The ancient timeless tribes of Africa coined a term that has survived the ages and made it into English; “It takes a village”, referring to how many people it requires to raise a child.
Almost all child rearing philosophies are focused on the relationship between caregiver and child. Somehow children’s relationships with each other and members of the community are not part of the conversation. As a result children are starving for appropriate quantities and qualities of social interaction.
When children misbehave, its very likely that they are emotionally hungry for connection and love from the parents, the secondary caregivers (educators), or their peers. Your child may feel terribly lonely, and that’s a difficult emotion to express.
This article will discuss possible solutions and what we’re doing about it.
All mammals have something called “mirror neurons” which are brain cells that excite certain areas of the brain to mirror what the organism is observing from its peers. It’s what allows sympathy and empathy. Humans have more mirror neurons than any other mammal and as a result we are the most extreme social creature on earth. Yet this exciting new paradigm of biology is being ignored with child-rearing!
Even social-neuroscientists believe this topic is sorely neglected.
Why is social health ignored in child rearing?
A hyper focus on parent/child relationships: Pediatric medical advancements in the west over the last 120 years or so have been from pediatricians caring for kids in orphanages. Remarkable discoveries about human biology were discovered by these doctors. Discoveries that we still use today in pediatric medicine. However, the conversation with these paradigms of medicine is about “life and death” instead of “thrive”. The ultimate conclusion by these orphanage pediatricians is that kids with parents are “better off” and focusing on that relationship can solve many of the problems facing children these days.
An example of one such discovery is that children die without love. Which is unfortunate, but parents don’t need a scientific article to know to love their child, this serves zero practical benefit to parents who want happy healthy children, and is part of the reason that social health is so ignored with children.
From
At the beginning of the 20th century, in the US and the UK, the death rates among infants placed in orphanages, nurseries, and foundling hospitals were, in some cases, close to 100%.
Most of these deaths were not due to starvation or disease, but to severe emotional and sensorial deprivation – in other words, a lack of love.
The cellphone culture. Another reason social health is ignored in children is because the social health of adults is also being ignored! Adults with strong-social ties, or loving friendships, live longer. Matter of fact, 300,000 people were studied and it was discovered that the strength of their social ties was a bigger indicator of longevity than any other factor, including diet, gender, and race. Being lonely was as bad for life expectancy as smoking! Imagine how devastating it is to a child’s development? How can they possibly grow into socially capable adults if they never have social ties with anyone else other than family?
Cellphone social networking promotes a culture of loose social ties. You may have a thousand people in your “friends” list, but that doesn’t mean much. What matters most for human biology is depth over breadth.
It would take over 100 years from those doctors studying orphans in Europe before psychologists began to understand the virtues of social learning in children.
The Solution
It’s our opinion, based on science, that “it takes a village” to raise a child. We believe that is how the human species evolved. As a social species the health of the somatic organism requires strong social ties (or love) between peers. These strong ties for kids establish appropriately when parents have a good relationship with the parents of their peers. It helps nurture a feeling of safety in the child and makes them receptive to learning new things.
- Model the social skills you want your child to have by having deep friendships with other adults. Find adults who have kids your age, and take that as an opportunity to connect. Find excuses to just “hang out”. We do this with our daycare business by having social activities with all the parents and kids every week or every other week. (But even this isn’t enough)
- Friendships are contextual, when you increase the variety of contexts the relationship exists in, you increase the depth of the relationship. If your child ONLY sees their friends at daycare, they will not be able to connect deeply with them. This can starve them for love. Adults need companionship from people other than their parents, kids do to. Help them by expanding the context of friendships by doing joint family activities.
- Schedule sleepovers. We have noticed there is no bonding activity for children better than sleeping over at a friend’s house from school or their friend sleeping over at their house. As owners of a daycare we are blown away at the change of the quality of relationships when kids get the opportunity to have a sleep over. The next day, both children are just happier. We wish there was a way to design a study showing the virtues of sleepovers. After, as the parent, there is also a deeper bond with the other family, as it required trust and faith in their parenting skills.
Learn more about the principles that guide us.
Quote from our Contract
By virtue of choosing (and getting accepted) into our “village” you will automatically and organically have many things in common with the other parents. We open up your contact information to the other parents in the daycare to encourage play dates and visiting outside the context of daycare to form these ties. Additionally, we go to each other’s birthday events, hold special seasonal events, and promote each other’s businesses. (Attendance is not required, but recommended) The kindred friendships you’ll make in these early years may follow you for the rest of your life.
Our values need to be bigger than money and business, and our village of like-minded families is something we hope you learn to value as much as we do.
-From the Founders
Rubria & Adrian Abascal
