07.+What+is+Intelligence+(February+2006) - Get a Free Blog

What is Intelligence? 138
Or children are strapped in car seats with a dummy shoved in their mouth
to keep them happy, and driven hundreds of miles round the road and so
on.
When you are a little baby, it’s very scary and over-stimulating to be
rattled round a supermarket in a truck, but you can’t complain too much
about it when you have a dummy shoved in your mouth, can’t speak
anyway and in any case are in fear of your life at this strange busy place
you have been unwillingly made to circuit round.
Of course mothers in general don’t remotely realise that these kind of
frantic environments can harm a young child with too much activity
going on and too unpredictable an environment.
For have we not noticed for example how babies react to a stranger with
great anxiety?
As adults we can feel quite scared being in a strange place with people we
don’t know, so how do we think a helpless child is going to feel?
Above all of course, the most critical factor in a child’s early
development is that it must have the security of one constant, familiar,
loving, gentle presence, i.e. generally speaking its mother.
If its usual “carer” - i.e. mother - is suddenly whisked away to work, or a
party or wherever, and it has to deal with another far less predictable
presence, what is that going to do its psyche over time?
It is going to create insecurity.
If the carer is as good or even better than the mother, that might not be a
problem, but how does the mother know what happens when she isn’t
there?
There are a thousand ways parents can get it wrong - the raising of
children - and it isn’t too difficult to see the consequences all around us in
the damaged people we daily meet and see.
But instead of giving this vital patient and consistent care to young
children up to the age of at least seven, and preferably ten or eleven, we
wake up to the fact that something is wrong with our child – it can’t cope
with school or lessons or whatever.