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It is thrilling
to know that the social sciences have now really and truly determined that the
development of nations depends upon the development of individuals. For a century, perhaps, it was thought that
development could be brought about by the injection of money and by government
edict. The scandalous failure of these
theories, so obvious particularly in Africa and Latin America, has left
hundreds of millions at the mercy of hunger, disease, ignorance, and worst of
all, the manipulation of powerful interests.
What we have
heard here in Mexico in the last 24 hours is a revolution; one that augurs very
good news for the next century. We have
heard how the old policies have unwittingly destroyed the family and with it
the social fabric. Rather than
development, we have almost lost the only effective vehicle to development: the
family.
Thanks to the
brilliant and independent observation and study of giants like Gary Becker and
Bernardo Kliksberg, the world is realizing that development depends not so much
on economics as on Human and Social Capital. And furthermore, that Family is
the place where Human Capital is created and where Social Capital is generated. It is now obvious that it is only by forming
individuals, from birth, in values and virtues, that societies will be able to
grow, develop and become self supporting, law abiding and self determining….in
fact happy and healthy. (It sounds
almost too good to be true!)
Thanks to them and
others such as Professor Lawrence Harrison of Harvard, the concept of investing
in Values Education has taken over development thought and theory: the solution is before our eyes and only
needs to be undertaken.
A new paradigm
has been fashioned and now it only needs the diligence of all levels to bring
this new model to effective fruition.
This must be our goal and ambition for the next 30 years.
The work before all of us….governments and
citizens alike….seems like a titanic task; the natural question is…. where
should one begin? Gary Becker won a
Nobel Prize with the answer: we must begin in the family. We must begin with small children. Beginning
with small children is not a new idea: all totalitarian governments have known
and tried to practice this, with tragic results. Public education has known it
for a century and tried to form good citizens with compulsory schooling. That
has been a failure, although many good and useful things have been taught
through compulsory schooling.
What
is new is Becker’s
contribution, backed, us as we can all
see, by Professor Fagan’s exhaustive and fascinating studies: the formation of
good citizens must start very, very young, and in the family. There are NO experts, NO professionals that
can do the job as well as those put there by nature, the mothers and the
fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers.
Given my personal
formation, the temptation for me today is to speak about anthropology and the
history of civilization: what has caused development in the past and what has
caused disintegration of societies.
However, I will in fact stick to the subject I was given, which is more
practical and immediate and has to do with “what actions can be taken in our
time.”
It all
starts in the brain
Becker has said
that Human Capital is formed very young, and in the family. This could sound glib, or romantic, and so I
would like to dwell a moment on this point, and bring to this gathering some
new insights about the developing brain.
As we know, the last 100 years have seen amazing advances in knowledge
about the human body, which made possible a veritable revolution in health
care. The one hundred years ahead
promise an equally stunning change in what is known about the human brain. In the last 15 years, since 1990, non-invasive
studies of brain development have become possible and the discoveries about the
brain have put previous ideas to rout.
I will explain
why this is of intense interest to the subject at hand.
To begin with it
has been proven that the cerebral cortex does not grow automatically, but
according to the stimulation received while it is in its main growth phase:
during the first 6 years. This explains why gifts and aptitudes so often “run
in families:” musicians’ children are better at music, trapeze artists’
children have a gift for the trapeze, children who are taught to ride or ski at
a very early age, do it better than others. Small children exposed to many
languages, learn them all and do not confuse them. The reason is that the cortex adapts to the demands of the
stimulation and axons and synapses are produced to respond to it. This is the first discovery, and it is
important.
But there is
more. Much more important than our
skills….in fact vital…is the development of the limbic system, which is that
part of the cerebral cortex which governs the sense of self, emotions, self
control and a host of elements of the balanced and happy individual. It now
appears that the cortico-limbic lobes also develop in response to stimulation.
And that stimulation is in fact the love and caresses of his or her mother from
the moment of birth. The main development of the limbic system takes place in
the first 4 years and is an absolutely fascinating subject.
A remarkable
interdisciplinary work has been done by Dr. Allan Schore, who has collected the
most outstanding new data from many fields involving the human brain and human
emotions in an important work entitled Affect Regulation and the Origin of the
Self.[1]
Just to give you
a glimpse into this extraordinary new field, I will mention the importance of
those hours that mothers gaze at their babies.
It is now determined that a detectable energy flows from the mother’s
brain through her eyes, into the baby’s eyes and stimulates the baby’s
brain. The stimulation inherent in this
“transaction” as they call it, causes neuro-chemical reactions, involving
secretions similar to endorphins, which as well as causing growth of the
cortico-limbic lobes, are very pleasurable! The baby loves the feeling and
responds, with looks and soon with smiles.
Bonding takes place and the eyes of each are imprinted on each other’s
brain. A result of this process is that the mother learns to know exactly how
much stimulation to give and the studies indicate that there is an uncanny understanding
on the part of the mothers to know just how much to stimulate and when to
calm. The tactile stimulation of her
kisses, cooing and caresses stimulate cortico-limbic growth, also. As the baby grows, the mother continues to
require ---with a sure sense---an increasing level of responses, which the baby
loves to grow into. The bonding, and the mutual understanding of how much, how
long and so on, seem to be somehow connected to all that mutual gazing from
birth.
Science
now tells us without a shadow of a doubt, that mothers, in constant contact
with their babies, are actually forming the baby’s brain…particularly in the
right hemispheric orbitofrontal cortex…those cortico-limbic lobes and intricate
connections which will determine his or her emotional well-being and sense of
self for the remainder of earthly existence.
She does this with her eyes, her voice, her reactions. It is a transfer, if you will, of creative energy---of
love-- from her brain to the baby’s brain through their senses, mainly their
eyes.
When we see the extensive studies since 1990 so
brilliantly collected by Dr. Schore, it becomes obvious that the age-old
fascination with motherhood has not been misplaced. It is not new. What is new is to know that it is brain growth,
not just fun. The second discovery, and
rather alarming, is that it cannot be achieved by part-time caregivers. These caregivers can attend most excellently to
the bodily needs of the child, but not this early brain growth.
Science has also
learned that if this stimulation is not given, and the cortico-limbic lobes are
not produced, the individual will grow up seriously deficient in all those
areas of self that make him or her able to interact with others in an
appropriate way. It was recently
disclosed that the author of the Columbine massacre had spent many years in Day
Care. This young man suffers from a cortical disability as identifiable as one
who suffers from lack of development of the vision center or whose mobility is
impaired by damage to the mid brain. And we all remember those tragic PET scans
of the orphans of Bucharest, whose brains were in large part inactive, where no
stimulation had been given.
So, part of our
new paradigm of development must certainly be to listen to the latest in
Neurology and to allow and facilitate mothers be with their children during
those first 6 years. We must grow
children with healthy emotional systems.
Bring back
Fatherhood
A second
necessary element to allow development is to create a new culture of
fatherhood. We are privileged here in
Mexico this week to be able to hear Dr. Wade Horn, who has been one of the
pioneers in this field and was one of the founders of the National Fatherhood
Initiative.
As we have heard,
fatherlessness is becoming recognized as the main cause of many social
ills. Other studies, such as those of
the psychiatrist Paul Vitz, show what the results of paternal abandonment can
be on the particular individual. It is
frightening. But aside from the plight
of families whose fathers are absent, there is a whole social tendency that
weakens and even destroys the father’s role and position, such as the new
trends that inhibit their natural influence, gut their nature as law-givers and
undermine their authority as responsible for the healthy social behavior of
their children.
The new additions that the
United Nations is attempting to insert into each International Convention and
Plan of Action will render impossible the exercise of authority by parents and
signal the beginning of a new age where fatherhood, as it has existed since the
beginning of mankind, which is inscribed in human nature and described
throughout Scripture and the folklore of all societies, will no longer be
tolerated.
The new fathers are supposed
to only provide comforts for their children.
Robbed of their masculine properties and increasingly feminine, fathers
are becoming expendable and their role considered “irrelevant”.
We must put a new and strong
emphasis on fatherhood.
Fair wage for fathers.
At the
start of this century, the Catholic Church wrote much about the just family
wage for workers so that women would be free to be home and bring up the
children. The early feminists were also
crusading for the right to stay home, rather than in the factories. This trend was vital and it was
effective. Unfortunately, it has been
derailed and neutralized. We have been
confused by the often-correct rhetoric about the education and inclusion of
women. Their right to work has now become the obligation to work; the effect has been that we
have tolerated changes in the economy and in taxation, which have lowered the
effective pay of fathers and caused the woman’s wage to become
indispensable. The bearing of children
is coming to be considered a privilege for the elites. (Elites, who frequently are the ones who
least desire them). Of course in the underdeveloped regions, sadly, the mother
is often the only breadwinner, works full time and frequently has even had to
emigrate to find work. The children of
such sacrifice are under a tremendous disadvantage. If it were possible to tie
higher wages for men to their presence in the home, many of these vicious
cycles would be eliminated.
Education
in Values, Social interaction and healthy sexuality.
The
third leg of our tripod is of course education. We live in a real world, where fathers and mothers are at work,
where children are bombarded with music and television that more often than not
convey chaos and anti-values. And the
parents themselves have frequently not had the benefits of good guidance
themselves and are at a loss as to how and what to say to their children.
At
the Latin American Alliance for the Family we have invested a great deal of
time and effort to develop a curriculum which can assist schools, or after-school groups, to convey those values which have been defined by great men
such as Becker and Kliksberg as being essential to harmony and development. We
believe that the areas for learning the values of the social and sexual person
must encompass:
-
In
body-behavioral
dynamics: identity, modesty, health, self-control, and skills.
-
In
psycho-emotional
dynamics: psychosexual development of the personality, self-knowledge,
self-esteem, assertiveness and good habits.
-
In
intellectual-spiritual
dynamics:
-
intellectual
maturity; objectivity, openness to the truth, and general culture;
-
moral
maturity, openness to virtue and happiness, growth in liberty, prudence,
respect for life; and
-
openness
to the transcendent: (the fundamental relationships of the human person,
determining a personal vocation, growth in love.)
Throughout this 12-year Series, called
Learning
to Cherish, (Aprendiendo a Querer) these concepts are
presented by means of a triple method, appealing to those areas through the 3
levels of body, emotions and mind by:
In
our texts, we have built a continuous story of a group of children who confront
a series of situations of universal application as they grow up and which help
them to identify the path of integrity in responding to day-to-day occurrences.
Following the
simple story, children can develop an understanding of the processes of
decision-making and of choosing what is right.
The
first school of love, of course, is the arms of loving parents, so our role is
to start by teaching them the basics of friendship, which are loyalty,
inter-dependability, respect for property and for differences in personality. Through a multidimensional understanding of
games and good sportsmanship, the importance of fair play and reciprocity, the
notion of friendship can become soundly based.
Upon this we build the
notion of sharing and how this is indispensable to all fruitful group
endeavors. Towards 10 or 11 years old
we illustrate the multi-faceted concept of diversity and complementarity,
demonstrating the need and the richness of widely differing types of personalities,
tastes and talents. This concept, when young people grasp it, is in fact
intensely liberating.
And so, the paradigm for
development, of both people and society, seems to necessarily be one that would
strengthen, enhance and enrich the natural family. It would elevate the image
of motherhood to its deserved uniquely life-giving and life-enhancing role and
make it worth performing. It would encourage fathers to be the men who make a
healthy society possible. It would insist on just remuneration and an equitable
balance between executive salaries and workers’ minimum wages. And it would include balanced, values-filled
education throughout the educational system.
Values-free content has done 50 years of damage in the developed
world. We must not allow it to invade
the countries aspiring to development.
The new Paradigm must be
based on realism: the truth about the FAMILY and how it is indispensable for
what the human being needs in order to grow, develop, produce and perform as
free, happy, skilled human beings. When
this is in place, there will be an explosion of development.
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