten him. “What’s a goblin, Mama?” “Oh, that’s a goblin.” Yeah. So childhood delusion? I think we had better talk about grown-up delusion, whereby we must build a world of complete asininity for this poor little kid!
By the way, he doesn’t have to buy this stuff. It is absolutely unnecessary to communicate with a child on this level. It is so childish that a lot of grown-ups ought to be spanked for having started it in the first place. Because a child is perfectly logical, he’s got good sense. There isn’t any sense in coming around and telling him that goblins exist, and there’s a place called hell where he’ll burn forever, and that the soul inside him is going to be taken by the Lord who doesn’t exist but he will now—as far as he’s concerned. Do you understand? I mean, he can’t reach out and grab this guy. Sir James Jeans and an awful lot of guys have been looking and trying to identify just what this was for an awful long time and they haven’t found him yet! And you expect this little kid, two, three years, four years old, to suddenly say, “Well, your—the Lord——.” “He’s going to come when I’m asleep?” “Well, yes. That’s all right, dear, go to sleep. Be calm.” This kid’s early life, until he gets the world around him properly labeled and into some kind of focus, is a world of terror and—why, it really is. You take some little kid, he’s got some engrams jumping, well, you may not be able to reach these engrams. And the reason why not is because you can’t get this child’s attention channeled to you. And furthermore, as you start back down the bank, if you can get him into reverie, you’ll find out that he’s got a prenatal bank that a thirty-five-year-old preclear, with all of his understanding and everything else, wouldn’t dare face.
You will find the track just sown with quarrels, brutalities of a kind which you can’t ask a little kid, four, five, six years of age to face this sort of thing. He just can’t do it! He hasn’t enough analyzer. Not only that, his analytical mind is not fully developed physiologically. Not only that, he doesn’t have a good, full bank of data, so he has no way to reevaluate. Because new data must be reevaluated or must be evaluated against old data. And supposing the kid hasn’t got any data? Now, how do you reevaluate new data against no data? Can’t be done.
As a result, you are up against a computational difficulty of no data and you are up against an attention difficulty of he has never learned to channel his attention in any way. This is somewhat educated into a person. Life educates this into him as how to channel, handle, focus attention.
Furthermore, he is insufficiently capable of handling his own body. He can’t make his body do all the things which a human being should permit his body to do, and consequently he can’t get his analytical mind to send him back on down the track so that he can pick up engrams expertly You’ll weep on some of these kids. You’ll find that you can get them back to a sleigh ride or the time they went swimming and they’re pianola, they just run, (snap) just like that They just go just exactly where you want them to go on the track and so forth. But you can only work them for about five minutes at a time! They get bored. They come up to present time and they want some candy, they want to go out and play Well, you have to corral them and bribe them and plead with them, and use various imaginative tricks in order to attract their attention. You say “Well, let’s play a game. Let’s play a little game, and let’s go back to the time when Mama caught you and punished you. And “Nuh-uh!” That’s one place this kid is not supposed to go. Well, here is just a little mild licking, merely had to do with a few hits in the head with a clenched fist, you know, mild American punishment. And hardly anything. And this kid can’t go back and face that, how do you expect him to go back and face a real knock-down-drag-out fight that is really something? That really has a high pain level? Or how do you expect him to go back and run through his tonsillectomy, which just happened?
No, I’m afraid that standard therapy is barred to a child until he has been educated into the handling of his own body, and has enough data so that he can evaluate data. Do you get the problems here?
Well, this leaves us rather up in the air as to what we do with a child, then, in processing. Well, the first thing I always do with a child when I start in processing, give them Straightwire, make them remember a few things. I try to get their attention on themselves by making them remember things.
I’ll fix up a memory game and I’ll say, “I bet I can remember more things than you can about such and such a thing,” and maybe you can get them going along that fashion. Oh, there’s dozens of ways you can do this and you get them going on Straightwire.
Now, you’ll find that their memories are pretty good because ordinarily only a few of their engrams have keyed in. This is very much in your favor.
Now let’s take them back to the last time they were hurt—if they were hurt slightly—and let’s run it out. Let’s show them this one. If we can manage to show them this one, we’re in.
I have seen a child who was relatively unable to handle himself in any way, that had been persuaded finally to run out the last injury, the last minor injury of his life, who would thereafter pick up—he did this all on his own idea, by the way—pick up his own whippings as fast as they were given to him. His papa told me about this and, this is a hell of a note—Papa felt outraged—he goes to all this trouble of whipping this kid and then the kid walks out on the back porch and goes back to the first moment of the whipping and runs it out. The kid in this case was eight years of age and was rather neurotic, pretty bad shape, but the kid had learned that this was the trick.
Now, you can always auto on the last injury. The last injury has not much been keyed in. So you can always auto on the thing and knock it out. Yeah, Papa was really checkmated on that one. So you can do this: You can teach the kid what you’re doing. You are in a fair way to being able to pick up late-life locks and minor injuries, in other words, minor engrams. But don’t suppose because you’ve gone this far, that you can immediately get back to basic-basic and do anything about that, because you probably won’t be able to. This merely means that a child is willing to work in locks.
Child can do this, you can get grief off this case. And let me tell you right now that the most you can do for this child is to get grief off his case. If you could start picking up moments of grief—you will be astounded, by the way, at the level of the grief. Somebody took Bessie’s doll and a big moment of grief. And the teacher didn’t look quite right in the classroom—big moment of grief. And so on. Oh, children will spill tears; watch them.
You can ease up enough tension on the child so the child can be pretty well balanced. And that should be your first target with children.
You will run into children, however—and I have been told and I have run into one or two isolated cases where children are told not to cry. This is sealing in all the grief on the case, you see, all the way along the line; doesn’t matter whether it’s done sympathetically or angrily, it’s just sealing the grief in, and you’re going to have a little bit of a tough time. But you can even get back to that with the child.
I’ve gotten back to it on Straightwire and knocked it out enough so that I could knock out grief discharges out of a child. All right.
Children, then, are a problem of deintensifying a case, not clearing one. That’s important. What your goal is, is to bring the child up so that he could get along better rather than clearing one. Your goal is a release. And it should be started into on the basis of picking up grief.
This is also—and you understand now we have several ways of tackling this problem—one, educating the parents into what they do to this child so that this child can level out and fly right, just by patching up the child’s environment; two, educating and redefining terms of the child by just telling him what the known world is about. I don’t mean educating him by teaching him spelling. I mean a type of education which is never performed on children until you call it to people’s attention. “This is a steam radiator. The steam from this radiator comes from a furnace in the basement. Coal is put on the furnace in the basement and this heats up water. The fire heats up the water and that comes up in this steam radiator.” “Yeah, yeah. That’s how that thing gets hot!” You will be amazed. You take a three-, four-, or five-year-old kid and you start educating it. It’s a function this society doesn’t do. They leave it to an eight-year-old kid or a seven-year-old kid.
The way a child learns language is to me utterly fantastic. I don’t understand how a child ever knows English, when I listen to some of the English the child is taught and when I listen to the identification of objects and so forth and function in the world around him. So we’ve got this strata by just taking an interest and interesting him in the real world around him and properly defining things. But we have to do that on a companionship basis, not upon an authoritarian basis. If we are crushing this child with data all the time, the data will not be assimilated, it will just be parked in the bullpen where most education resides. In fact, I think most people that graduate from college have still got their whole college education parked over here in the bullpen, it’s not assimilated. And every time you start telling this person “The reason you have to know this is simply because we are going to ask you on an examination . . .” Well, you’d hardly call that education. That is to say, “If you will pick up this data and memorize it and spit it back when we tell you to, you are then educated.” Well, in such a wise, you can’t follow this program with a child. What you’ve got to do is to get the child interested in the real world.
Now, trying to interest a child in a hobby is pretty difficult if you choose the hobby. Let the kid choose the hobby. And then let him show how proficient he can get in this hobby. And you’ll find out that something new takes place. This child is learning a skill. Now, just plain learning a skill isn’t good enough, unless it had some side effect that would have something to do with processing. And that it does have.
This child is not able to control his own body very well, is he? Little child, hasn’t been educated. You’re giving him precision control of his own body. And if you can build that precision control of his own body up high enough by teaching him I don’t care what—you don’t have to choose academic subjects, you can have him walking tightropes or learning how to fry eggs or anything there. The whole world—that isn’t a bunch of selected subjects that somebody wrote down in a book. This is the business of living!
This child has to have skills in the business of living and if they’re interesting to him, that’s what you want. If he will be interested in what he is doing, I don’t care what he is doing, that’s good enough, it’s part of the real world.
All play, you understand, all play is mock performance of future emergencies and future works. In other words, the purpose of play is to practice the individual in the handling of self so that in the future, when those things, skills and coordinations are needed, they will be present. Anybody who thinks play is anything else is talking through his hat. They have given it a false value!
Play treated along in that line really becomes play, too, by the way. Have you ever seen these hectic, tired businessmen out there playing because they’ve been told that this is for their health? And told that they were working too hard on this job and therefore they had better learn how to play for a while. Well, sure, it’s all right for this fellow to go out and learn himself a new skill if he thinks he can do anything with it. But the further that skill departs from any practical application in the future, the less efficacy it will have in straightening up his mental and physical health. He’s got to have a goal before the play means anything. And in such a wise it is with children.
The child has to see that what he is doing leads towards an actual effect in his life. Now, just by showing him that certain things in his life will lead up to certain other things in his life, you can occasionally invite his interest enormously.
Well, you take embroidery. Now, this seems to be a far cry from anything, teaching a little girl needlework. It isn’t done these days. The thing that is done these days in the home is teaching a little girl to look at a television set. But if you would teach a little girl needlework, embroidery, something like that—the child is always, by the way, seeking approval just as any human being is; this isn’t peculiar to children. A person who doesn’t seek approval is really in bad shape. And so this child seeking approval—the child likes to use this intricate needlework and so forth. You have a concentration then of the mind on the handling of the body, and when you build this up to a sufficient point, why, then the mind can handle the engrams, because what are engrams? They’re the impingement of thought and the turbulence of matter, energy, space and time upon life and you get those turbulent areas. And unless you get thought up to a point where it can overcome those turbulences, the turbulences are going to be further enforced by matter, energy, space and time. Don’t you see?
You’ve got to educate and build this child up to a point where he can handle his own body! And when he comes into a place where he can coordinate, where he can handle himself skillfully, we have learned self-discipline.
Well, we don’t talk to a child about self-discipline because this is something that is a native and natural mechanism. It isn’t something that is installed with a club, the way so many people believed in the past. It is something that comes about.
Self-discipline: he learns, in other words, that although his body would like to go and eat dinner right now, that if he writes just a few more lines in this notebook he will be finished and he won’t have to worry about it later. The body doesn’t say, “I’m hungry”; he doesn’t abandon the notebook. There you are getting to the point where thought and life are overcoming the physical needs so that you are getting a thought superimposition over the top of it.
The end of all this is easier and easier processing so that you start with a child who is a normal child, badly disassociated, nervous, upset, you say “Boo” to them, they go a foot off the deck. You look a little excited at them or whip them up a little bit and they go into high hysteria and run around the room and break everything in the room and then interrupt all the grown-ups’ conversation and then go outside and get on a tricycle and fall into the gutter and cut their heads open—I mean, a normal child!
If you’ve ever watched children play—you know, one is prone to sit in one’s society and look at his own society and say, “This is natural, this is native, this is the way human beings are and the way they are everyplace.” But if you go out and examine a few other civilizations, you find out this isn’t the way they are everyplace.
I know of about five societies in which kids sit around rather sedately, practicing to be men, practicing to be women, and they’re very happy. They’re not constrained and nobody beats them. They are accepted members of the society. They have their work to do. They take pride in doing it. They’re liable to certain clumsinesses and so forth occasionally, and they feel bitterly ashamed of themselves when they’re guilty of such things.
They’re pretty sedate. And the funny part of it is, is that if grown-ups didn’t come in and stir up little babies and stir up little boys and so forth—and their idea of play is throwing them up against the ceiling and a few other things like that—little kids would grow up with such an enormous sense of dignity that it’s very interesting to watch. And I’ve known kids in this society (in strange homes, it’s true) who grew up with a very great concept of their own personal worth and a feeling of great dignity. And I’ve run back—interested, very interested in this—on the time track and have found when dignity first starts to come in. And I have found dignity very much present in a two-months-old child, taking a person back down the time track.
Somebody comes in and says, “Kitchy-kitchy-coo,” and the kid says “Who the hell is this!” But he can’t express it in words. So we take this child that’s normal, whose parents are worried about the child, the child gets a cold, has asthma, is sick. The parents say “We’ve done everything in the world we could for this child.” You echo to yourself, “And probably everything in the world that you could do to it.” And we will carry this thing along. And what do we do with this child, you as an auditor? This child is sick.
Well, the first thing you can try to do is to take the child by itself, no parents. Get them very definitely off the scene. You try to examine a child around his parents and you will find that he is falsely valuing everything. He is still a bit squirrelly and you find out that the bulk of children, if you’d sit them down in a chair, in your office or wherever you’re working, and you talk to them on a rather dignified level, that you’ll find them talking to you on a rather dignified level. And you have entered the case right at that moment because this child is not spinning. This child is more in possession of self!
Now, let’s just treat the child on an as adult a level as possible! Let’s not talk baby talk to it. And just talk to it on a very adult level and start giving the child Straightwire without saying this is Straightwire and without explaining what all this is about. And you’ll find out that you can go right straight along with most cases and you can start blowing locks out very rapidly.
The span of attention is limited, so never make therapy onerous by demanding that it go longer than the natural span of attention of the child. If you’re only getting in five minutes a day on this child, be content, don’t start to claw and paw and contain this child in himself and force him to go into more processing than he can stand.
Have you ever had a child on your lap sitting there enjoying himself, just talking about something or eating candy or something of the sort, and then wrap your arms around the child lightly—you’re not hurting the child, but just wrap your arms around him in a closed loop? That child wants to be gone right there.
One of the saddest things that can be done to life is to imprison and constrain it against its own will That is why we have invented the prison, because it breaks men; it finishes them! The same thing with a child, so you just carry over the period of natural attention span with this child and the child is immediately going to start getting restive, and you’re going to have to put on constraint. And hows that child going to act to constraint? He’s going to be out of contact with you the next time because you’re just like every other grown-up: you try to pen him up. So don’t link yourself up with the rest of the world of grown-ups with which he’s considered. He’s a different human being when he sees you, this is perfectly clear. You can talk to him on a different strata than he talks to other people—a grown-up strata.
Don’t contain his attention unit too long. When he starts to get restless and his attention wanders, you follow the wandering of this attention to keep up your agreement with him, just follow the wandering of attention, let him wander right on out into whatever he wants to wander out into and that’s the end of that. Let him go home. Next time you see him, he’ll be perfectly agreeable to work with. But you tell this child he has to have this done, that he has to sit there, that he must listen to you, that this, that that, so on and so on and so on; no good.
If you had to see a child every day and you only saw him for two or three minutes, you would gradually get enough—let’s say you couldn’t ever get the child to sit down in a chair or remember anything, and the child’s attention is wandering and so forth. You see him a minute or two every day, every few days and so forth, “How are you Billy?” That’s about all. “How do you feel today?” And don’t pay any attention to his parents. This is for the kid. This is for the child. You’re not giving processing to the parents. They don’t exist as far as you’re concerned. Don’t talk to them over the head of Billy. You talk to Billy! Because you will accrue to yourself all the broken affinity that that parent has experienced with the child, if you talk to the parent over the head of the child. You see? He’s your point of interest, the kid. So the parents go aside from there. You just talk to him as himself even if you have to ignore Mama. And the first thing you know, this kid is going to start to come around where you’re concerned. So in Child Dianetics, you can expect to cover the field with a lot more patience and a lot more endurance than you would expect to cover even in adult processing. You’ve got to be persistent to that degree. You’ve got to be able to adapt your attitude and so forth to that of a child. If you can do these things, you’re going to get results. You’ll eventually get the kid straightwire. Now the kid is dignified and straighter there, he’ll talk to you, straightwire, remember things for you. Don’t strain his attention beyond the point where he can naturally hold it because it is naturally and natively limited. It isn’t this child wants to be bad and go away, his attention is natively limited—I mean, just by structural difficulties. So away he goes—you see him again.
Now, if you’ve got him on some Straightwire, what you want to work him into finally is some grief. You work him into grief by running pleasure moments on him. You run this game of “Let’s go back and do so-and-so.” And you run him through a pleasure moment here and a pleasure moment there. And don’t run him through enough pleasure moments so that he gets bored with this game, because he’ll get bored with running pleasure moments. Remember, unlike grown-ups, present time is usually pleasurable to a child.
Now, you run a few of these pleasure moments and get them back, gradually working with them, building up your confidence with them, building up affinity with them and so on to a point where they will go back into grief and blow grief discharges. If you can get a lot of grief off this case, the chances are that the chronic somatics and things like that will just blow up. You haven’t hit their source.
Now, you want to proof the child against future key-in by telling the parents about restimulation and so forth, about upsets, emotional upsets around the child and so forth. How it comes about that the child gets into this condition. What you try to do there in the early years of the child, I repeat, is to blow a few locks and get off some grief.
Don’t take them back down the track. Don’t take them into the prenatal area because you’re liable to get into stuff which you will just plain restimulate and you’ll have to go off and leave because the child is physiologically incapable of running this stuff, physiologically incapable of running it. His thought is not in sufficient control of the body.
Now, during this whole course of processing that you give the child—and you may be at it for quite a while, because you’re only at it for maybe a day or once every two, three days, and only at it for a few minutes—you set up for this child a program of acquiring skills. This child is supposed to acquire various skills, physically and mentally, but more physical than mental. This child has got to learn how to handle his body.
If you find that this child is impossible to process—you can’t get anywhere with this child, then you set up as a method of gaining this, you set up a program of educational therapy.
Now, there are three valid therapies. In all of Dianetics we have these three valid therapies. The first is knocking apart engrams, just Dianetic processing. The second is educational in all of its ramifications. Educational therapy is a valid therapy, it will produce results. And the third one is environmental. Shifting the environment of the individual will very often produce marked results, just that—that’s all by itself, or educating them or processing them. Well, you’ve got to play the whole piano when you’re treating children.
If this child is sickly, asthma, so on, if the parents are really concerned with this child, let’s see if we can’t select out of his environment the most restimulative factors and get rid of them for the child. Let’s take a review of this situation, if the parents are really worried and so on.
One little boy who was terribly allergic to Mama was being taken to all manner of health resorts by Mama because he was so sickly. Of course, every place he went, he just carried along the source of his illness.
Now, you can’t tell a mother in so many words “You are so restimulative to your child, your child is going to go right on being sick.” But you can try and educate Mama or you can give Mama some processing. If Papa’s the one who’s really interested in the thing, you sell Papa on the idea of your processing Mama.
A second dynamic will clean up quick enough so that Mama’s attitude toward the children will shift.
Now, in other words, you’re going to treat a child, you have to evaluate the child’s environment and you may wind up by treating one or more adults in that child’s vicinity. And yet people will be so interested in the health of this child that they will permit themselves to be processed for the benefit of the child when they won’t permit themselves to be processed for their own benefit. Interesting thing, the strength of this future generation drive. So the next thing which you can do with a child is really part of this acquiring skills, is to try to set up some continuing step of achievement: goals. You want to see if you can give this child a feeling of pride in himself and a feeling of independence about a certain thing. There must be at least one thing in a child’s life about which he has the only say-so.
Now, we’ll take some little boy who has suddenly decided—as he’s walking down the street, he’s blinded by this window of musical instruments and he sees this beautiful accordion and he suddenly decides, “I want to play the accordion.” So he whines and he does anything he can do; he pleads and he’s bad and he’s good and he’s all sorts of things and finally people break down; “Well, all right! We’ll see if we can’t give you some accordion lessons.” So the next thing you know, why, he acquires a small accordion, and he goes on and he plays the thing, and he goes and sees this teacher, and he and the teacher get along all right—probably because most musical teachers get along all right in spite of the cartoons—and he learns finally to play something on the accordion. And all of a sudden, why, some of the people in his environment, his family, will begin to realize that, “Why, there’s Johnny playing on the accordion, hmm. Well, I always thought it was a good idea to start him in on the accordion; I’m glad I started him in on the accordion—it was up to me, of course—I made up my mind about it and then I must have made up his mind about it.” This is about the sequence of thought that will go behind this sort of thing. And the first thing you know they’re controlling Johnny’s accordion playing! In other words, they come over from controlling Johnny—here was something he really wanted to do, now the next step is “Let’s see if we can’t get in there with him on this.” So they will say, “Well now, you must practice an hour and seventeen minutes every day; it says so right here in the book. You’re not going to go out and play because you’re going to stay in here and practice.” Now, so-and-so and so-and-so. “Now, you hit the wrong note on this.” This is no longer Johnny’s accordion and it’s no longer Johnny’s music. And Johnny will take the goddamn accordion and junk it. And then the parents will say, “Well, you know how children are; they’re flighty.” “They change their minds, they just don’t concentrate, they don’t know what they want next.” You examine this course and you’ll find out that the child selected something he wanted to do, and then he was being forced to do it, or he was being interfered with in his doing it, and he found out that this was not an independent sphere of action, so he abandoned it. And you get a child who has been going along the line of shifting from one thing to the next, and you will find in each case that he has been interfered with as to his independence of action. And you as an auditor want to make sure that Johnny has reserved to him alone and exclusively, at least one sphere of action in which he is completely independent! And one which particularly includes physical skill so that the mental end of the thing is showing up. That’s very important; it wouldn’t seem to be very important at first look at it but he’s got to have someplace where he has an independent sphere and in which he himself can do some shining.
Because as he shines, his own idea of his own importance and so forth will increase, he will be able to pull in attention units out of this wide periphery of the unknown and concentrate them on an object, so will diminish some of his fears and in this wise you can probably bring, one way or the other, Johnny into a state of sanity which he might not have very fully enjoyed before.
Its interesting that on a conversational level, just straightwire, that you can straighten out some of the major problems of Johnnys life. They are really that light. They depend on no data.
One little girl—just to give you a case in point—one little girl I was talking to one day. She said oh, she was very bad in arithmetic; she was failing in arithmetic; she always failed in arithmetic; she couldn’t get any arithmetic. So I gave her a problem. And I said “If an airplane is traveling at” — this little girl was eight—”If an airplane is traveling at the height of ten thousand feet at two o’clock and at three o’clock comes down to a height of five thousand feet and a man jumps out, how far does the man fall before he hits the ground?” And she thought, and she thought, and she thought. And we went over this thing for about an hour and she just could not get this problem. Ten thousand feet at two o’clock, but at three o’clock the plane was at five thousand feet and the man jumped out, now how far did the man fall? No! But the funny part of it is that she could add a column of figures: 2 + 2 = 4, and she could add them rather well. So I finally isolated out of her the fact that she was unable to do anything about problems. Now, it required a little bit of auditor insight at this moment to recognize that there was a cross-up here on the word “problem.” So I said “Does anybody ever call you a problem?” She looked at me for a moment and she says, “Oh, you mean that kind of a problem!” Oh, differentiation, bing. The word “problem” suddenly came apart into two halves. She went back to school and started to get A’s in arithmetic.
There is the simplicity that you are dealing with.
Now, you can work with a child along this level and you can gain, oh, just diamonds as far as their going along. Well, what are you doing? You’re redifferentiating and relabeling their lives. You’re telling them what data is. You’re giving them straight stuff. You’re not telling them “The goblins are going to get you.” “Now, I lay me down to sleep.” “Now, children must always honor their father and their mother! That’s all there is to that.” No quarrel with this, nope. Nobody ever bothers to tell the child what parents have to do, to be honored!
You can count on one thing in Child Dianetics—you can count on two things: that parents are going to be very anxious to have their children be better and healthier; and you can count upon the fact that the parents are only in a very limited degree going to take your advice. You can count on those two things. They will remain anxious and they are not going to expedite.
Therefore, you can expect in all the processing of children, the way to be hard and the work to be long and your patience to be at a very high level and your own imagination to be very good, because you have to have an insight into the problems at hand. You’re going to have to work with a lot less data than you need to solve the problem.
One little boy came to me one day and couldn’t be processed. I mean just, that’s all, I’d ask a question. Bing. Nothing. And I had to solve the problem—the insight in that case was picked up in the first two minutes of play. “Which one of your parents told you they would punish you if you told me anything about their quarreling?” Tears. Bing. “Both of them.” How am I supposed to do anything with this kid if the parents tell him he’s not supposed to tell me anything about his home life or their quarrels! Am I supposed to talk about his playing Lone Ranger? Is this going to be the end of it? And come to find out they were quite certain that reading comic books had been responsible for aberrating him. And these two people, actually in their course of their marital—you wouldn’t call it a passage—a sort of marital misnavigation out in the middle of a hurricane section, quite customarily fought at every meal and this kid couldn’t be gotten to eat. He was starving to death! Food equaled fight, in their lives.
Papa and Mama would sit down to the table; a nice meal, all right. Papa would start complaining about the food; Mama would complain about how hard she had to work, and it was quite usual and ordinary for them to pick up the crockery and shy it at each other. And not extraordinary for the kid to be hit! And this had been going on ever since this little kid could be moved up to the table. And this kid that should have weighed somewhere around eighty-five pounds was down to about forty-eight pounds and doing very badly. Now, that gives you some sort of an idea of the problem you’re going to run into.
Childhood is so resilient and children are naturally so healthy that it doesn’t take very much to key out what’s wrong and bring them up to battery again.
The prescription in this case was merely Straightwire on the first time they quarreled and picking it on up the line. Of course it was all through the prenatal bank, but it keyed out fairly quickly. I’m calling it Straightwire now; well, it didn’t have that technical name at the time, it was just “discussion of the matter.” And the next thing was to insist that the child be permitted to eat in the kitchen with a closed door. And they looked at me, both parents, and they looked daggers! And they said, “What has that child been telling you?” And I could see right away the child was going to be punished. You see the parents were much more anxious to punish this kid than they were to get the kid well, actually! And I said, “Well, you know, I happen to know that the child can gain considerable in the way of weight if this is done. And I know that if this is done, the child will gain weight. Therefore, in the next couple of weeks the child will gain weight or I call the Humane Society.” Unanswerable question. That was the end of that. The child gained weight.
Another child I ran into—this poor sickly little kid. His parents used to take him in and sit him up—his mother used to go in and get him, whenever there would be a quarrel, and sit him up in a chair and make him sit there to listen. In other words, it was a holder.
The kid would be sound asleep. Mama would come in. Frighten him to death by grabbing him out of his bed, take him in, slam him down in the chair and say “Sit there! Stay there. Now you’ve got to listen.” Holder—demon circuit right there! So that the child would know how horrible it was to be married to a man. You see, that was to be the moral lesson of this child and it was this child’s duty to sit there and listen. “You’ve got to stay there and listen.” It’s interesting. You’re going to discover an awful lot of interesting things about marriage life. You’re going to begin to wonder after a while why anybody invented the confounded institution if they didn’t intend to do any better with it than they’re doing.
Most people fortunately do quite well I would say at least 10 percent of the population has no marital trouble. As far as the children are concerned, actually, most people try in their various untutored way to sort of keep the kid out of all of the trouble and grief and there are an awful lot of happy kids around.
No happier kids have I ever seen, however, than the kids of a couple of parents. They weren’t interested in anything for the kids particularly; they were interested in somebody next door who was in, kind of, a little bit bad shape. And here were two kids that were round-faced and they were very happy, cheerful little kids. They came in, they sat down quietly and they listened very alertly—and one was six and the other was eight—and they sat there, two little boys. And they sat there very quiet and they listened about it. And the mother told them, “You can go outside and play if you want to.” And they said, “No, we’d rather sit here.” And they agreed to this and they sat there. Gee, those kids were calm! They gave me the spooks! This was so unreal, I mean, the kids sitting there; no noise and so forth.
Finally, experimentally I shoved over a gimmick and a gadget I thought they might be interested in, a ship telescope, thinking, of course, it would be pulled to pieces in the next five minutes. And they didn’t; they found out how it was used and they found out how it was focused and a few minutes later were over at the window looking out and examining the neighborhood, using it the way it was supposed to be used, not beating each other over the head with it. This fascinated me. So I said to this lady, “How do you and your husband get along?” And she said “Why, what do you mean? We get along all right.” I said, “What church do you belong to?” “What . . . what church? We don’t belong to any church.” “Well, what kind of a fellow is your husband?” “Oh, he’s a swell guy.” “What’s he do?” “Oh, he does, he does pretty well.” It turned out that the fellow was a man in shipping and he wasn’t doing anything really to be super proud of but according to this woman, why, he was about the biggest shipping man that ever got to ship anything! And I got more curious about this and I met this fellow a day or so later and I said, “Say, what do you think about your wife? What kind of a wife do you have?” He looked at me with great surprise, “But about the finest woman alive; you’re not going to say anything against her, are you?” And I said, “No!” And I said, “Do you get along well with her?” “Oh, sure.” He says, “You know,” he said, “I never really amounted to anything,” he says, “until I got married,” he said. “And things are very nice.” I said “What happens at night when you come home?” “Oh, I don’t know, eat supper and play cards with the wife and kids and maybe go for a drive, something like that.” And I said, “Well, where are the kids’ grandparents?” “Well, they’re all dead.” And here were two very bright, alert, calm little kids. They never got into trouble in the neighborhood with their fellow man. But you would very occasionally find them on a highly punitive expedition—the two of them—to sort out this bully who had assaulted somebody younger than himself; knights-errant! Very serious about the whole thing. Well, they beat up a kid that was about ten. And this was something that shouldn’t have happened to this ten-year-old kid according to his parents. And I heard some future history on this thing. And they came over and evidently they got—this complaining parent got very short shrift about the whole thing. In other words, these kids were not only being backed up in the house, they were being backed up outside of the house. Nobody questioned their reasoning, so they had no reason to question their own reasoning; and life was very, very beautiful all the way around the line.
This doesn’t mean these children are going to be dumb vegetables. It means probably they will be very sane citizens and actually amount to something very, very fine in life.
I give you this as a model of what happens. I have seen enough now of life up against Dianetics, and Dianetics infiltrating the social order of today, to know that treating children is not any easy task because it is very hard to treat children without occasionally having to educate the parents. And I know that the parents are very often going to balk you in educating children up to certain lines. But I can tell you this: that if you can give a child a good release, if you can straighten him out, so forth in his early years, you have done a very great deal for him because these are the years in which he learns things and you have made it possible for him to fill his standard banks and to be able to think straight, early enough, so that he has an enormous advantage in life. And wherever you can practice Dianetics on children, by all means do so. And if you can’t practice directly on children, for heaven’s sakes, spread the word around on the subject of Preventive Dianetics and maybe, whether we process all the people in the United States or not, we may have us a sane society in the next generation or two.
Thank you.