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Minor Details
"Poisonous pedagogy." That's what world-renowned Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller calls our current dominant methods of child-rearing. It's a hard label to swallow. We'd rather deny it. But she's dead serious.
Miller's writings are extensive and important, including her most well-known book, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (1979), or For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence (1990), and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child (1998). In every one she challenges much of what we consider "normal" parenting. Miller calls for a total revision of the methods we use and the way we view children. She describes how parents, who haven't dealt with the effects of the poisonous pedagogy of their own parents, project their ideas, feelings, and dreams on their children. Children learn that in order to survive they must honor and obey their parents while repressing memories, feelings, and attempts to be themselves. Children must learn to conform, suppress their curiosity and emotions, and become intolerant, even afraid, of deviations from what they've learned. This parenting, we sincerely believe, is "for their own good." In order not to face the pains, humiliations, disappointments, tragedies, and abuses of our own up-bringing, we won't look deeply at the issue. In fact, we refuse to take our own childhood feelings and experiences seriously. As a result we've become unaware of what really happened. We're convinced that anything we went through was good for us, character-building, or necessary training to get along in the real world. "My childhood wasn't that bad." "I turned out okay," we respond, even if our childhood was frankly abusive. In addition, our culture still tends to teach children to blame themselves as if adults are innocent and children born guilty. As the magnitude of child abuse in our culture continues to come to the surface, we just don't want to face it. We learn to defend our parents and blame ourselves for any negative things they have done and our inabilities to rise above them. We want to protect parents. We want to let them off the hook. We want to say they were well-meaning, even if they were screwed-up. We want to tell adult children that they should forgive their parents. And the worst commandment, the one used to support the illusion that parenting is just fine and children need to get over it, Miller adds, is "Honor your father and your mother." So, as adults we deal with depression, surprising amounts of anger, self-defeating internal messages, low self-esteem, and patterns of actions through which we constantly attempt to prove we're really not stupid, insignificant, abandoned, or worthless. We're still not supposed to add to "Well my parents did the best they could (given their own upbringing)," the realization that they were incapable of giving us what we needed as children. Parents so needed their children to fulfill their own unmet childhood needs that they couldn't love them unconditionally, couldn't let them grow in their own ways, couldn't always fully be there, couldn't take children's feelings seriously, or couldn't affirm, respect, and believe their children.
It's not about violence on TV. Children who have really been loved and protected, Miller asserts, are uninterested in violent movies and video games. The child who was hurt and humiliated, maybe not by parents but at school, will seek an object to hate and on which to take revenge. The abuser was always abused. Violent people were brought up violently. And often they were also taught to deny their histories. These memories are unbearably painful and one way not to feel the pain of childhood is to hurt or kill innocent people. This is not to blame parents. They don't get much help either. The mainstream thinks this is the way it should be as long as parents don't go to extremes. It doesn't take alternative ideas seriously. It just doesn't want to face the hurts most of us felt as children. Parents are left to pass along the methods of their parents, though they often improve them somewhat. And fixing this through permissiveness will not be the answer either. Parents are given little support. They're taught to rely on an inadequate consumer-driven nuclear family model that's guaranteed to exhaust them. They're told to discipline children by hitting, yelling at, and humiliating them. But Miller is blunt. Experiments, she says, have proven conclusively that no one learns anything from punishment. They only learn how to avoid more punishment through lies, pretense, and diversion. They also learn how to punish a child later. Little children are naturally tolerant. They think it's wrong to be hurt. It makes sense to them that people who are hurting or left out should be helped. They have a sense of fairness. They don't object to showing affection to others of either sex. They expect human beings to cry out when they're in need. They look intently at others until they're told not to stare. They expect the best of other humans until they're taught not to trust. They laugh more, cry more, observe more, and dream more. They do things that are inefficient, unproductive, outside of the box. The world is theirs for exploring and loving. Children are not naturally homophobic. They don't naturally think that sexuality is dirty. They aren't naturally racist. They have to be taught this. Childishness, of course, ends. We call it growing up. And it seems to be ending sooner than ever as we push younger and younger children to be like us adults -- the adults who seek more and more fulfillment, use addictive coping mechanisms, are unhappy with their looks, and buy books to improve their self-esteem, and the many things they don't like about themselves. When children enforce on each other the prejudices and inadequacies they were taught by grown-ups, we call it peer pressure. Not surprisingly, this poisonous pedagogy installs and enforces homophobia and prejudice against LGBT people. As generation after generation moves away from its methods, we'll slowly also move away from the search for others to blame for society's problems. Still, there will be some who won't face the deep personal hurts of their parenting. They couldn't bear to tell the truth about their parents. They may be psychologists, right-wing evangelists, anti-gay leaders, or others who prefer to blame LGBT people. They say, "I was hit, hurt, etc. and I turned out okay." Anti-gay efforts are less painful to them than feeling the pains of their childhood. There is probably no anti-gay person who has fully faced their own up-bringing. One way to avoid doing so is to focus hate, prejudice, arrogance, and disgust on LGBT people. So, I'll bet, that's what their problem is. It's not us. It's their inability to face their childhoods. They really need therapy. 
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., is author of Scared Straight: Why It's So
Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human (HumanityWorks!,
2001) and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. He
may be reached through www.fairnessproject.org.
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When children learn to suppress their feelings, they learn not to feel what's really going on around them. They often become violent.