Articles by Izzy
Mother Nature's Advice for Abused Parents
There are millions of species of animals in the world. Do you know how many of them are driven crazy by their children? If your answer was greater than one, you were wrong. In all of Nature, there is only one species that is led to the brink of madness by their own children. That species is us.
We humans pride ourselves on being the most intelligent creatures ever to have walked upon the face of the planet. We even gave ourselves the name homo sapiens, which translates as "intelligent man." No other species comes close to the kind of achievements that we are capable of. But if we are really such a smart species, why is it that no other animal is as abused by its own children?
In recent years, we have been flooded with information about child abuse. We are taught about it in schools, books, magazines, TV, radio, and movies. I have nothing against ending child abuse. I agree wholeheartedly that innocent, defenseless children need to be protected from cruel and negligent parents. But the truth is that for every case of parents abusing children, there are probably twenty cases of children abusing parents. In fact, it is a rare family in which the parents do not feel abused by any of their kids. Furthermore, most cases of parents abusing children arise from the frustration of trying to stop the kids from driving them crazy.
Abused children deserve our sympathy and our help. But the time has come to expand our sympathy for that much larger population of abused people, parents. Parents do more for their children than anyone else in the world, and as reward for their efforts, their kids take them for granted and show them less respect than they show anyone else in the world. Teaching parents how to stop being abused by their children happens to be the best way in the world to end physical child abuse, because when parents are no longer abused by their children, children stop being abused by their parents.
Why don't our lives run as smoothly as those of the animals? Why can't we raise our children as naturally as all the other species that share the planet with us? Because we have become civilized. Civilization, with its endless set of man-made rules, has obscured the fact that we are animals, and has blinded us to the extensive role of nature in our lives. Life has been evolving on Earth for a couple of billion years, and we are a product of that evolution. We are genetically programmed to function like animals, because we are animals. This genetic programming cannot simply be erased by a mere few thousand years of life in civilization.
When our efforts to live according to the rules of civilization conflict with our genetic programming to live according to the rules of nature, suffering is inevitable. As long as we defy natural law, Mother Nature takes her revenge. And one of the ways she takes it is by having our children drive us crazy.
Animals are not perplexed by life. Only we humans are. That's because the other animals don't have artificial rules to confuse them the way we do. They live life purely according to forces of nature. They know exactly what it is they have to do, and they do it without question. They do for their children precisely what they must, even when that demands giving up their lives so their children can live. Because they confidently carry out their biological programming, their children can neither take advantage of them nor drive them berserk with nonsense. Have you ever seen an animal get upset because her child was being picky with food, or refusing to go to sleep?
Fortunately, much of human confusion and suffering is for nothing. Many of the problems that animals don't have, we bring upon ourselves. What we need to do is get off of our superiority trip and learn from the animals. They often know better than we do when it comes to raising children, because they live by the rules of Mother Nature.
In this column, I will serve as your guide to Mother Nature. Some of the things I will be saying may sound strange at first, but if you follow my column, this way of thinking will come to make more and more sense to you. You will learn how to use the wisdom of nature, and many of your parenting problems will fade away. So stay tuned. You'll be amazed at how nice it is to be an animal again.
