Quote of the Month: Revolution on Unlocking Joy

After becoming adults, we tend to lose grip of our imagination, and start to rigidly believe in reality. Sometimes, for children, it’s best to stop thinking about what’s possible or not possible, and think in terms of hope, faith, and wonder. To let go you need to turn off that voice in your head that tells you what can be real or not, and let the child guide you away from the ideas of a limited world. This is the most important lesson a child can teach. -- Revolution

The full text of Revolution's essay appears below.




Unlocking Joy: Being a Child’s Best Friend

by Revolution


Children are people, and people need someone to listen to them and their ideas. It doesn’t matter what those ideas are; children will value your open mind and honesty. Seeing a child’s hopes, dreams, passions, and views as they would, and as intently as they might helps build a better bond between you and a child, whether you’re their parent, teacher, coach, aunt, uncle, or even just an older friend. So how does an adult gain the wisdom to see importance in what children believe? How can you be a child’s best friend? Here are a few tips below to improve your relations with kids, and be a real friend to them

1 Use your imagination

Your greatest tool for seeing things from a child’s perspective and understanding them is your imagination. You need to enter their world, and they’d be eager for the company if you have an open mind. Working on your creativity and being spontaneous are great ways to do this. Be wary of clinging to and applying adult rules to a child’s stories and games. It may take significant time to let go of all the adult ideas of how things are, but with determination, all grown-ups can let go of reality, and find their imagination once again.

2 Let go of your inclinations

After becoming adults, we tend to lose grip of our imagination, and start to rigidly believe in reality. Sometimes, for children, it’s best to stop thinking about what’s possible or not possible, and think in terms of hope, faith, and wonder. To let go you need to turn off that voice in your head that tells you what can be real or not, and let the child guide you away from the ideas of a limited world. This is the most important lesson a child can teach. Being free-spirited is something many children are experts in because the world is still new to them, and full of exciting things for them to see and do.

3 Understand the need to be serious at times

Although children usually show a more liberal imagination, it’s also important to understand that children have concerns that feel just as important to them as adult matters are to grown-ups. Some of these are basic needs, but sometimes, when children complain about school, or about rules set in the household, it’s time to listen to their side of the story, and see how they feel about a given situation. Whatever you do, make sure the child knows you’re treating their concerns as important, and you’re willing to consider their point of view valuable and well-considered given their circumstances. The first thing to do is to understand their interests and intentions. Children commonly have good intentions, but not much of an outlet for their ideas and concerns. As an adult playmate be willing to understand why rules are important from the child’s perspective, and follow any rules set for the child as if you were their equal. For things that are ingrained in decades of tradition, it can be very hard to understand the reasoning for a child. For those things that are difficult to understand from their perspective, you can begin to question the validity of the rules yourself, and explain your thought process to the child in a manner they’ll be able to comprehend.

4 Understand that children are intolerant of lies

Children are very good at detecting lies, and if you fib, they’ll quickly sense what they understand as an inconsistency. Make sure that no matter what, you are honest with children, or else they’ll be very upset
with you. A lie can infuriate a child, and rightfully so. If they catch you lying, be prepared to immediately correct yourself and make an honest apology, or else they’ll begin to model a negative image of you in their mind. To be honest with children you need to express your optimum of empathy and know how best to explain the truth without the omission of details. This can seem tough, because adults may get scared when they need to tell a child a hard truth. Grown-ups think the child on the receiving end won’t understand that truth. However, it’s essential to be honest with children, given their strong opinions about those they’ve learned not to trust.

5 Understand that children are people

Children are first and foremost individuals, and each one is unique. There’s no magic formula to deal with others, and children are no exception. Make sure you respect all the intricacies of a child’s personality, and always be willing to learn about them and how they’re different. It’s easy to see children as individuals with unique hopes, dreams, desires, and needs. All that you need to do is pay attention to the children in your life, and their personalities, interests, and beliefs. You will see a vast diversity from one child to the next, just like you would with any group.

I hope these tips help you to better relate to children you know. I strongly believe that following these tips will light up their world and make them feel that you are worthy of their respect. After all, with the right treatment and consideration, any child can feel important and loved by adults.

Beatrice Faust

Today would have been the 84th birthday of Beatrice Faust, Australian author, civil libertarian, and campaigner for women's rights, who died in 2019.

In 1966 she was president of the Victorian Abortion Law Repeal Association and co-founder of the Victorian Union of Civil Liberties. She was also a co-founder of the Women's Electoral Lobby in 1972.

She attended Melbourne University in the 1950s, where she became acquainted with Germaine Greer and they extended their feminist inclinations through various cogitations, earning her bachelor's degree in English and subsequently her master's degree. Much later in her life, the

higher degrees of PhD and LLD were conferred upon her, the former for her 1991 book Apprenticeship in Liberty and the latter for her life's work in general, as a social reformist and researcher.

In 2001 Faust was awarded the Centenary Medal. In the same year, she was inductted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women. In 2004 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia.

Among her early writings, she contributed to the Australian edition of The Little Red Schoolbook, a book written by two Danish schoolteachers in 1969 which encouraged and instructed young people to question social norms. Translated into many languages in the early 1970s, the book aroused much controversy, moral panic, and even censorship via successful prosecution under the UK's Obscene Publications Act for a British edition.

I read her book Women, Sex, and Pornography in the mid-'80s and was struck by how free it was of the erotophobia and misandry characterizing so much of the writing by feminists on this subject. Her early positive relationship with an older man may be partly responsible for this difference. As reported in Uncommon Desires Newsletter, 6, 1992:

“Australian author and women's rights activist Beatrice Faust recalls the tender and consensual love relationship she had as a young girl with her adult friend Ritchie. He always concentrated on making her feel good. She fully trusted him and he sometimes made her orgasm four to five times in a row. She still remembers those days with gratitude.” (Quoted in Positive Memories by T. Rivas, Edition 4, edited by Ipce, 2020, p. 151.)

In The Betrayal of Youth: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex, and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People, edited by Warren Middleton, is a chapter contributed by Faust titled “The Pedophiles” which reviews the research presented in two books on the subject. Here she writes:

“Pedophile sexuality is not predatory; it is not wholly or even mainly genital, and child-lovers reveal at least as much agape as eros. It has some characteristics of the masculine erotic style, for many pedophiles enjoy visual stimuli and a variety of partners. But many also prefer couple-bonding and tactile stimuli that are more common in the feminine style.

“Overwhelmingly, their love is process orientated (feminine) rather than performance orientated (masculine). All of us share both feminine and masculine components of sexual style in varying degrees, but the most dominant characteristic of pedophilic love is the epimeletic – nurturant – response to children found in both sexes among chimps and some human cultures, but mainly among women in the industrial West.”

[…]

“Orthodoxy teaches that children are, or should be, sexless, equating innocence with ignorance and immaturity. Suffragettes in all countries initiated ages of consent and incest laws to protect children from sexual exploitation – which was a real hazard – and premature sexual awakening – which was a Victorian middle-class phobia. “Even now, in the 1980s, the problems continue. Despite much extensive research, children are still regarded as sexless and a concerned minority are still trying to enforce unenforceable laws that define any sexual contact between children and their elders as molestation.”

[…]

“There is no point in retaining laws that fail to prevent or punish; that cannot be enforced with equity; and which often cause harm to the children they were supposedly designed to protect.”

"Matt Gaetz Cleared: The Importance of Due Process & the Dangers of Prosecutorial Leaks"

Glenn Greenwald discusses what this case illustrates about the importance of upholding constitutional rights not merely as laws but also as moral values which are vital irrespective of what one thinks of those targeted by attacks on those rights (and also regardless of what one thinks of the laws used to do so). If you care about defending those values, I encourage you to support the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDf6hpwvNTs

Going to the Source

Over thirty years ago, I was first made aware of the issue of sociogenic harm by an article in the magazine Anarchy, and most memorable was a quote from sexologist Joan Nelson describing her experience with it at the age of eight. In those pre-Web days, there was no easy way for me as a non-academic to find this account in its original context. But I was always curious about it, so recently I obtained the book in which it appears via an interlibrary loan. (I regret having to link to Amazon because it's not in the Powell's catalog.) The passage I'd seen quoted is the entirety of the personal reminiscence part of the paper in which it appears, but it does help to understand the context, which is that Nelson felt that readers should be aware of the personal motive behind her research. It should be noted that, despite this highly ethical rationale of full disclosure, Nelson was severely criticized for having shared her personal experience.