It Takes A Village

You've heard the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child".

As I give this phrase some thought. I wonder what time period it came from. If you think back when perhaps a child was raised in a village per se, then it makes a great deal of sense. Think back in the biblical days. When you think in terms of a village you might would think more of a group of people that travel and live together while setting up villages as their homestead.

I would imagine that the group started out as a small family and over time would add spouses, and others. I'm thinking in terms of the stories in the bible that speaks of Joseph, his brothers and parents. It was common for the sons to marry and stay within the family group until their own family had grown too big.

I picture a situation like this as having one common goal and belief system of raising children. In other words, all the children were more than likely brought up learning the same things and raised in pretty much the same ways. The beliefs of the parents were passed onto the children with ease.

Now, think about how our children are being raised today. Not by you the parent, but by the village as a whole. We send our children to pre-school at an early age. I myself started the 1st grade at age 5. But think about it. We have day-care, pre-school, field trips, after school care and more than you can think about. We have television, video games, toys made by major corporations. These too are villagers helping to raise your children.

I can't help but to think that the village in general raising our children is not the same as before. It's obvious that the mindset of todays village does not share the same core beliefs and morals, yet we expose our children to them anyway. This is why I've come to hope that I can help change the way our children are being raised. I wish to simply bring awareness to the parents. Since we don't know everything our children are being exposed to since we can't be with them every single minute of the day. We can help to offset some of those indirect teachings they receive.

We can do this by constantly praising them on the good aspects of their lives that we see continously. If we do this then we can allow the children's small brains to focus more on the positive teachings and less on the other. Our brains are always making new connections between neurons. These connections are grouping everything that our 5 senses are sending to us about ourselves, our environment and every person, or thing we come in contact with.

The majority of positive affirmations that are given to a child, will cause the brain to make those connections more dominant than something they picked up at school, or from another child that called him a bad name, or a phrase he/she overheard between two adults at a restuarant. Did you know that if a child under the age of 8 or 9 over heard someone say "You are stupid". That phrase goes into the mind of the child as if it was said to them, regardless of who it was said to or about. The child's brain can not make this distinction at this point in his/her life.

My research has led me to some amazing discoveries. I use the name of Praising Your Child as our organization's corporate name because it's the only means I've found so far to help offset the indirect programming our children are receiving everyday without our knowledge. I hope you take the time to visit our website http://www.praisingyourchild.com/ and take a quick look at some of the files and research I've been putting together. I promise you won't regret it.

Let's improve on the village that is raising our children these days.