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Pretending that the world isn’t cruel, as Bruno Bettelheim argues in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, may be far more damaging for children than showing that it is.
John Yorke • Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them
Bettelheim says fairy tales re-create the sort of dramas that lodge in our psyches and offer a way for children to understand that people are rarely all good or all evil, and that they can learn to navigate safely in the world.
Susan Reynolds • Fire Up Your Writing Brain
Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. To help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pre
... See moreAlain De Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education
In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev
... See moreAlice Miller • The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
It is impossible to maintain a child’s innocence according to a standard of perfect parenting—that is, the parent cannot meet the child’s longing for love, desire for safety, and needs for mirroring at every given moment. The parent, whose soul has been wounded, is bound to fail. From the point of view of the child’s soul, the betrayal is inevitabl
... See moreSteven Wolf • Romancing the Shadow
Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop
... See moreAlain De Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education
Growing up – and the lesson of the ‘good-enough’ parent – is in part a process of learning that our own desires are not the centre of anyone else’s world. We can be needy and manipulative, bullying or seducing others into pandering to us, but we should expect to be resented for it. Where our behaviour is positive and less self-centred, though, some
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