Robin Grille Quotes

Advantages Philadelphia Has Over New York: Fairmount Park (more than four times bigger and better than Central Park). The park’s colonial houses: Strawberry Mansion, Lemon Hill, Belmont Mansion. The weeping cherry trees of George’s Hill, the Playhouse in the Park, Robin Hood Dell. Hoagies (more than four times better than heroes). Steak sandwiches (they don’t make them here the way they do at home: layers of paper-thin beef smothered in grilled onions; melted cheese, optional; catsup, yet another option!). People who wait for you to get off the subway before they try to get on. Smoking on the subway platform. Row houses. The Philadelphia Orchestra. Mustard pretzels with mustard (in New York—would you believe?—they sell mustard pretzels plain). Red and white police cars so you can shout, “Look out, the red devil’s coming!

Children are not adults-in-the-making; they are not clay to be molded. They are children, and that is that. Our task is to wonder at them, to learn about ourselves through our relationships with them. It is also important to remind ourselves that children are not “them”—they are “us.” We have felt what they feel, yearned for what they yearn for—and if we are honest with ourselves… we still do. So,

Rather than imposing “good” values through punishment and reward, and rather than enforcing blind obedience, the helping mode parent fosters the child’s autonomy and self-regulation.

Perhaps the most significant departure from previous modes involves a better psychological differentiation between parent and child. In other words, helping mode parents have learned to distinguish more clearly between the child’s need, and the adult’s wishes. Many of the socializing mode practices were done ostensibly “for the child’s own good,” when it was really the adult’s need being served. We convinced ourselves, for instance, that it was for the child’s own good that we spanked them, dispatched them to regimented, rote learning and competition-based education, or forced them into rigid feeding and sleeping routines.

Since withdrawal is the only psychological defence available to the baby at this time, shocks experienced here can lead to a demeanour of remoteness or aloofness. Some of these babies may grow to be day-dreamers, under stress they might feel depersonalized or unreal. Others grow to be overly passive, compliant and obedient. The movement is away from contact with others, taking refuge in excessive intellectualisation; a state of analytical detachment from life, or a tendency to reverie.

The adult becomes uneasy in the unpredictable world of feelings and emotion, and therefore over-emphasizes the “reasonable,” the “rational,” the “logical”—or the “abstract” and the “philosophical.

The prolonged and total immobilization of babies24 in tight swaddling bandages, a practice long abandoned throughout Western civilization, has persisted into modern times in the Balkans, with the predictable deleterious affects of withdrawal, passivity, and late walking.

In my own therapy, I have re-experienced some of the intense terror, followed by elation and relief that surrounded the event of my birth. I have also remembered the all-encompassing adoration I felt for my mother as a baby. Although I cannot easily re-capture such intense, early-life feelings in my relatively armoured adult body, the memories are not altogether irretrievable.