Kid 101 - part 1

"You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely."
~Ogden Nash~
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In this session The Guys explained the difference between Kid and Adult. I'll post more of the transcript at another time.

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It's all about Power.
The number one difference between a child and an adult is power. It is what makes a child a child when it’s a problem; power, a child has no power. Anyone bigger than the child can overpower the child.

The child comes with vulnerabilities; intrinsic vulnerabilities which add to its powerlessness and therefore enhance everyone else’s power. So, the vulnerability goes back into a power issue; less power for the child, more power for anyone who is bigger or more competent than him. Back down to power.

Because the child has this problem of powerlessness, the child is smart enough to recognize early on how vulnerable it is ..... it feels its powerlessness ever so much more than people in power feel their power. Which makes sense, because when you’re powerless the impact of being powerless is oppressive. Whereas, you can see with almost all the adults that we work with, who are as powerful as they can possibly be, they can walk around feeling powerless. Without any shred of recognition of how powerful they are, and they’re wielding power left and right, but feeling powerless. So they can be punishing their children, while feeling helpless in the face of the very children they're punishing.

Can you see how convoluted and confused that can be?

You will never get the children, who are having that unconscious power wielded against them, to entertain for an instant that they have some power. They know they are powerless, So consequently, right out of the chute, ...as soon as they get this message, they recognize that their survival is dependent on the good will of others.

An adult’s survival, unless they are incapacitated or incarcerated, is not dependent on the good will of any particular person. Because an adult can pick themselves up and move themselves to a more hospitable environment, to a more hospitable company, or community.

A child is stuck, so they’re trapped, they’re powerless, and dependent on the good will of others for their survival. Everything from a cookie to their very life is dependent on the good will of others. Consequently, the child starts engaging in behaviors as a result of what they perceive as greater good will or lesser good will. And they will move toward monitoring good will and trying to make decisions that will favor them in the good will department. That’s generic.

There are some children that are intrinsically very, very stubborn. They have different agendas and will go about this in a manner that looks like they are engaging in a specific purpose to garner ill will. But they’re not. They’re even more bereft of attention than those that can play with good will/bad will, and any attention is better than no attention. So, if they have to act up and do what makes somebody angry, they will do that because they need the attention. But that’s still a lesser segment. The greater segment is not a matter of attention/no attention, it’s about good attention/bad attention.

The next level from here is noting that the child is always monitoring for good will. And based on what provoked or provided good will and what the good will garnered for the child in the home of origin (what we talk about is the first five years of life, from birth to five), that response gets cellularly encoded in a memory. From that point on the child has a tendency to universalize that response and think that all it has to do is provide this behavior and it will get that response from everyone everywhere. So that’s the child’s first major misunderstanding that leads to problems down the road for the adult.

So, if you start with figuring out and tracking and writing down what kinds of behaviors on your part between the ages of birth and five got you things that you considered pleasant, then you’re going to have a small blueprint that you can extrapolate from and use as an overlay for how to find “little YOU” in your life at any given point.