Child Development and Nurturance

Based on the book Nurturing the Nurturers; Healing the Planet, The Wati Kanyilpai Story by Leon Petchkovsky Childhood trauma is a global problem. How’s that for an opening statement?  Let me ask you a question. If you had a time machine where would you go? You could live in any century. After a long debate about […]

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Based on the book Nurturing the Nurturers; Healing the Planet, The Wati Kanyilpai Story by Leon Petchkovsky

Childhood trauma is a global problem. How’s that for an opening statement? 

Let me ask you a question. If you had a time machine where would you go? You could live in any century. After a long debate about the pros and cons of that time but here’s the catch, the society you choose needs to be hyper focused on the importance of early childhood development. I usually come to the conclusion that right here, right now is the best time but is it really? What’s the maternity leave policy at your office? How often can you take time off to be with the kids? Are you struggling with any political or economic pressures that make it hard to be a good parent? What about caring for others? How much time do you have for that? 

As far as the centuries go this is a pretty good time to be alive but we have a lot of work to do when it comes to Nurturance. 

Leon Petchkovsky – There should actually be a ministry for child nurturance that sets up government programs to help with that. 

According to Professor Leon Petchkovsky Nurturance is one of the most crucially important  elements missing from our society because it’s all about the early years where proper childhood development is crucial. 

Leon Petchkovsky – If you’re lucky enough to get a reasonably good go of it life is much more manageable, relationships are much more manageable, our emotions are much more manageable, our behavior is much more manageable, you know we’re less impulsive, all of that sort of stuff. 

Leon Petchkovsky is a retired Professor of Psychiatry He’s also written a book about Nurturance called Nurturing the Nurturers; Healing the Planet. This is an interesting guy. His book focuses on Developmental Neuroscience and Psychology. That may sound like a lot but never mind the fancy titles. He makes is very simple, we need to focus our energy in these two areas: 

Leon Petchkovsky – More awareness of the critical importance of those first three years of life. 

And the second thing, which is probably even more important…

Leon Petchkovsky – There are no governments on earth except maybe a few of the Scandinavian countries that have any focused policies and in the book I’ve described a few private indigenous organizations that have set up stuff like that to identify the moms at risk, to give them lots of support. They’re the kind of models we should be following all over the planet. 

One of the things I love about this guy is his no nonsense approach. The work he does is based on a great deal of research and it’s hard to argue with him when he says developmental neuroscience explains how failures of nurturance during the critical periods in life have disastrous psychological and physical consequences not only for ourselves, but for society in general and he explains exactly what we need to do.

It starts with you. 

We need to develop better empathy and mindfulness skills, better ways of looking after ourselves and caring for others. In a nutshell, we can end suffering on this planet by better caring for ourselves and others. Can it really be that easy? 

Leon Petchkovsky – There are lots of really good parents out there in the world but not enough and by not enough I mean some of them try really hard to be good parents but because they’ve become so damaged themselves, it becomes a struggle. Like, you know you could have a very kind mother who develops postpartum depression so she’s severely depressed for the first twelve months of your life, and even though she’s a good being because she’s depressed it makes it very difficult for her to just be in touch. 

This is a serious topic but Leon has a great sense of humor and when you read his book you get a better sense of his personality. In it he shares some fun stories about working with Indigenous communities across Australia. Like this one…

Leon Petchkovsky – We were camping out one night with our Aboriginal teachers and they kept asking us if we’ve had any dreams and so I had a dream on that particular night, and in the dream I saw this huge kind man, an Aboriginal man, walking through the landscape but not just Australia but walking through everywhere in the world, and his job was to look after all the nurturers, so all the mothers who were looking after babies, all the animal mothers all of that and all of the people who were looking after them and so I told them about that and they said “..oh, Leon you’ve dreamt about a dreamtime being we call Wati Kanyilpai which is the man who is always looking after all the nurturers. 

Which is why the full title of his book is Nurturing the Nurturers; Healing the Planet The Wati Kanyilpai Story by Leon Petchkovsky. A great insight into what can go right and wrong in the development of a human mind. There are some ways to fix it, and ways to encourage and make Nurturance a bigger part of who we are as a species. 

You can find his book on https://www.booktopia.com and lots of other places. There’s also a nice summary of the book on youtube and the links are in the show notes. 

And that will do it for this edition of Newsgram from Webtalkradio.com — Take care

Link: 

https://www.xlibris.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/802041-nurturing-the-nurturers-healing-the-planet

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