There comes a time when you pick up a book and it just grabs you.
Such a book for me recently has been “The Right to be Human†by Edward Hoffman, a biography of Abraham Maslow, revised and updated in 1999. The title alone hooked me while browsing a church fundraising sale when I was in England in the spring. It has been beside my bed since then.
I pulled it out of the stack, by chance, a couple of weeks ago and it has me hooked. As ever, I started with the index and opened the book somewhere about page 150! Now that it’s nearly finished I thought I would start at the beginning!
Those of you who have been students of psychology will long since have known Maslow’s name but for me his ideas have been enlightening and I am encouraged to know that someone was writing 50 years ago about the ideas that I’ve developed during my lifetime — without reading his work!
None of us is unique in our ideas, usually someone has thought of such things before and come to the same conclusions, it’s just that no one person may have come along and combined different ideas.
Maslow was a great believer in coming up with new ideas. Certainly his ideas are still studied and valued today. He also believed that it was important to study ‘good human beings’.
I felt sure there was another book in my collection that had quoted Maslow’s work and I’d just not registered the name or viewpoint. I was right! Another favourite book of mine (one I should have read before and during my sons’ early years) is “Growing Up Gifted” by Barbara Clark.
The title can be misleading because what she suggests are the needs of the gifted are in fact the needs of every child, not just one you presume will be gifted. Of course every parent hopes their child will be ‘gifted’ but how can you tell when they are newborns?
I also believe that many children are more able than we know BUT they are often profoundly neglected in their early years. I have come to the conclusion that children on the autism spectrum are mostly highly and differently intelligent; they have gifts and talents we don’t yet know about, are neglected in the early years and their developmental delays only come to light when they are 2 or 3 years old and by then it’s virtually impossible to assess their IQ by typical methods.
I was very moved yesterday to see on TV a young couple with Down’s Syndrome who had decided to marry – not something either set of parents could have forecast when they had a newborn with such a diagnosis and were advised ‘by experts’ to institutionalise their child. These two young people were so accomplished. Each set of parents, separately and from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, had done a remarkable job of parenting these fine young people. Why shouldn’t all children be parented that way?
Maslow was in the forefront in thinking about the factors that cause people to develop higher order thinking skills, their creative abilities and other fine qualities like altruism, which bring a superior quality of life to those they meet.
We all know such people. I am fortunate to have had a father and two sons who fit that profile and who lead the way by example.
My opportunities to develop my own abilities have really come through my sons. By educating them at home and watching and guiding their development I have discovered my calling, if you will.
I’ve become passionate about children under 3 because I now realise that by being somewhat unconventional in my mode of educating my sons and them in turn constantly being self-taught in just about everything they do, there’s something special going on here and it’s rooted in our house!
It is by reading Barbara Clark’s book and Maslow’s biography that I am encouraged to pull together all my notes of past years and build them into more than just a blog!
I’ve made the connection!