CHILD DIANETICS PART I

A lecture given on 8 November 1950

Second Dynamic Aberrations in the Society

The data which is available on Child Dianetics is not as extensive as I would like to have it. Three people, to date, have been given assignments to investigate this particular field, but so far as I can discover, no data has been added to my own which has been almost at random over a series of other investigations during the last four years.

The problem of children is a very important one. Children occupy a position of even greater interest than adults in that adults are primarily interested in getting their children into things, particularly when their children are not doing very well. Therefore as an auditor you should know something about this subject and how engrams affect children and how an auditor can alleviate a child’s various distresses.

Firstly there is the problem of accessibility. It is very interesting that the treatment of a child and the treatment of a psychotic happen to have very definite parallels, primarily because both of them present the problem of accessibility. This does not mean that all children are psychotics; they are only nearly so. I am serious about that. In this society it is quite fashionable in the mores to have a thoroughly blocked second dynamic.

One looks over the past two centuries and he discovers that to a greater and greater extent sex has been taboo. This was obviously pointed up by the work of Freud who, observing the societies of the civilized world, was forced to a conclusion that sex was primarily responsible for aberration. Now, when an investigator of the stature of Freud can look over a social order and decide that just one thing is wrong with it, we have an obvious point- up of the fact that there is a lot wrong with just that one thing. True enough, aberration spreads over a wider periphery than the second dynamic.

Nobody, until Dianetics, had actually looked bluntly at this problem and recognized the fact that the child is the product of sex, and that there is a definite correlation between children and sex. That seems to be obvious, yet we find people who think babies are too, too cute, who at the same time are saying that sex is just too, too nasty. It is amazing to me that they could take the future race and divide it up so that the sex act and children don’t have anything to do with each other, when they are very intimately related. Without sex there would be no children, and no amount of test tube experimentation in biochemical laboratories could remedy this at this time.

When we have advanced a lot further, maybe we can separate these two, but not now. We are hung with the fact that the second dynamic includes not only sex and the sex act but also children. And when we investigate this field, we discover a very interesting datum: Where you have a person with a thoroughly blocked second dynamic, he usually has a thorough dislike of children. The two go hand in glove. So perhaps the society’s trend in this direction was to so thoroughly block the second dynamic that all our future generations would be insane. It is that important to this society, because if this dwindling spiral of sexual aberration were not interrupted, you could fully expect in the year 2000 or 2050 to find, not 1,900,000 people in sanitariums and institutions, but the few sane people running for their lives from a country which was almost 100 percent insane!

Aberration goes by a geometric progression. It is a spreading thing. It is not a narrow line. The fact that one person in this society today is insane or very badly neurotic does not postulate the fact that in the next generation there will be one insane person, because this person is going to affect 50 or 100 in the next generation.

Perhaps only 5 or 10 of these 50 or 100 people are going to be badly affected, but in the next generation after that we will have maybe 5 severely neurotic or psychotic people as a result of this one person. Then in the following generation and for every one following we have 5 or 10 severely affected and 50 who are faintly affected by this person, and we have already gone up to a population of somewhere around 250 people who have been affected. And it keeps going that way unless it is actively interrupted!

The only way this has been interrupted in the past has been with new lands, whereby a race has faced into a new continent or a new country and by conquering the old inhabitants has made itself very strong. The necessity level of the new race has become very high. They have the tremendous goal to take over, conquer, improve and set themselves up on a high level. And as long as that impetus carries forward, the race is successful and the amount of contagion in that race is cut down markedly because there are too many other important things to think about.

But once they reach a point where nearly everything has been nicely smoothed out and they can say "Well, we now have some means of transport, the food is fairly regular, the government has settled into a nice run of crookedness and we are in fact a civilized nation and there is no higher goal," they start down the dwindling spiral, even though their "golden age" may come right after that period. People’s necessity levels are no longer as high as before, and as they go lower, aberration begins to manifest itself wider and wider and the process of supercontagion starts along the line.

That has happened in the field of the second dynamic, very markedly. The first people who settled the United States brought into it the seeds of future aberration. They were carrying along certain diseases for which there were no cures, so for the disease was substituted a mores.

Any moral taboo is based upon the fact that something the society had done in the past was more painful than it was beneficial, and so a taboo was laid down when they did not understand how to remedy it. They merely said, "Well, you must not do this anymore because it is more painful than it is beneficial to society; therefore it is immoral." And then by prejudice it is carried forward long beyond its time.

If you look back over the past you will find that people were faced with problems they couldn’t solve. Those problems are being solved today. But people began to make taboos along the line and then they began to have to enforce those taboos, and as soon as they started to enforce them, this meant that force was being applied to reason. And what is aberration but force being applied to reason! Turbulence points were created and more and more pain was entered into the society until at last the whole social order was being very severely affected.

Children have borne the brunt of this, and the dwindling spiral finally winds up in their laps.

It is an insidious thing. It is something that nobody could trace clearly before because they did not know the source of an aberration. Not knowing that, nothing much could be done about it, and these two things— the innocent little child on the one hand and this horrible thing called sex on the other hand— could remain widely separated and not be considered in the least bit interrelated!

But look over the field and you will find that a thoroughly blocked second dynamic is accompanied by a dislike for children, abuse of them and general impatience with them.

Of course, it does not follow that a blocked second dynamic is blocked both as to sex and to children. It could be selectively blocked. It could be wide open on sex apparently and very thoroughly blocked on children. Or it could be wide open on children and thoroughly blocked as far as sex is concerned. But where you have this condition of wide open on children and blocked as far as sex is concerned, the children resulting therefrom are unfortunately going to be very neurotic, and most of the children we have today in our society are excessively neurotic. The child in this society is denied any responsible position of any kind whatsoever. With his first breath, he begins to be denied the independence which he as an organism seeks.

After that he is cared for one way or another or he is fitted into some sort of a mold which people think is desirable. But his independence, his freedom of action, is being cut off in all directions. He has, fortunately for him, one goal, and that is to grow up. He might have other goals but they are minor compared to growing up, and this goal of growing up is his one saving grace. He can salvage himself on that alone unless he is carefully taught not to grow up.

If he is taught sufficiently that his growing up is something that will result in a bad state of affairs for him and that the desirable thing is to remain a child, he has been robbed of the one goal which would carry him forward.

You cannot overestimate the effect this has on a child. Look around in the society and you will find that children who have received too large a bonus for being children are those who are progressing least satisfactorily.

The modern school gives to children a certain state in the home which far exceeds their actual state. All the concentration in the school and in the whole family is given to the child, and he is given importance as a child way out of relationship to importance as an adult.

If little Willy suddenly runs into the room, knocks over a lamp and spills some sticky pineapple juice on a guest’s suit, that’s just fine. We pat little Willy on the head and we take him out and give him some more pineapple juice because he lost it. Then we say, "Well, he’s only a little child. He doesn’t know any better." This general line of training toward children gives a very high priority to remaining a child. And who in the name of common sense would want to be an adult in such a family? So the child is left with that feeling that he wants to stay on being a child. This was rare 20 years ago but it is not rare today.

We look over this goal the child has of growing up and we find out how he gets the idea that growing up is desirable. His only model about this is the grown- up. He knows he is growing. Physiologically he has this big goal and he has enormous energy; he has good repair and healing qualities and he is geared up to be very energetic and active. He looks around- him and says, "Now, let’s see. I am growing up. What will I be when I grow up?" And the natural answer is "I will be an adult." So he takes a look at the adults around him.

Here is Mama, whose whole concentration must be as a sort of a waiting maid to children. Well, we don’t want to be Mama; she never has any fun!

We look at Papa and he isn’t very elegant as he drags home from work and snarls and maybe gets a chance to look at the paper before dinner. And he finally goes to bed complaining about the children because they are in his road. That is another grown- up. By this time a child starts to scratch his head and say, "What is this being grown up? I want to stay a child because, look, we get waited on; we get food; we get clothing; we have no responsibility whatsoever, and to heck with these adults! " That is about how he would sum it all up.

The child fortunately has a very high reality. He has been utterly libeled regarding delusion. It is common belief that all childhood is delusion, but the person who said that was, I am afraid, all delusion himself. A child has a great deal of reality. He is not running on a reality with which everyone has agreed, but he is running on the reality he sees and which he interprets according to his data. It is quite real to him, but it is not delusion.

The grown- up is the one who is suffering under a delusion, because the grown- up has been welded into a line whereby he has been forced to agree upon a very solid reality which may or may not be real at all.

We measure a child’s reality as follows: His affinity is usually very high; he tries desperately to communicate to the world at large and his reality is very high. He is in perfect agreement in his age group on the reality of things. He agrees perfectly that he is Hopalong Cassidy between four and six o’clock and that somebody else is Little Beaver in those same hours. There is no lack of agreement. And actually for him there is no lack of reality. His reality is greater simply because he can take reality on the whole periphery and he can also bring it down to selective realities.

The mechanism in him which sets up his reality is far more able than an adult’s, who, after all, has been cramped down to the fact that reality is sitting at Desk 13. Only that is not reality; that is a super artificiality on which this person has had to agree practically at gunpoint! Society has said to him, "If you don’t consider Desk 13 the greatest reality of your life and the only one, we are going to starve you, bud." And so he has agreed to the reality, only that is not reality. That is an agreed- upon strata of society; it is an agreed- upon code of action. Reality must be met by the individual’s ability to recognize realities when he sees them, and a child has a very great deal of this.

A child is also very sensitive to unrealities. If you question a child very thoroughly you will find out that he has a very high concept of unreality. If you try to tell him that the reason why so- and- so and so- and- so takes place, and you are talking out of your own enforced reality, he is liable to look at you very blankly; he won’t be able to figure this one out. And you will find out that you have to tell him over and over again, and he has to be told it in grade school and in high school and in college, and then he has to get married and be told it by the boss. By that time, all of a sudden he agrees that this thing he has been told all his life is a reality, and at that moment he practically folds up. We are not just talking about Desk 13 now, we are talking about a lot of nonsense that is prevalent in the society.

There is a similarity between his acceptance of the general reality of a society and the aging curve. It is not accidental; a person should not get old that quickly.

A child is faced with a very strange world. He continually has foisted off on him concepts which actually don’t make very good sense. If you detach yourself from this thing we call reality in this society and step back and take a look at it for what it is, you will see a viewpoint very like a child’s.

He knows that he likes to run and play, and he has an idea that other people ought to like to run and play too. Yet we look at a large section of this society and it believes that running and playing is very wicked indeed, or it’s not done. Oh, it’s all right to go out on a golf course and push a little white ball around, but don’t really have a good time!

The child is continually confronted with these inconsistencies. It is a completely insane world as far as he is concerned when he first steps into it. There are all sorts of strangenesses with which he is confronted, such as the strangeness of his own complete unimportance. Everybody has agreed that all a child is supposed to do is go and play, or go to school and listen, and they get rid of him over here and push him over there someplace and say, "Well, now you can go and sit and look at television, but don’t make any noise." He is not supposed to talk; he is not supposed to walk; he is not supposed to sit! He is heavily anchored, but in spite of this his own vitality overcomes it.

Right now there is this insidious line in the society which teaches a child not to grow up by teaching him firstly that it pays a high bonus to be a child, and secondly that grown- ups don’t have any fun, so why be a grown- up?

He is confronted with the second one on an educational level. He is confronted with a society which is shot through with a blocked second dynamic as a fashionable thing. So he is also confronted, then, with people who don’t like children and who are willing to put off on this child all manner of barbarisms on the excuse that this obtains loyalty and discipline and so forth.

It is absolutely wonderful to watch children who have not been "disciplined." They are not bad children. But if you want to observe a thoroughly bad, wicked child, find one who has really been "disciplined"! He knows now just exactly what he is supposed to do and as long as he has got breath in his body he is doggoned if he will do it. The whole being has been set up as a turbulence.

We are very much in the province of Child Dianetics. The things I’ve covered so far have been to demonstrate to you that the child goes along creating one environment and that another environment is given to him continually, so that he himself is in a constant turbulence.

A case history is that of a little boy who was brought to me. This little boy was about 4 years of age and he was a bad boy. There was no doubt about it. How a boy 4 years of age could be as destructive as he was, I never could quite figure out. If he had been six feet tall, he would have given Genghis Khan a good run for his money.

He would go upstairs and pull all of Mama’s clothes off their hangers in the closet onto the floor and then he would get a pair of scissors and cut them up. This would be a small act of the day. Or he would go into another room, preferably one which was very neat, and he would get a knife and slash the wallpaper and then tear it off the walls. Or somebody in the family would be eating cereal and he would take a cigarette and shred it over the top of the cereal. It also happened that he was extremely clumsy somehow and he seemed to be able to break any valuable piece of bric- a- brac in the house selectively. Anything that had any value would get broken. He was just naturally a bad boy and what he obviously needed was more discipline.

I looked into the amount of discipline this child had had and it amounted to about four spankings and a good swift kick in the skull every day. He was really disciplined! The discipline was not particularly inconsistent, because it did not matter what he did, he got punished. And furthermore, he had unanimity in the family. Papa agreed and punished him, Mama agreed and punished him, and the one grandparent that was around agreed and punished him. This left him a target for all hands.

I took one look at this child, looked into his eyes and saw there a red- hot rebel, a veritable Lenin in the community. And he was successfully making life so hellish for his own family that they were all almost crazy. He was a victorious rebel. He had them up to a point where nobody dared leave anything anywhere it could be reached; where if he started in on some program of destruction, they knew inevitably that it would get carried through. The child was leading a successful revolt.

The matter was solved rather simply. I made an announcement, since these people were not very tall people, and I said, "The next person who lays a hand on that child will be accountable to me, personally, and if the child tells me that anybody has spanked him or done anything to him of any kind whatsoever that he does not like, why, I will come over and I will beat that person’s skull in. If you don’t think I can do it, look at me." They agreed with me; this was a new reality. And within 24 hours the child was a good boy.

About a week later, he put it to test. Somebody took a kick at him as he was going out of the door, so he came over and told me. I went over and told the person who had kicked him that if it happened again I would make sure they wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week. The person was very meek and apologized, and I went away. After that the child really got to be a good boy. He did the dishes. He picked up his own clothes. He didn’t break things anymore. He went out and played.

The primary purpose of life is to overcome an environment. It is the attack of little theta on big theta, the attack of thought merging with matter and becoming life, attacking the environment. And when life has had set up to it an enormous obstacle, life will attack; and if that obstacle is extremely big and it carries physical pain with it, the attacks will become more and more savage and irrational.

So if you see some child who is accidentally breaking things, who has these odds and ends of disobediences and strange oversights, you can be very well aware of the fact that here is a child who has been badly badgered from some quarter or other. And the people who should have some processing there are the parents, not the child.

This might seem very odd until you take a square look at it yourself and go and look at a family who has a very bad boy or a sick boy or girl. This family, by the way, will offer to you the aspects of veritable saints. They will all be walking around with great glowing halos around their heads. No, they have never quarreled in the presence of this child; they have never punished this child; they have never upset anything. This child has always had the best of food and the best of care and had doctors every time he needed them and so forth. But don’t go into the late life bank of this child, because you will find that every single one of these so- called usual childhood illnesses which are so very savage and devastating on the constitution has been preceded by a very high emotional upset in the vicinity of that child— every one of them! (I could never find out why they are called "the usual childhood illnesses." These things are murderous!)

If you want to check this, look over the prenatal and postnatal banks of people. In the prenatal bank you will find quarrels, upsets and so on, and postpartum you will find periods of illness of the child; and if you track it back two or three days before that period of illness, you will find a clue as to the conduct of the people in this person’s background. That is good detecting, because there is something there. There is a lost ally before a major illness, and there are quarrels and so on.

In one family which was the very model of propriety, the 3- year- old child in the family had been very ill with a combination of chicken pox and hives, which eventually passed over into pneumonia. I was interested to look over the general situation and find out that an obvious quarrel had taken place in the room where the child was ordinarily kept. The steel legs of his crib were freshly bent and had not yet had a chance to rust or gather dust in any way. What happened in there I don’t know. But I looked around and found out that one side of the wall, which was made of beaverboard, was dented in and the outline of three knuckles was imbedded in it. Yet this family appeared to live a model life.

This gives you an idea of what will happen to a child who is in an area of combat, high emotional stress and so on. You can check this by going back into your own preclears’ lives and you will find out that these big periods of illness, upset and regression are preceded by something on a family level.

Take any child and look the child over, and as you know the subject a little better you can read off the face and body of that child the kind of home life he has and the general type of activity engaged upon in his home. These children are not just walking advertisements, they are walking signboards, of the kind of families they come from. These little children who go around gimping on lame legs and so forth are walking advertisements of attempted abortions and so on. In other words, by their children you will know them. So when you start to treat children and you start looking them over, you will actually find yourself less able to help the children who are worse off, because they are in the most restimulative environment.

Looking over the background of a child, one finds that ordinarily a child’s early bank does not start to key in until considerable time has elapsed. Their necessity level is high and they are in good shape generally. They could have a very heavy bank, but it would take an extraordinary threat in their environment in order to key this material in. It is difficult to tire a child. They appear to be tired, but their level of "I’ll quit and go to sleep" comes much sooner than that of an adult. The mechanism is still in such good shape usually that it doesn’t permit itself to become overtired. It is only when a child is really pushed along and very badly tired out by some extraordinary circumstance that you can get them up to a point where they get a key- in.

That first key- in, whether it is in babyhood or early childhood, is a fairly hard point to reach. It will be the first key- in that brings on the first sickness of the child. This is not mere theory. It is incredible to me that there is this much interaction between the two.

It is very difficult to get a child up to a point of physical exhaustion where he can get a key- in. A child will also take fairly good care of himself from a standpoint of injury. He doesn’t get injured nearly as easily as you think, because he is quite resilient. He can fall down with a heavy bump and just bounce. Sure, he cries; but that is because he is annoyed, not because he has hurt himself. It is at those moments that he can get a key- in.

The problem of the early life of a child is a problem of keeping the child from being keyed in. As long as his tone is high, almost anything can be done to the child or around the child and he is not affected. You can take a child who is wide awake and alert and full of food and you can scream and yell and rant and stamp your foot at this child and he just grins at you. He isn’t affected— there is no key- in.

But let’s take him out and walk him for a couple of miles when he is very little and overtire him and then let’s just say something rather light to him with an emotional tone and this child will break down immediately. In fact you can watch key- ins happen.

There are, in the usual human being, tens of thousands of key- ins and restimulations. There has to be a key- in for every engram before that engram is in the least bit effective. The engram sleeps until it is keyed in, but once it is, it can thereafter be restimulated.

The first principle, then, that must be observed in the handling of children is Preventive Dianetics. The child must be kept from getting engrams in the first place, which requires that the society take care of Mama to some degree and watch certain things such as talking around Mama when she is hurt, or saying things to her when she is ill when a child is on the way, because these things have a marked effect.

The next thing, and the most insidious of engrams, is birth. And when you have Mama rather badly blocked on the second dynamic, you will find somebody whose pelvic region is not well developed, whose endocrine system is in bad shape and who nervously will have a hard time of birth; so you get a rough birth.

There is the second dynamic creeping up physiologically. Look at some woman who has a retarded endocrine system, look over her bank in general, and you will find out that it is probably blocked on the second dynamic. It requires real force and takes some heavy engrams and key- ins to arrest the physiological development of a woman.

A bad birth, with instruments, ether, surgery, Mama worried and people talking all during the birth, together with lots of restimulative noises and so forth going on, is likely to result in a case like a little girl I knew who was only about half- awake. She was very fat, and the fat was white. Her physical development was badly retarded and completely out of gear. That child was still being born.

I was certain that the child had had a very heavy anesthetic birth, so I visited Mama. We got to talking about things in general and we finally got around to obstetrics and I asked what the birth had been like. She said, "Well, it was all right, I guess." She guessed for the good reason that she could not remember a thing about it because she was unconscious for about 12 hours under chloroform. Now, of course, that went straight through the umbilical cord and anesthetized the child as well. So, with the chloroform and all the holders and bouncers that occurred during birth, this poor little girl got born and life went on, but as far as the reactive mind time track was concerned life stopped right at birth, and this child was in a continual dope- off. She was in very bad shape. For instance, her alertness was three years younger than her actual age. She had already entered kindergarten and flunked. Here are coordinated points, and you do not have to look very far for them.

A child should have a very quiet prenatal period and as silent and painless a birth as possible.

There are people around who will say "Well, the kind of birth that ought to be the easiest to pick up would be a Caesarean. That is a very fine sort of a birth," except that I have looked over Caesarean births and found that they are harder to pick up than ordinary births. This is not because there isn’t any pain there. The doctors normally wait in a Caesarean until the child is very firmly wedged and is not going to be born normally, then they leave the child that way for about 12 or 14 hours with his skull caved in before they throw in five or six gallons of anesthetics, which knocks out both mother and child, and then comes the Caesarean. A Caesarean done immediately with a relatively light anesthetic would be an easy birth, but that isn’t the way Caesareans are done, ordinarily. They are done only after a natural birth has been attempted.

I saw an x- ray one day of a baby in the process of birth. But Mama’s pelvic region was so small that the fontanell bones of the child’s skull had folded completely over on themselves and the child was left that way for 14 hours while people stood around the child and had long conversations as to what was going to be done.

The contrast in IQ between this boy and his brother, who is just a year older, is amazing. The child is slow and clumsy, whereas his brother is very alert. His brother was premature and born at a time when he was small enough that the restricted pelvic area opening was sufficiently large to permit his being born. And so his alertness is very high because he didn’t have a hard birth. In fact, his birth was so unhard that he was already born by the time the doctor arrived. Both of these children have an almost identical prenatal bank, but the big difference there is birth.

After birth one should take care that a child is not dropped, run over by trucks, hit in the head with sledgehammers or otherwise abused. And of course people normally take this precaution with a child, so that does not have to be stressed. What does have to be stressed is the possibility of key- ins. Preventive Dianetics goes forward into the key- in stage.

The child bumps his head. There for a few seconds is a period of potential key- in. One must be very careful that it doesn’t take place, because there are engrams down the bank which are matched in voice tones to those of the parents. A parent’s voice tone alone can start to reactivate some of the earlier engrams. So you say absolutely nothing around a child right after he or she has been injured, even if it is a very small cut in the finger or a bumped head. No matter how light the injury, no matter how great the temptation is to say "Oh, you poor, dear little baby," and lay in a nice sympathy engram and key in an earlier engram, leave it alone! Let the child howl. If you do anything with a child, straighten him up a little bit, and once the anaten departs and the child is a little more alert, do something for him at that moment and still say nothing. Let minutes and minutes and minutes go by after a bumped head before you talk around a child.

Quarrels around a sleeping child are highly destructive. The child is tired and goes to bed and Papa and Mama start Sghting. I have picked up countless key- ins as having occurred right after the child went to bed and Papa and Mama were busily quarreling in the next room, since Junior was asleep.

One case of stuttering occurred in this fashion. A little boy had been playing hours beyond when he should have. He had been out to an amusement park, and the rides were so fascinating and everything was so wonderful and he was very excited. Then after all this he found out he had to walk over a mile, finally, to get home; and additionally he was sunburned during the incident. The child arrived home and tried to eat some supper but he felt too bad to do so. He went up to bed and had been asleep for about half an hour when Papa came home and a big quarrel ensued wherein phrases such as "You can’t talk to me! Who are you talking to?" and so forth were used. The next morning the boy woke up stuttering, and he stuttered for the next 22 years!

So we are serious when we talk about key- ins and quarrels and sympathy engrams. If a child is luckless enough to get sick, mum’s the word. Don’t talk around a sick child!

If the medical doctor comes in and decides that he is going to hold a long, drawn- out conversation around this child, your natural feeling of courtesy or awe might restrain you from doing something. Well, would you want your natural feeling of courtesy and awe to be so strong that you severely aberrate a child for the rest of his life? No, I’m afraid that the balance outweighs. So a good, swift kick in the shins of anybody talking around a sick child, and yanking them by the collar, dragging them out of the room and saying that you will punch their teeth down their throat if they don’t learn to keep their mouth shut around a child while he is being treated or examined, would be much more to the point!

That may sound very punitive, but it gets punitive at the moment when you have been an auditor long enough to find out how much talking goes on around sick children. People come in and thoroughly mess up the child’s life. There he is, he can’t protect himself; he can’t get his guards up in any way. He is analytically attenuated and an ally comes in and says, "Well, dear, I’m going to stay here with you until you are well. Now, I’m going to be right back. That’s all right, I don’t think you will die. Do you think he will die, dear?" Or there is one of these hysterical scenes where someone says, "Oh, my dear, darling little baby, you are going to die! I know you are going to die. Don’t leave me!" Then there are big scenes where Mama, all worried, talks to the doctor across the baby’s head while the baby is in a complete spin, unconscious, with all of it being faithfully recorded, so that later on the baby slides into Mama’s valence. The original period of illness maybe lasted five days and keyed in about half of the prenatal bank and then the baby didn’t get well for months.

One period of whooping cough that I traced was very interesting to me because it lasted for one year, starting out with a light cold. I found this period of a year’s illness in this person’s life but I could not find any further data. We would go down into the early area, but the person’s sense of reality was very bad, and we would come back up to this year’s illness.

Finally we moved a few days before the first moments of the illness; and this little child is sitting on the stairs in the cold, late at night in a drafty hall, listening to Mama and Papa scream at each other because they are about to come and take Papa off to jail. And Mama is berating Papa for having been careless enough to have to be taken off to jail. Papa has signed a note for a friend who turns out to be a crook and this makes Papa a crook.

The child listened to all of this and immediately got the sniffles. Just before the sickness really took hold solidly she was emotionally exhausted. Papa was the ally in the case, and Papa went away and was gone exactly a year. And nobody knew this little child had known anything about this situation!

Shortly afterwards another ally of the child’s came in and said, "Now, Papa will be here to take care of you," and he told the child a lot of lies on the subject. Then Mama came in and threw herself on the child’s bed and said, "Oh, dear! Father has gone away forever. He is lost to us. He has left us all to starve and sicken and die!"

The child stayed ill one solid year. First it was just a bad cold, which was bad enough, but the cold was perpetuated and turned into whooping cough.

Now, this child had had a little room where the furniture had been made for her by her father, with her name on all of it. And the next thing that happened was that people came in, again late at night (this family evidently specialized in this sort of thing), and somebody picked the child up and said, "Well, we are moving now."

"But where?"

"Well, we’re going to another house. We can’t stay in this house anymore because we are all broke."

And the child said, "But what about my room and my furniture?"

"Oh, we will have to leave all that behind."

So the child was carried out through this house where all the furniture was upside down and the packing was going on. In other words, here was home now really shaken. The child was taken and put on a screen porch. She was covered up all right, but the odd part of it was that she woke up the next morning with double pneumonia and almost died. As soon as she was over that, she got measles, in the meantime not having gotten rid of the whooping cough anywhere along this line. Two days before Christmas, Papa came home, and in 24 hours the child was well.

This should give you some idea of how an emotional crisis or the emotional behavior of people around a child coordinates with childhood illness.

I use these examples because you will find one of the handiest ways to put children on a happy road is by a little education of their parents. You cannot deliver processing to a child without doing some education of the parents.

I would not advise you to go on as punitive a level of conversation and mood as I have been on here, but I have seen children badly beaten up in this society and I like children. What I am trying to impress you with is the urgency of putting across a communication of this sort to a child’s parents if that child is badly in need of some assistance from you.

Your first entering wedge is the education of the parents. You have to tell them and demonstrate to them, possibly using their own lives as examples, what happens when certain things happen to a child, and what to do to prevent the child from being upset and disturbed. You have to show them the consequences of doing certain things to the child.

For instance, your tenet there is not that you must never punish this child. As a matter of fact an occasional cuffing around demonstrates to a child that the thing to be is not a child but an adult. That is almost educational. But don’t nag and then hit the child, then nag some more and hit the child and then nag some more. If you have got to punish the child, there is a way to do it. Tell him what the realities of the situation are first, after which you punish him in absolute silence and then leave him alone; because the punishment will give him analytical attenuation, and the content of any lecture given after that will enter on a reactive basis where it is no longer available to the analytical mind, so the child cannot rationalize himself into good behavior. There is nothing more stupid than punishment on that line, because all the punishment then dives out of sight and the child analyzes the fact that "these people are awfully mean to me."

If any sort of liaison is going to be used and any communication established with this child, it is on the basis of "We have a life to live together, and you live with me in peace and I’ll live with you in peace." That may sound strange, but children will listen to it.

The insidious part of it is that when you enter a case or when you take up the case of a child, you are going to pick up somebody who has been very badly abused for quite a while. You are picking it up beyond the point where you can do anything active about it quickly. It will be at a point where the child is relatively destructive and is running around in circles, making noise, and doing this and that. And somehow or other you have got to bring the child into a cooperative setup, which after all that has been done to the child is a very difficult thing. However, it can be done by educating the parents, at least to the point where they are not doing some of the things they have been doing to this child, and by picking up from the child various things with Straightwire. But you are picking up the child late. The dwindling spiral has already started.

An interesting phenomenon is the child who has never been punished. There is no broken affinity. Maybe this child has broken affinity with a chair and a teapot and a few other things, but that is only natural, and nothing much has been said and the child was never raved at. This child is in quite good shape and will go along for a long time.

Regardless of what somebody may say about how neurotic a person must be to succeed, I am afraid that as we look around the world, we find that a preponderance of the successful people in this world stem exactly from that sort of background. All of the native independence, the native desires to grow up and to carry on, are left undisturbed in that child.

When one talks about a "spoiled" child he is talking about something else entirely. One has to really label and evaluate what is meant by "a spoiled child" before he can understand the act of spoiling children.

The way children are spoiled is by robbing them of their independence of action! That is the way a child is spoiled, not by loving the child, not by giving him things. These do not spoil a child. You can give a child an Empire State Building and it will not spoil him.

A child can be robbed of his independence of action in numerous ways. The first way is to prevent him from making his own decisions by inflicting punishment upon him when his own decisions lead him into trouble, on the rationalization that "it’s for his own good." There is no real adjudication here; the child makes up his mind he is going to do something and he gets punished.

Then there is the other one where the child is given everything and then told this is being done for him; he is continually informed how nice everybody is to him, how the world is all run for him and how ungrateful he is and so forth. That is another way to rob him of his independence of action, by buying him off so that he doesn’t dare act independently.

Another way is to work on him on the basis of getting sick, tired or discouraged whenever he does anything wrong, which sets up a false ally.

Have you ever seen a mother who handled a child with a tyranny beyond that of any of Rome’s emperors by simply bringing home to the child that all of Mama’s travail, all of Mama’s sickness and all of Mama’s weariness was definitely because Mama gave her all to the child and now the child is expected to do something in return— at least to be a little bit obedient and not marry Johnnie?

This sort of pattern going back throughout a child’s life is highly disruptive, because the child— the poor fool— goes along his whole life being caught in this trap continually; and being a naturally responsive, live, warm human being, he believes that if he isn’t good or he isn’t this or he isn’t that, something dreadful is going to happen to Mama! And the trouble with it is that if he does cut loose from his moorings and suddenly turns on this situation, something usually does happen to Mama. She goes ahead and finishes out the dramatization, because it is strictly neurosis on Mama’s part that causes her to do this.

I know of at least one mama that died because of this. The daughters got tired of this whole thing and decided that they were no longer going to fall for this dramatization. Two of them had remained unmarried although proposed to many, many times, and then got married at the age of 35; and the third one was being called upon to break up her marriage, otherwise Mama would get sick and die! All of a sudden one afternoon they decided that this was a bad state of affairs and they told Mama, not without much rancor, that they had decided they were just going to go ahead and live their own lives, and that they were going to move out and get jobs and so forth. (Mama had held money and everything else as a whip over them.) So they did, and in two months Mama was dead. She finished her dramatization!

So it is not without peril that a child embarks upon this course. Mama is not just pretending; Mama will actually get sick if that is her dramatization. She had that laid into her as a child and she turns around and lays it into her own children, and they in turn will grow up and lay it into their children and so on ad infinitum. That is one of the most insidious equations this society faces.

The action of punishment will result eventually in a tremendous rebellion on the part of a child. He has nothing to compensate for punishment, nagging and so forth, so he will just fly in the face of fate and probably very irrationally become a rebel against the whole system.

The other method of buying the child goes like this: "I am going to buy you some new shoes, Johnnie. Now, here are your nice new shoes." (Get that "your new shoes.")

Johnnie says, "Gee, that’s fine. I think I’ll go out and play with Roger," and he puts on his new shoes.

"No, Johnnie, those are your best shoes! You are to wear those only on Sunday." His shoes?

And then the following week he is told, "But I am so good to you, Johnnie. I always buy you everything you want— new shoes and everything else." By this time on an educational level his wits will start to spin slightly because obviously they were not his shoes! So he is deprived of his pride of ownership, he is deprived of his independence of action, simply by having them bought from him all the time.

No child was ever spoiled by affection, by sympathy, by kindness, by understanding or even by indulgence. If the three ways I have mentioned of spoiling a child are avoided, you could give a child Cadillac roadsters or anything else that comes into your head and this child would not be spoiled by them. You could give him better toys than anybody on the block and you would not make a snob out of him. If this child is permitted to grow amongst the society of children, they will to some degree make a citizen out of him about these things. He can go forth with his possessions and he can share them or otherwise; he will find out how the world orients itself. That is something he has got to learn.

The stress in the field of Child Dianetics is to break an old superstition which exists in this society, as incredible as it may seem, that love and affection so thoroughly upset a child as to drive him crazy.

A gentleman called me one day and said, "I don’t know what could possibly be wrong with my daughter. She has reached the age of 16 and I have always been very careful never to demonstrate my affection for her for fear of setting up a complex in her. And yet today she is convinced that she has no family life and she has run away from home three times." What a non sequitur type of logic! This person had been careful all of his life never to be affectionate to his daughter because he thought that you spoil children by loving them.

I assure you that the fastest way to spoil children is by not loving them.

There is another fallacy in the society. Some people have a belief that parenthood is a biological fact and that the child has no natural affection for the parents, that he could be raised just as well by anybody else, and that the parents’ indulgence toward the child is not reciprocated.

It is interesting to observe some 6- to 12- month- old babies whose parents are relatively unaberrated. I made a little survey of this and found that there is obviously a natural affection from the child to his own particular parents. I have no scientific proof for this, but it is my observation that a child gets along better with his own parents.

The analytical level of thought in a child is more powerful than the reactive level. The parents’ voices would obviously be restimulative to the child, and there are all manner of things wrong with this relationship on a reactive level, yet the child has enough affinity for his own parents to overcome the bulk of this.

A child is very full of love and affection. Observation alone demonstrates the natural affection of the child for his own particular parents. When this is interrupted by somebody or something else, a break of affinity occurs on an analytical level. For instance, a grandparent stepping in and jockeying the situation around until she is receiving the affection has actually had to break a natural affinity span between the child and his parents.

Grandma’s way of doing this is historical. She demonstrates to the child that the parents are mean. By correcting Mama each time Mama corrects the child, by setting herself up as an ally in moments of pain and anguish on the child’s part, she becomes a reactive ally to the child which crashes the child’s mental efficiency. Any family which permits within it people or factors which will split up this natural affinity line between children and parents is asking for future wreckage as far as this child’s mental condition is concerned.

You may not realize, unless you have processed a lot of people, how insidious the ally is in the sympathy engram. But it is matched by the fact that parents are very often mean to children. However, a lot of the whipsaw around a child comes about when an ally steps into the family and starts to make large capital with the child and buy the child and starts to do this and that. Children to whom this has been done really spin.

So on an educational level you should look over families, and as bad as it is to offer anybody advice along this line, you could explain to some parents how this situation in which they find themselves gripped has in it certain factors which, if changed, would resolve the situation fairly thoroughly.

You have several points now that you can understand with regard to the family situation. One of them is the exterior ally. Grandparents do not belong in homes. One can look back with all the mawkish sentimentality in the world and say "My dear, dear grandparents," but wait until you get back there in the bank and find out what they did! They were very nice, that’s true, but they often bought the child off and caused enough disturbance here and there to break the affinity line between the parents and the child and estrange them.

A child does have a natural affinity for his parents that is much stronger and much more important than is ordinarily realized. It is a mistake that the society has made, a society which was doting a little bit too hard on Darwin or on some other biological concept, that such a thing as affection did not exist between parents and children. It very definitely does and alone accounts for the fact that we have any sane citizens at all!