From ContinuumConcept.org: Jean Liedloff was a Manhattan socialite with a fascination for the wild. In the 1950s and ’60s, she made a series of expeditions to the Venezuelan rainforest and spent several years living with the Yequana people. What she observed about how they lived, and especially how they raised their babies and children, resulted in her book The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost, which spurred the attachment parenting movement and influenced evolutionary psychology and the home-schooling movement. According to her biographer, “The glaring contrast between the richly connected way of life in tribal villages and the relative alienation of our culture caused her to question some of our most basic assumptions about human nature. Over time, she became convinced that humans are innately cooperative and hard-wired for happiness. She cites our ignorance of this fact as the underlying cause of all our psychosocial ills.” Here she is interviewed by Michael Mendizza, filmmaker and founder of Touch the Future, an organization whose goal is “to bring about a deep change in the way adults view and relate to the developmental needs of children.”
“The jungle represented something you felt was missing from your New York background. Can you reach back and help me understand this?
As a child I was attracted to Tarzan and everything that had to do with jungles. It seemed to me ā and this is in retrospect ā that there was something primal, something right about it.
. . . I suppose I was looking for what I found and shouldnāt have been so surprised when I found it, which wasnāt until the fourth expedition. It was then I realized that I had unlearned a great many assumptions that I had about human nature.
It became clear that we have made a terrible mistake about what human nature is. We are under the misapprehension that weāre born bad, or in the official words of the Church of England,Ā innately depraved, and that is simply not true.
Letās go back. You said that you started to have a series of insights.
I was taking my assumptions apart, thinking, ‘gosh, if this isnāt true then that isnāt true.’ I was living for more than two years with these Indians, looking straight at them and not really seeing them, because I was so blinded by preconceptions. I didnāt even notice that, amazingly, the children never fought. They played together all day unsupervised, all ages, from crawling, to walking to adolescence. Not only did they not fight, they never even argued. This is not at all what we have been taught human nature is ā boys will be boys. So I thought well maybe,Ā boys wonāt be boys.
It was a long time before I began to notice what was before my eyes. One thinks, ‘Well, these are savages. They wear red paint and feather loin cloths, so theyāre not people.’ But theyāre exactly the same species as we are, except they are behaving the way we all evolved to behave. We, on the other hand, are mistreated as infants and children, treated inappropriately for our species.
As a result, we keep re-creating an anti-social population. Nobodyās born rotten. You just donāt have bad kids. Itās not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad.
Ironically, the reason itās possible to make these profoundly social animals bad or anti-social is because we areĀ soĀ social. Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, thatās when the real fall took place. And weāre paying for it dearly.
Just imagine the neurotic and psychopathic people that we have become. Why do we have a 50% divorce rate? Why do we have so many police? Itās not just Americans, itās the whole of Western civilization laboring under a misapprehension of what human nature truly is. Thatās what I learned from my experiences.
. . .Ā I donāt mean to be disrespectful to ourĀ experts. They may be able to distinguish a measle from a mump, which is very useful if you have one or the other. But that doesnāt, for one minute, give them deep knowledge of correct human behavior.
Researchers faithfully try to document what isĀ normal. Nobody I know really wants a normal child. Just look at normal. It includes whatās called the terrible twos, which are sort of wild, bossy tantrum-prone con-men. Luckily theyāre small otherwise weād really be in trouble. And weāve got God knows what kinds of drudgery and alienation for children and parents.
We use the wordĀ normalĀ as though it were a synonym forĀ natural, which it is not.
. . .Ā TodayĀ normalĀ isĀ adversarial. The baby arrives and has an innate expectation that it will be among trustworthy allies. Thatās not what happens. From the babyās point of view he or she feels like ‘theyāre not on my side.’
‘Whatever I want, they say no. I want to be with my mother. I want to be close. I want to be safe. I want to be with someone alive, whoās breathing and warm and smells right and feels right and who touches me and helps me feel my own flesh appropriately, not a lifeless box with a lifeless cloth. I donāt want to hear myself screaming in my own ears, and hear other people screaming around me and get no response. When I scream I expect something to happen. Not just to scream but because Iām waiting. Iām expecting something and it doesnāt come and I scream until Iām exhausted.’
So normal is adversarial. I hope people realize that what theyāre doing with all the love in their hearts, and I have no doubt of that,Ā isĀ adversarial.
. . .Ā Itās easy to see how this normal but unnatural behavior perpetuates itself. When a baby girl is born and her mother doesnāt answer her cries, she feels that she has no power to signal and summon help. Unfortunately, human nature is such that she cannot blame the parent. So she feels sheās not good enough, not lovable enough, ‘I havenāt done the right thing. Iām not worth responding to.’ This is universally the reaction of babies. They feel that they havenāt got it right or theyāre not good enough because theyāre so social, ironically. They believe in the authority of their elders, their parents. If parents donāt come, they feel that their instinct ā to cry ā wasnāt right. They donāt know anything else, and it doesnāt work.
As they grow older and look under blades of grass to see whatās growing, or cutting up worms, or tasting things, and they hear, ‘donāt do that, no donāt do that, bad, naughty.’ Their faith in their own instincts are constantly undermined. ‘Donāt touch that, youāll hurt yourself.’ ‘Donāt get up on that, youāll fall.’ If babies were allowed to trust and develop their innate wisdom and intelligence they wouldnāt fall into the swimming pool. They wouldnāt dream of it.
Letās talk about trust. How could we have gotten to this place where when the babyās screaming we deny our natural innate tendencies to respond and pick it up? Both in the medical field and as mothers?
Our faith in our own instincts is undermined right from birth. The first job we have on Earth, which is dictated innately, is that of an explorer. We go around sniffing and tasting and touching and looking at everything. And people say, ‘Donāt touch, itās dirty,’ ‘Donāt touch that; be careful, youāll hurt yourself,’ ‘Donāt do that, youāll break it!’ ā all of which constantly undermines our feeling of competence, our trust in our instincts.
When you get to school people say, ‘sit still, fold your hands, donāt talk to your neighbor.’
Whatever children are doing ā is learning. Theyāre learning like little sponges, all the time. But theyāre told, ‘Stop it because this is worthless. What is important is this. Pay attention. “A” is for apple.’ Everything else is undermined and pronounced worthless. ‘A’ isnāt even for apple. It could be for aardvark, it could be for God knows what, anything you like. But they arbitrarily tell you that ‘A’ is for apple. Nothing else counts. And they persist. All your authority figures tell you that your nature, which is to explore, is worthless. If theyĀ donātĀ teachĀ you, itās not learning.
Iāve recently come to the startling but obvious conclusion that learning occurs naturally, but teaching isnāt natural at all. I canāt remember ever seeing any of the people Iām talking about, who live so successfully,Ā teaching. The little ones are learning from the older children or from the adults, but nobodyās teaching.
Theyāre learning on their own initiative, which is so powerful. You donāt have to augment it. In fact you canāt really augment it. Thereās no way you can make a child learn better than he would if he or she wants to.
By the time we have our first child, weāre so conditioned not to believe our innate feelings that we have total strangers in the hospital tell us what to do and we donāt know any better. Itās tragic. We have an exquisitely evolved innate knowledge of how to do things. Mothers know that the baby should not be taken away at birth but they have been so conditioned to believe in anĀ authorityĀ and not themselves, that they deny their own wisdom.
. . .Ā We act as though human nature were something to be afraid of; to constrain, modify or fight; to subdue and overcome. Somehow we have gotten away from believing that we evolved in a way that works. We believe that our nature has to be modified, opposed and controlled from the very beginning . . .
Does this lack of basic trust permeate our entire culture?
In the broadest terms we have lost trust in our own essential nature. We donāt just mistrust children, we mistrust ourselves. We mistrust human nature itself. The reason Iām always talking about babies and children is because this is where the mistrust first manifests itself, where it is formed. But Iām talking about all human beings. Iām talking about society as it is.
Society is unpleasant, dangerous, unhappy, alienated, and unstable because in childhood our nature ā being confident, joyous and loving ā has been undermined and we simply live the way we are expected to. What we believe is what we make our experience into. And what we believe is what we have been taught to believe by our parents and our experiences.
. . . These beliefs are instilled in us in infancy, before weāre able to judge anything. We cannot look in the mirror and say, ‘Well Iām a nice little girl. Iāve got all my fingers and toes and Iām a sweet little thing. Iām intelligent and charming and I got a little pink party dress and Iām just fine.’ We canāt do that. We can only get our feeling of worth about ourselves and everything else from our authority figures. And this is what children do. They take the authority of these people and believe it. Whatever it is. This becomes the basic feeling we have about self and also about the relationship between self and other.
How can we empower children and then later adults to trust their nature?
We donāt need to empower children to trust their nature. The tendency to trust is there. We simply need to allow them to do so.”
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