All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse toward growth, or toward the actualization of human potentialities. (Maslow, 1971: 25)
We continue to strive for this wholeness. Can a parent say when his or her job is over? Or if it ever is? When we finish the two spheres of parenting that perhaps do have an end: meeting the physical and psychological needs of our children (this is not true for all parents and their children); the inner child is still there.
How do we continue to take care of this inner child? Let me, for a moment, share with you my personal story. In the last couple of years, I've searched out some of the reasons I felt I had "lost" my childhood and where it might have gone. In exploring these reasons, I discovered that what I had done was to take the child who hurt too much to face the world and hide her away beneath the facade of an intelligent, capable, functioning adult. I am a capable adult, but the denial of my inner child kept me from further emotional growth. What I had lost was being in touch with my core, or my inner child.
And as I parent, to regain my chances for emotional growth, and to offer that to my children, I had to find and face my inner child. How did I do this? I do it in small and large ways. Sometimes I am consciously aware of it; sometimes not. One of the ways I stay in touch with my inner child is to play. As a child who became an adult too soon, because of abuse and neglect, there was not time for play when I was young. And so my inner child literally never played. Perhaps as an adult, you aren't convinced there's time for play. I try and remember to laugh, have tickle fights, go dancing, join in a neighborhood snowball fight, or romp in the autumn leaves. Or as I did recently, take a hike through the woods, and play chase with a trout in the cold waters of a river in early June.
In their ability to wonder and to question the meaning of all they see and touch and hear and smell, children discover, and become themselves, constantly growing, constantly becoming.....(Turnbull, 1983: 25) It can be as simple as asking myself how I really feel today, acknowledging those feelings, and giving myself permission to do what I need to do to express them: from joyful laughter to sadness and tears.
Many times knowledge and care of my inner child is a result of meeting my other needs. Like my child, I have physical and psychological needs. For example, in a situation where I am trying to master my environment, I will give up because I have become scared. I hope by now you will agree with me that if we cannot meet these needs for ourselves, we will fall far short of the mark in helping to see they are met for our children. There is not one of us who has left childhood behind forever. Inside each of us is a helpless two-year-old. (Wheat, 1979:10)
Parenting is a process. There is no neon sign that says we are finished. Our goal as parents is not to produce a product, but to give a child the tools to become life-long seekers of wholeness. Our goal as human beings is to give ourselves the tools to stretch toward wholeness. In this gift to ourselves emerges the same gift for our children: the strength to journey backwards through to wholeness.
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