Behaviour Problems in Children
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 1998 Jan / Feb VOL VII NO 1.
Dr Manu Kothari
Dr Lopa Mehta
It was Sir Alan Parkes, the famous UK demographer, who declared in the early 60s: "A child is brought into this world without its knowledge and consent." In Ardrey's words, it is "an accident of the midnight" that burdens the earth with yet one more being. The neonate is called an infant, from in meaning not, and fari meaning to speak, that is, one who is incapable speech.
Infancy soon matures into childhood, defined by Bierce as 'the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth." From the time that Adam ate the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden, mankind has inoculated its imbalanced culture medium with the germ (Sanskrit: janma birth) of humanhood and has hoped for an idyllic outcome. This could never come to pass. So you are forced to conclude that the theme of this issue of NJH is as old as mankind, the manifestations differing with the changing moods and mores of changing times. Omkar Nath Thakur's famous Malkauns on Mein Nahin Makhan Khayo is a lyrical listing of Krishna's problematic behaviour ending in a lovable, defensive twist: Mainay hi Makhan Khayo.
This incurable chasm between society's hopes and children's cussedness has some very obvious bases. A thoughtful textbook of medicine points out that, by and large (9 or more out of 10) couples acquire parenthood through hormonal hurry. Biologically fit; but psychologically unfit. Add to that the Indian penchant for early motherhood to render the marriage unbreakable. The child/children are seen as the bond holding the parents together. Whenever they run away from each other, the bond is torn. To add insult to injury the child is seen an investment, a care-taker for their old age, and a ready achiever of all the parental aims. Hence that rather sickening song sung by Manna Dey: ..... mera naam kaarega roshan, jag main mera raaj dulhara. In medical college, we often see the parody a parenthood when a new entrant to medicine comes as the forced, prospective inheritor of the medical gaddi and the empire that the parents have built. First for themselves, and as an afterthought, for their progeny.
Heredity is a holy humbug where parents think that they own the child and the child thinks that it owns the parent's property. Heredity is scientifically untenable. Because of the crossing over inherent in meiosis, the one cell in the mother that is totally unlike her is her ovum; similarly for the sperm. Just sing these lines in the style of Mukesh singing, in Sangam movie,Dost dost naa rahaa.
Sperm father naa rahaa
Ovum mother naa rahaa
Vaarsaa hamein teraa
Etbaar naa rahaa, etbaar naa rahaa.
We must conclude this part of the article with Kahlil Gibran's genius: Your children are neither you, nor yours. They are life's lyricality sung through you. Yours is to enjoy the tune without wanting to call the tunepoetically perfect, biologically more so. The bastardness or otherwise of a child lies, not in the child, but the eyes of the beholders.
The behaviour problems that we crib about, worry over, wring our hands on, and break our hearts upon are due to behavioural deficiencies on one side, and excesses on the other. A child with a low IQ is merely one end of the normal curve at the other end of which is a genius with all the brilliance for making an atom bomb or an AK 47. Thank God, the Americans now feel that IQ may signify Idiotic Quotient and hence harp on EQ - Emotional Quotient. In the medical world, thriving on hyper-this and hyper-that, Sir George Pickering pointed out that no one knows where normotension ends and hypertension begins.
So too about the problem of the hyperactive child. You subscribe to junk food, junk entertainment, and drowning decibels - a perfect recipe for the agitation of muscles and nerves. Sugar and salt in all food items; the osmolarity is enough to knock out the serenity of the stomach with a resultant loss of child's attention span, and a spate of warning letters from "Miss" in school. In the name of giving the "best" to your kid, you deprive yourself of their due, and the child imitates you perfectly. A society gets the childhood behavioural problems that it richly deserves.
We must mention three maverick authorities that have hinted at a way out of the behavioural mess. Plato emphasized that up to the age of 14, a child should be kept away from formal, competitive studies, and be made conversant with animal life, botanical splendour, astronomy, music, singing, dancing, languages, literature and sports in an enjoyable manner. This way, the child would be so rich that it would learn to worship Saraswati without wanting to make Laxmi out of her.
Alexis St. Exupery wrote The Little Prince merely to underline the fact that a child, like the great teacher, Anaxagoras, is sent by the Lord to admire the sun, sunrise and sunset, God-made riches that teach you not to run after man-made ones. The Dancing Wu-Li Masters of the Far East held that a child should not be allowed to warm a bench. In the Socratic style, the child has to learn while on the move. Gravitation would be taught by first taking the child to the garden and waiting till a leaf falls. Then the teacher would do the choreography of the falling leaf. This would be set to music, and then, if necessary, the Newtonian equations would follow. Rightly it is said that we are all born emperors and end up being beggars.
We do not have the temerity to suggest drugs or high-sounding, confusing, psychologic theories or therapies for the problems in the current context. Thomas de Kesmpis masterpiece The Imitation of Christ, the most widely read book after The Holy imitating. A child with complete rust looks up to its adults as paragons of virtue, of idealism, of the right-this, and right-that, and then behaves by imitating the adults at home and outside. Let us adults acquire that humility, that detachment, that depth whereby we yield to William Blake's urging:
Behold the world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
