With all the posts today about the damage done to young children by masking and lockdowns (f'rinstance), it's a good time to remind people (especially the Remnant -- a term more relevant now than ever -- who will be birthing and raising future generations) that proper childrearing creates happier, healthier children who become stronger, healthier adults -- and makes life easier and more rewarding for the parents along the way.
By "proper childrearing" I mean in accordance with natural instinct (the child's and the parents') and, as it happens, with the teachings of Jesus and (some) other ancient authorities. Check out Matthew: 18:1 - 18:6 and Mark: 10:13 - 10:15; how many people have really contemplated these passages? One key to understanding them is in Luke: 17:21, about the location of God's Kingdom.
Still, Jesus' comments on children (at least, as reported in the Bible) are quite brief. More detail is useful and eye-opening. Jean Liefloff's The Continuum Concept: In Search Of Happiness Lost describes what she learned about child-rearing and human nature during years spent with tribes in the Amazon. I consider it completely in harmony with Jesus' comments on children and an excellent meditation on how humans are designed to interact, in regards child rearing and among adults as well.
Last year, Geralyn Gendreau published Jungle Jean: The Life and Times of Jean Liedloff, the Woman who Transformed Modern Parenting with The Continuum Concept. It makes an excellent introduction to Jean's ideas as well as providing a vivid portrait of the woman herself: an educated upper-middle class blonde who modeled, spoke a variety of languages, hobnobbed with the rich and famous, and yet was drawn to primitive tribes in the jungles of South America in search of something she felt was missing in her life. More than that: Jean Liedloff truly SAW and understood what she observed and wrote about it with clear and engaging prose.
From Chapter 3 of Gendreau's biography of Liedloff: -- an example of adults raised in healthy fashion versus those from the modern industrial world --
BEGIN QUOTE
She climbed up ten yards and perched high on a rock. From that vantage point at a distance from the action, she noticed a curious fact. There, before her, was a group of men engaged in a single shared task. (Lugging a canoe up a steep, rocky ravine). Two of them were tense, frowning, losing their tempers at everything and everyone, cursing in the distinctive way of Tuscan men. The Tauripan guides, on the other hand, were having a fine time of it. They were laughing at the unwieldy canoe and making a game of the battle with gravity and rock. Between pushes, they showed off their scrapes and bruises. When, once again, the canoe would wobble forward, pin one, then another of them underneath it, they responded with amusement rather than upset. The fellow who was held barebacked against the scorching granite invariably laughed the loudest -- once he could breathe again.
All the men were doing the same work. All were experiencing strain and pain. All were sweating in the blazing hot sun. There was no difference in their situations except one -- Jean and the Italians had been conditioned by their culture to believe that such a combination of circumstances was at the very bottom of the scale of wellbeing. What's more, they were quite unaware they had a choice, any other option, as to how they could experience that situation.
The guides were equally unaware of their choice. These supposedly primitive people had also been conditioned to deal with their circumstances in a particular way. They knew what lay ahead but hadn't spent the days before the trek wallowing in dread -- quite the contrary. They approached the portage in a perfectly merry mood. They seemed to revel in the camaraderie. Each forward move of the canoe was viewed as a victory, a cause for celebration.
. . . So pure was the sweet freedom she had experienced that afternoon, she vowed to live that liberation ever after. But within a few days, the sweetness gave way to the tyranny of habit, to the great pull of conditioning that only sustained conscious effort can countermand.
END QUOTE
Read these two books and it will be even more clear that most "experts" in child rearing as as wrong and dangerous about THIS subject as the "experts" are about the COVID "vaccines."
I thought about that comment at dinner, and I want to retract it.
Some who are visibly more emotionally healthy than average are not (yet) aware that some people cannot be trusted -- either because those people are malicious or because they are simply mal-informed. That naïveté makes it possible for them to believe socialists, for instance, who talk about using a "compassionate government" to improve people's lives (. . . by centralizing control, which of course never ends well).
So instead of sheep, I'll say this: Emotionally healthy people don't become authoritarian bullies (or bullies of any other type, either). They don't become "good Germans" as so many citizens became under Hitler.
"Emotionally healthy people don't become sheep" and "Emotionally healthy people don't become authoritarian bullies (or bullies of any other type, either)".
Both of these statements are accurate. If a person does not have a relationship with God then they leave themselves open to a forced relationship with the god of this world - Satan.