Diary

Keeping a diary dedicated to recording the formative years of your children’s lives is a twofold gift.

Acting as a filter to life’s experiences

As parents, or other adults around children, we have a unique opportunity to give a child context. We’re there watching as they start experiencing life, learning and growing. We observe their development and we help them make sense of what happens. As parents we see the cause and effect that our children participate in, we have an adult perspective and understand the bigger picture.

As children grow, and experience new situations, they gradually create foundational rules that they start to lean on to make everyday decisions. Humans are driven by two forces; to avoid pain and to gain pleasure. Everyday we’re faced with hundreds of variations of situations we’ve been in before. By the age of 8-10 our brains have collected enough data to draw quick conclusions/assumptions as to weather a situation will be painful or pleasurable. This is a great function of the brain, it helps us to become fast decision makers.

The only problem is when the experiences you’ve encountered as a child mistakenly are stored as painful ones. Children are sensitive, their brains not fully developed, so everything that gets stored goes deep. Children are also biased towards egocentricity and will by default interpret every situation as if it was centered on them. As an example a child will take on responsibility for someone else’s bad mood regardless of it being the cause of it or not.

As adults we can help children reason through experiences to help store as many positive and empowering foundations as possible.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

In the science fiction movie Avatar (2009) you encounter an indigenous people of the planet Pandora called the Na’vi. The Na’vi have a special phrase for greeting one another, it translates to “I see you” in English.

I also have a strong visual memory, in the same category, from another movie. It’s from a scene with John Travolta in the movie Face off. John, in the movie named Sean, moves his hand slowly down in front of his sons face. I love how consciously intentional the action is to anchor them into the moment and of really seeing each other. It’s a beautiful scene, filled with love, which has stuck in my mind.

Adults that commits time and energy to be present and really see a child will make that child come alive. Being seen is like feeling the sun come out of the clouds, warm and bright. A central part of our human set up, as social beings, is how we strive to reach the expectations of others. We give enormous power, to influence our well being, to the ones we’ve enlisted to be part of our tribe.

Children don’t get to choose their tribe, they’re stuck with us 😉 That means we are in the honorable position to be their first and most important mirrors. What we see when we see them, what we allow to be reflected back to them, will mold them for life.

It’s impossible to catch everything as it happens

We don’t always understand the impact that a situation have on a child as it happens.

I know of a story of a woman who had a deep phobia for traveling on trains. Through hypnosis she learnt why. As a young child, around 4 years old, she had been on a trip with her father. They were playing around in the train cabin and her father was tossing her up in the air. All of a sudden the train jolted and as the father stumbled the little girl fell towards the window. There were no real danger, the window was closed and her father got hold of her before she even feel down. But the chock on her father’s face combined with the feeling of falling and of the sounds of the train all got embedded in her brain. It all developed into a fear of trains that she just couldn’t understand.

No matter how hard we try to explain, coach and be there, we won’t make it 100% of the time. Life happens. We’re all a work in progress and never perfect. So my belief is that it’s part of my job to arm my children with the abilities to work their own shit out. To direct them towards critical thinking, knowledge of the brain and human tendencies/biases as well as evolutionary theory. I also believe that I’m uniquely positioned to provide them with background information from their early formative years.

Start recording – all aspects

Many people take pictures and record substantial parts of their everyday lives on social media. However there are few that record all aspects of life online. You don’t share the bad times, the mistakes and the everyday boring stuff that are also part of life.

Keeping some form of a diary will help you objectively remember the past. It might provide invaluable clues for you and your child into past experiences that can explain current behavior patterns.

The diary doesn’t have to be written by hand! I hesitated to get started for months because I believed it had to be done in some beautiful journal. It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to use my computer, with storage online, that I actually got started. All of a sudden I could write anytime I got a free moment independent of if I had the notebook with me or not.

One beautiful aspect of writing about your everyday experience with your children is how connected it makes them feel. Children love to hear about their past. Imagine sharing chapters from your diary many years later. Consider this opportunity to share your insight, your worries, your thoughts in a responsible way. This diary is not meant to be used to work through your personal doubts or hardships. That sort of diary is a subject for a whole series of other blog posts.

Write this diary with the intention of recording and of remembering each stage of your children’s development. Write with the intention of sharing it with them. Make sure you describe the up’s and the downs, include your potential worries for them, but most of all remember to write about the love and laughter and about all the learning.

Extract from my Diary

”It’s Friday today. She woke up at 6 AM, at least half an hour ahead of my plan 😉 and yet much better than at 5 AM like yesterday. I went and picked her up from her crib.  She was sitting up although she was still almost asleep, I carried her over to our bed. I tried to get a few more minutes of sleep while breastfeeding her. She lay there cuddling for a while and then stared pushing with her little legs. She eventually pushed herself up too far to reach the breast anymore so she got upset – I wonder when she’s going to make that connection. 😀

I treasure those quiet moments in the morning (if I’m not too tired). Especially when she’s extra sleepy because then she’s so cuddly. She slowly runs her warm, super soft little hand back and forth over my arm. It feels like she’s stroking me with love and it warms my heart. Sometimes when she gets a bit too eager, when she’s super hungry, she scratches or pushes –especially unpleasant if I haven’t trimmed her fingernails recently.

She figured out how to crawl about a month ago. I think the likes it. I believe I’ve noticed that she gets less upset when I leave a room when she knows she can come after me. She had some serious bruises on her knees from struggling to get up on all fours. She used a very funny method of not using her knees at all, instead getting up on her hands and feet. The bruises are gone now and she’s found an effective way to move around. She’s fast! Now I have to chase her around the apartment! Where did that baby go?!”

Nurturing our connection

Sharing the stories with my daughter makes us laugh and I feel the connection grow ever stronger. She loves the way I loved her. She loves to hear how curious, happy and funny she was even back then – I think it also reminds her that that beautiful creature is still part of her.