Julia Gippenreiter presents: a collection of memoirs of great people about their childhood.
Yu.B. Gippenreiter. Parents: how to be a child
Publisher: AST, 2010
As soon as an author gains mega-popularity, his name begins to be actively used to promote other books that are less sensible. The series appeared: “Mary Ivanna recommends” or “Edited by Mary Ivanna”. Moreover, the name of the "star" is written in capital letters with the clear expectation that the buyer will take it for the author's - and buy, or rather buy. It's good that some celebrities keep their brand without falling into consumer goods. New masterpieces have been expected from Professor Yulia Borisovna Gippenreiter for a long time. So far, few psychologists-writers have managed to reach the popularity of her first book, "Communicating with a Child: How?" But a genius is a genius, in his entire life he can come up with one little formula that turned the world upside down, and do nothing else - the world is moving on according to his formula anyway.
This new book is not Gippenreiter's personal work, not a technique, but also useful reading.
In America, an old family friend once said to a young bon vivant:
- Freddie, someday you will marry your little cousin.
Fred, startled, replied:
“She’s very tiny!”
But he always had a special feeling for the girl who adored him, kept children's letters and poems that she wrote to him. After a long series of love affairs with New York beauties and representatives of high society (among them - Jenny Jerome, future Lady Randolph Churchill), he returned to his native England and asked a quiet little cousin to become his wife. It is typical for my mother that she resolutely refused him.
- But why? I asked her once.
- Because I was boring. - She answered.
The reason is rather unusual, but for the mother it is quite sufficient.
(Agatha Christie)
So, this is a reader. A collection of memoirs of celebrities about their childhood, children's perception of the world and pedagogical inferences. Among the authors: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Thor Heyerdahl, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pavel Florensky, Lydia Chukovskaya, Natalia Sats and others. Their memories and notes are accompanied by comments from Gippenreiter. The result is a wonderful collection, light and informative, it is a pity that it was published in such an inconspicuous form, but such is the fate of all literature from the publishing house AST.
A quote from Gippenreiter's commentary on Stanislav Richter's story about himself, about his personal definition of himself as "a lazy person by nature", confirmed by school mentors.
Before us is a psychological riddle: how can one think of a keen, "captured" person as a lazy person ?! Well, you can still forgive the gymnasium mentor - she, one might say, by definition, has professional blinders on her eyes. But Richter himself is about himself (?!). However, the mystery of the paradox is in his own words and in his fate: “I hated school, and even now, at the mere recollection of it, I tremble. Everything about her repulsed me, and above all, she was obligatory. " Here's the thing: compulsory classes - that's where he was "lazy"! We are confronted here with a serious attitude of "society", schools, teachers and parents. It is imposed on children, and then becomes its own assessment for children and adults. This position can be briefly expressed in words: lazy - one who does not know how to work under duress. We repeat once again, S. Richter, like some children like him, in addition to special giftedness, possessed one more gift: a sense of his own path. This is a special, personal gift that it is time to understand, recognize, and protect in every way in children! The "laziness" of such gifted children is resistance to being pulled into an alien path.
After this conclusion, a collective exhalation should sound. Surely many have felt on their own skin a similar pressure from the side of society. Eminent teachers a hundred years ago declared that there are no lazy children - there are insensitive adults. A child's "laziness" is 99% of the time a defensive reaction to unnecessary pressure.
... Psychologist Marina Osorina, as usual, will open a window to the mysterious worlds of children, tell about children's fantasies and observation. Agatha Christie shares her memories of the difficult life of English children: what it is like to be "worthy" all the time and behave decently. Stanislavsky draws pictures of his first acquaintance with the theater with a bright, refined style. Lydia Chukovskaya talks about her family with such piercing emotional strength that she feels sorry for the little girl surrounded by Names and Surnames.
Again the Great Road, again winter, again we are returning from somewhere together. Not real frost, no more than five degrees. Fine snow is being sown ... We are forced to retreat into a roadside snowdrift, from the alley onto the Great Road a train with ice slowly stretches out towards us. ... Slowly, tediously, the wagon train drags on: I get tired of looking at the horses and at the transparent rectangles of freshly cut ice. Finally the train creaked. The last horse, the last block of ice, the last helmet. We stepped onto the road. And then a new obstacle is Repin. It turned out he was on the other side. In warm shoes, in a soft fur hat, all covered with snow, waiting for the train, just like us. I am annoyed: now they will talk! Stop again! Repin, taking off his glove, politely greets Korney Ivanovich, then holds out his hand to me. No, you don't have to wait long. Something like that was agreed about "Wednesday". Again, courteous handshakes, and Repin disappears into the snow. We move through the snow in one direction - it in the other. But before we have time to take ten steps, something strange happens. It is as if a demon possesses my father. Korney Ivanovich suddenly rips off the glove from my hand and throws it far into a snowdrift to the stakes of someone else's fence.
- You Repin holds out his hand without a glove. - He screams in a fury. - And you dare to serve yours without taking them off! Insignificance! To whom are you thrusting a mitten under the nose? After all, he wrote with this very hand "They did not expect" and "Mussorgsky"! Balda!
The book is worth reading, without haste and from any place, in order to relax your soul, having met with a competent literary language, mastery of high style. Each story makes you think, hear the author as if in reality, thanks to a few correct words and nagging images. Geniuses in childhood were ordinary children with their own complexes and mistakes, they were often brought up in a harsh atmosphere, much more severe than the current problems. Their stories skillfully "lower" an adult to the level of a child and make them respect the desire of children to please their parents, to please them by doing things they don't like (as happened with Tsvetaeva, for example). And this effort also remains underestimated, while adults themselves rarely yield to each other in principled pursuits.
We think a lot about how to make the right adult out of a child. And we devote little time and effort to the child-as-a-child, trying to exaggerate his abilities and skills, his responsibility in trifles. The book evokes such pathetic thoughts. All that remains for us is to pat the children on the head and protect their lives, and they will do the rest themselves.
Book price in stores: ~ 250 rubles.
The world through the eyes of a child
"The eyes of a child" is a special vision of the world. Children are surprised at things and events that we pass by without noticing; are mesmerized by colors, sounds and words in which we find nothing special. They have different scales, different values, a different understanding of what is important and unimportant.
Many childhood memories reveal the amazing originality and richness of the child's inner world. At the same time, they show how delicately adults should deal with this world. After all, the child lives in him for real, seriously. Through his prism, he perceives the outside world, other people and himself. And if we do not always understand the hidden life of a child, then, in any case, we can respect and protect it along with its cherished "secrets", fantasies and dreams.
This chapter opens with excerpts from the book M. Osorina - a talented researcher of childhood. They are followed by texts from memories P. Florensky, A. Christie, M. Tsvetaeva and L. Chukovskaya. Although the title "The World through the Eyes of a Child" can be attributed to the entire book, here are selected those episodes that reveal the originality and "dissimilarity" of a child's attitude to our, adult's, perception. Hopefully, these talented descriptions will help us remember our childhood and understand our children more deeply.
M.V. Osorina
Maria Vladimirovna Osorina (born December 6, 1950) is a Russian psychologist, associate professor at the Faculty of Psychology at St. Petersburg State University, vice president of the St. Petersburg Psychological Society, author of numerous original studies in the field of children's subculture, children's drawing and creativity.
With excerpts from her book "The Secret World of Children ..." we open this section. The materials of the book are the result of the author's extensive experience - a master of careful observation of children and compassionate communication with them. You can see how much an "understanding" adult learns by entering into confidential contact with a child.
For a one-year-old, it is important to crawl, climb, reach the intended goal. A two-three-year-old discovers a lot of things, their names, the possibility of using them, their accessibility and forbiddenness. Between two and five years of age, the child's ability to visualize and fantasize develops progressively.
This is a qualitatively new event in the intellectual life of a child, which will revolutionize many aspects of his life.
Previously, the child was a prisoner of the particular situation where he was. He was influenced only by what he directly saw, heard, felt.
Now he discovers that he has received a new ability double the world presenting imaginary images on the inner psychic screen. This gives him the opportunity to be in the world at the same time. externally visible (here and now) and in imaginary the world of your fantasies (there and then) arising from real events and things. An amazing property of the child's perception of the world during this period (as well as several years later) is that most of the significant objects surrounding the child in everyday life are represented in his fantasies as heroes of many events. Dramatic situations are played out around them, they become participants in strange serials created by the child from day to day.
Mom does not even suspect that, looking at the soup in a plate, the child sees the underwater world with algae and sunken ships, and making grooves in the porridge with a spoon, imagines that these are gorges among the mountains along which the heroes of his plot make their way.
Sometimes in the morning, parents do not know who is sitting in front of them in the form of their own child: whether it is their daughter Nastya, or Chanterelle, who neatly spreads her fluffy tail and requires only what foxes eat for breakfast. To avoid getting screwed up, it can be helpful for poor adults to ask a child in advance who they are dealing with today.
This new capacity for imagination gives the child completely new degrees of freedom. It allows him to be extremely active and autocratic in the amazing inner world of the psyche, which begins to form in the child. The inner psychic screen on which imaginary events unfold is somewhat similar to a computer screen. In principle, you can easily call any image on it (it would be a skill!), Change it as you want, present events that are impossible in reality, make the action unfold as rapidly as it does not happen in the real world with the usual passage of time. The child learns all these skills gradually. But the appearance of such a psychic ability is of great importance for his personality. After all, all these amazing possibilities, which the child enthusiastically begins to use, give a feeling of their own strength, capacity, master's attitude to imaginary situations. This is in sharp contrast with the child's ability to cope with objects and events of the real physical world, which is not very well listened to, for the time being.
By the way, if you do not develop the child's contacts with real objects and people, do not encourage him to act "in the world", he can save himself in front of the difficulties of life. In this world of physical reality that resists us, does not always obey our desires, and requires skills, it is important for a person sometimes to suppress the temptation to dive and hide into an illusory fantasy world, where everything is easy. Toys are a psychologically special class of things for a child. By their very nature, they are designed to embody, "objectify" children's fantasies. In general, children's thinking is characterized by animism- the tendency to endow inanimate objects with a soul, inner strength and the ability to an independent secret life. It is this string of the child's psyche that self-propelled toys always touch: mechanical chickens that can peck, dolls that close their eyes and say "mother", walking cubs, etc. Such toys always find a response in an enchanted child (and sometimes an adult), because in his soul he knows internally that this is how it should be - they are alive, but they hide it. During the day, toys obediently fulfill the will of their owners, but at some special moments, in particular at night, the secret becomes apparent. Left to themselves, toys begin to live their own, full of passions and desires, an active life. This exciting topic, associated with the secrets of the existence of the objective world, is so significant that it has become one of the traditional motives of the works of children's literature. The toy nightlife is at the heart of the Nutcracker events by E.-T.-A. Hoffmann, "Black Hen" by A. Pogorelsky and many other books, and from the works of contemporary authors - the famous "Travels of the Blue Arrow" by G. Rodari. The Russian artist Alexander Benois in his famous "Alphabet" of 1904 chose this very theme to illustrate the letter "I", which depicts the intensely mysterious revival of the nocturnal community of Toys.
It turns out that almost all children tend to fantasize about their home and almost every child has favorite “objects of meditation”, concentrating on which he plunges into his dreams. Going to bed, someone looks at a spot on the ceiling, similar to the head of a bearded uncle, someone - a pattern on the wallpaper that resembles funny animals, and comes up with something about them. One girl said that a deer skin hung over her bed, and every evening, lying in bed, she stroked her deer and wrote another story about his adventures.
Inside a room, apartment or house, the child selects for himself favorite places where he plays, dreams, where he retires. If you are in a bad mood, you can hide under a hanger with a whole bunch of coats, hide there from the whole world and sit like in a house. Or crawl under a table with a long tablecloth and press your back against a warm radiator.
You can look for interest in a small window from the corridor of an old apartment, overlooking a back staircase - what can you see there? - and imagine, and what could be seen there, if suddenly ...
There are also frightening places in the apartment that the child tries to avoid. For example, here is a small brown door in a wall niche in the kitchen, adults put food there, in a cool place, but for a five-year-old child this can be the scariest place: there is a gaping blackness behind the door, it seems that there is a hole in some other world where something terrible might come from. On their own initiative, the child will not come to such a door and will never open it.
One of the biggest problems of children's daydreaming is associated with the lack of development of self-awareness in the child. Because of this, he often cannot discern what is reality and what is his own experiences and fantasies that envelop this object, sticking to it. In general, adults also have this problem. But in children, such a fusion of the real and the fantasy can be very strong and gives the child a lot of difficulties.
At home, a child can simultaneously coexist in two different realities - in the familiar world of surrounding objects, where adults control and protect the child, and in an imaginary world of his own, superimposed on top of everyday life. He, too, is real to the child, but invisible to other people. Accordingly, it is not available for adults. Although the same objects can be in both worlds at once, however, they have different essences there. Here it seems to be just a black coat hanging, but you look - as if someone is terrible.
V This the world of the child will be protected by adults, in Volume- they can’t help, because they don’t enter there. Therefore, if in Volume the world is getting scared, you need to run faster in This, and even shout loudly: "Mom!". Sometimes the child himself does not know at what moment the scenery will change and he will find himself in the imaginary space of another world - this happens unexpectedly and instantly. Of course, this happens more often when adults are not nearby, when they do not keep the child in everyday reality with their presence, conversation.
For most children, the absence of their parents at home is a difficult moment. They feel abandoned, defenseless, and the usual rooms and things without adults, as it were, begin to live their own special life, become different. This happens at night, in the dark, when the dark, hidden sides of the life of curtains and wardrobes, clothes on a hanger and strange, unrecognizable objects that the child did not notice before are revealed.
If mom has gone to the store, then some children are afraid even during the day to move in a chair until she comes. Other children are especially afraid of portraits and posters of people. One eleven-year-old girl told her friends how afraid she was of a poster with Michael Jackson hanging on the inside of her room door. If the mother left the house, and the girl did not have time to leave this room, then she could only sit, huddled, on the sofa until her mother arrived. It seemed to the girl that Michael Jackson was about to step off the poster and strangle her. The friends nodded sympathetically - her anxiety was understandable and close. The girl did not dare to take off the poster or reveal her fears to her parents - they hung it up. They liked Michael Jackson very much, and the girl was "big and should not be afraid."
A child feels defenseless if, as it seems to him, he is not loved enough, is often blamed and rejected, left alone for a long time, with random or unpleasant people, left alone in an apartment where there are some dangerous neighbors.
Even an adult with unresolved childhood fears of this kind is sometimes more afraid of being alone at home than walking alone along a dark street.
Any weakening of the parental protective field, which should reliably envelop the child, causes in him anxiety and the feeling that the impending danger will easily break through the thin shell of the physical house and reach it. It turns out that for a child, the presence of loving parents seems to be a more durable shelter than all doors with locks.
Since the topic of home security and scary fantasies are relevant for almost all children of a certain age, they are reflected in children's folklore, in traditional scary stories, orally passed down from generation to generation of children.
One of the most widespread stories throughout Russia tells about how a certain family with children lives in a room where there is a suspicious stain on the ceiling, wall or floor - red, black or yellow. Sometimes it is found when moving to a new apartment, sometimes one of the family members will accidentally put it on - for example, a mother-teacher dropped red ink on the floor. Usually the heroes of a horror story try to scrub or wash this stain, but they fail. At night, when all family members fall asleep, the stain reveals its sinister nature. At midnight, it begins to grow slowly, becoming large, like a trapdoor. Then the spot opens, a huge red, black or yellow (in accordance with the color of the spot) hand protrudes from there ...
True, these horrors occur in horror stories only if the parents have gone - to the movies, to visit, to work the night shift, or fall asleep, which equally deprives their children of protection and opens access to evil.
… For the child's consciousness, there are other places of potential breakthroughs of a rather thin protective shell of the house into the space of another world. Our surveys have shown that most often children are afraid of closets at home, closets, fireplaces, mezzanines, various doors in the walls, unusual small windows, paintings, stains and cracks. Children are also intimidated by the holes in the toilet bowl, and even more - by the wooden "glasses" of the village latrines.
So, individual children's scary fantasies are characterized by the motive of the child being carried away or dropped out of the world of the House into Another Space through a certain magical opening. This motive is variously reflected in the products of collective creativity of children - the texts of children's folklore. But it is also widely found in children's literature. For example, as a plot about a child leaving inside a picture hanging on the wall of his room (analogue - inside a mirror; remember Alice through the Looking Glass). As you know, who has what hurts, he talks about that. Add to this - and listens to it with interest.
The fear of failure into another world, which is metaphorically presented in these fictional texts, has a real basis in the psychology of children. We remember that this is an early childhood problem of the fusion of two worlds in the child's perception: the world of the visible and the world of mental events projected onto him as a screen. The age-related cause of this problem (we do not consider pathology) is a lack of mental self-regulation, the lack of formation of the mechanisms of self-awareness, defamiliarisation, in the old way - sobriety, which makes it possible to distinguish one from the other and cope with the situation. Therefore, an adult is usually a sane and somewhat down-to-earth creature that brings a child back to reality.
In this sense, as a literary example, we will be interested in the chapter "Hard Day" from the famous book by the Englishwoman P. L. Travers "Mary Poppins".
On that bad day, Jane, the little heroine of the book, did not go well at all. She spat so much with all the household that her brother, who also became her victim, advised Jane to leave home so that someone would adopt her. For her sins, Jane was left home alone. And since she burned with indignation against her household, she was easily tempted to join their company by three boys painted on an old dish hanging on the wall of the room. Note that two important factors contributed to Jane's departure to the green lawn for the boys: Jane's unwillingness to be in the home world and the crack in the middle of the dish, formed from an accidental blow inflicted by the girl. That is, her home world cracked and the food world cracked, as a result of which a gap was formed through which Jane entered another space. The boys invited Jane to leave the lawn through the forest to the ancient castle where their great-grandfather lived. And the further, the more terrible it became. Finally it dawned on her that they had lured her, they would not let her go back, and besides, there was nowhere to return, since there was a different, ancient time. In relation to him in the real world, her parents had not yet been born, and her House Number Seventeen in Vishnevy Lane had not yet been built.
Jane screamed as best she could: “Mary Poppins! Help! Mary Poppins!" And, despite the resistance of the inhabitants of the dish, strong hands, fortunately, turned out to be the hands of Mary Poppins, pulled her out of there.
- Oh, it's you! Jane stammered. - I thought you didn't hear me! I thought I would have to stay there forever! I thought…
“Some people,” Mary Poppins said, gently lowering her to the floor, “think too much. Undoubtedly. Wipe your face, please.
She handed Jane her handkerchief and began to set for dinner. "
So, Mary Poppins fulfilled her adult function, brought the girl back to reality. And now Jane is already enjoying the comfort, warmth and peace that she exudes from familiar household things. The horror experienced goes far, far away.
But Travers's book would never have become the favorite of many generations of children around the world if it had ended so prosaically. Telling her brother in the evening the story of her adventure, Jane looked again at the dish and found there visible traces of the fact that both she and Mary Poppins had really been in that world. On the green lawn of the dish was left a scarf dropped by Mary with her initials, and the knee of one of the painted boys remained tied with Jane's handkerchief. That is, it is still true that two worlds coexist - That and This... You just need to be able to go back from there. While the children - the heroes of the book - help in this Mary Poppins. Moreover, together with her, they often find themselves in very strange situations, from which it is rather difficult to come to their senses. But Mary Poppins is strict and disciplined. She knows how to show a child in an instant where he is in.
Since the reader is repeatedly told in the book by P. L. Travers that Mary Poppins was the best educator in England, we can also use her teaching experience.
Under stay in Volume world in the context of Travers's book is understood not only the fantasy world, but also the child's excessive immersion in his own mental states, from which he cannot get out on his own - in emotions, memories, etc. What needs to be done to return the child from Togo peace into a peace situation This?
Mary Poppins' favorite technique was to sharply switch the child's attention and fix it on some specific object of the surrounding reality, forcing something to be done quickly and responsibly. Most often, Mary draws the child's attention to his own bodily self. So she tries to return to the body the soul of the pupil soaring in an unknown place: “Brush your hair, please!”; “Your laces are untied again!”; “Go wash yourself!”; "Look how your collar lies!"
This rude technique is reminiscent of a sharp slap from a massage therapist, with which at the end of the massage he returns to reality the client who has fallen into a trance, softened.
It would be nice if everything was that simple! If only it was possible to make the child's enchanted soul not “fly away” to no one knows where, with one slap or a clever trick of switching attention, to teach him to live in reality, to look decent and to do a job. Even Mary Poppins did it for a short time. And she herself was distinguished by the ability to involve children in unexpected and fantastic adventures, which she knew how to create in everyday life. Therefore, it was always so interesting to children with her.
The more complex the child's inner life, the higher his intellect, the more numerous and wider the worlds that he discovers both in the environment and in his soul.
Constant, favorite childhood fantasies, especially those associated with objects of the home world that are significant for a child, can then determine his whole life. Having matured, such a person believes that they were sent to him in childhood by fate itself.
One of the most subtle psychological descriptions of this theme, given in the experience of a Russian boy, we will find in the novel by V. V. Nabokov "Feat".
“Above a small narrow bed ... a watercolor painting hung on a light wall: a dense forest and a twisted path going deeper. Meanwhile, in one of the English books that his mother read with him ... there was a story about just such a picture with a path in the forest right above the boy's bed Forest. Martyn was worried about the idea that his mother might notice the similarity between the watercolors on the wall and the picture in the book: according to his calculations, she, frightened, would prevent the night journey by removing the picture, and therefore whenever he prayed in bed before going to bed ... Martyn prayed that she would not notice the seductive path just above him. Recalling that time in his youth, he wondered if it really happened that he once jumped into the picture from the head of the bed, and if this was the beginning of that happy and painful journey that turned out to be his whole life. He seemed to remember the chill of the earth, the green twilight of the forest, the bends of the path crossed here and there by a humped root, the flickering of the trunks, past which he ran barefoot, and the strange dark air full of fabulous possibilities. "
There is no doubt that much of what has been said here is familiar to almost everyone. But I would like to draw your attention to some of the accents put down by M. Osorina. The value of her descriptions lies in the fact that they emphasize a special, unique function of the child's fantasies, which adults do not notice, or, at best, are simply called "play." In fact, the child's imagination does a huge and difficult job of mastering the world, realizing oneself, mastering one's own emotions, and understanding others. This is real mental labor , which children inevitably do when entering a normal life, is also real spiritual creativity, which children are especially endowed with. In fact, the inner work of the imagination takes place throughout a person's life, but in adults it is "clogged" with real events and concerns. In children, it has a large "specific weight" and manifests itself in peculiar forms that are not always clear to us. These are “animated” favorite toys, and imaginary events, where the child himself is a hero, and the double life of things - real and mysterious, and scary characters. The originality of these images is determined by many features of the child's psyche - a lack of experience, the immaturity of formal intelligence, and increased emotionality. Through fantasy, the child develops mentally, emotionally, socially. He, according to M. Osorina, discovers new worlds "both in the environment and in his soul," and also receives impressions that sometimes determine the direction of his entire future life. We will see all this in the texts of this and other chapters cited below.
Pavel Florensky
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) - Russian religious philosopher, scientist, priest. Graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University (1904) and the Moscow Theological Academy (1908), was an associate professor and professor at the Academy in the Department of History of Philosophy. Pavel Florensky understood his life task as paving the way to a future integral worldview, synthesizing faith and reason, intuition and discussion, theology and philosophy, art and science.
Excerpts are taken from the book of memoirs by P. Florensky, which he dedicated to his children. They are about his early childhood years. You can see what a subtle and impressionable nature the boy possessed and how this was expressed in his perception of the world, images and fantasies.
... It is clear that I did not open up to adults. And not only because children never reveal their deepest perceptions to adults, but even more because my perceptions seemed so natural to me, common everyone, ordinary, that was not worth talking about; and how to find, not to mention how it was to find words to express feelings and thoughts that covered the entire field of inner life, and therefore, with all its acute specificity in strength, vague, elusive, inexpressible? In childhood, the feeling mystery it was dominant with me, it was the background of my inner life, on which tenderness and affection for my parents were outlined. Everything around, that which usually does not seem and is not recognized as mysterious, very many familiar and everyday objects and phenomena had some depth of shadows, as if in the fourth dimension, and appeared in Rembrandt's prophetic shadows.
"Monster"
We lived in two apartments. One housed a dining room, a living room and some other bedrooms. In another I lived with my aunt Yulia - in another, that is, in the outbuilding. The communication between the two rooms was through a courtyard paved with stones through which grass grew. Usually I walked accompanied by one of the elders, and maybe sometimes I dared to run alone. But one day, sitting in the dining room - it was during the day, I missed my aunt Yulia or my mother, perhaps for some reason, did not come from the outhouse to everyone - and ran to her or after her. I still remember everything that happened. I opened the door and immediately, going down 2-3 steps, I found myself under a slightly dark canopy formed near the house. I remember that this canopy was held on unpainted wooden poles with peeled bark, gray from the rain ... Probably, it was in the evening, or the weather was sunless, but I had the impression of twilight. And on the stone pavement of the courtyard, overgrown with grass, perhaps already in autumn - I see this pavement, as now - I saw something. Rather, at first I heard - some kind of original sound unheard of by me. I was already scared of him. But curiosity and courage won out. I decided to sneak past and get to my goal. But ... running further with almost closed eyes, I was suddenly dumbfounded. An unprecedented shell stood before me. Something in it swirled quickly, squealed, creaked, and bright sparks fell from the wheel. And, worst of all, some person, he seemed to me like a dark silhouette in the sky, probably evening, - some person stood at this shell calmly, dispassionately and fearlessly and was holding something in his hands ...
Julia Gippenreiter
Parents: how to be a child
To all children living with us and within us
Foreword
This book is composed of living stories - memories of various people about their childhood, in which the authors managed to mentally return to that time, again deeply experience it and tell about it heartfeltly. Children, as a rule, cannot reveal to us all the complexity of their inner world. They lack words, and sometimes they lack faith in our understanding. And this most difficult task of an excitedly open message about oneself for all children and on behalf of all children is talentedly solved by the authors of the memoirs!
Reading these memories, you will be surprised to learn how sometimes our ideas about what it means to be a child are far from the truth. They provide an opportunity to visit the "skin" of a child, hear his inner voice, see the world through his eyes, learn about his problems and joys.
The purpose of this anthology is to help us adults understand children deeper, better, and more compassionately.
I hope that such an understanding will enable readers to look completely differently at communicating with their own child, to see their mistakes and, conversely, good luck in raising him. Moreover, in the texts of memoirs, we also get acquainted with the patterns of behavior of some parents and teachers and have the opportunity to borrow the brilliant experience of these adults.
This reader forms a single row with my first two books for parents: “Communicate with a child. How?" and “We continue to communicate with the child. So?". She continues the themes of these books and the general humanistic approach to child rearing.
In the books mentioned, I already had to use examples and life stories, including those taken from memoir literature. But the genre of those books did not allow me to quote large excerpts from the works of other authors, no matter how much I wanted. Then the idea of a reader arose. In it, the reader will meet with the names and stories already familiar from my books, set out, however, in a broader context, and with many new well-known and less well-known authors.
In addition to memoirs, the book contains several texts by talented scientists and educators, in which they share their thoughts and practical experience on the same topic: how to understand a child and how to make his life happier.
All texts are abbreviated. They are accompanied by my comments. The comments were written with the aim of helping the reader to understand the psychological meaning of many facts, details and conditions of children's life.
The structure of the anthology posed a particular problem. It seemed necessary to highlight a few general chapters that would highlight significant moments in a child's life. The authors of the memoirs themselves helped to solve this problem. In their stories, most often topics such as children's special perception of the world, dreams and hobbies, parents and family, study and school are heard. As a result, four chapters of the book were defined, the titles of which reflect these themes: “Through the Eyes of a Child” (Chapter 1); “From passion to calling” (chapter 2); The Meaningful Close Adult (Chapter 3); "Classes, study, school" (Chapter 4).
For some authors, in their memoirs, one of the above topics sounds more, others - two or more. As a result, the name of the same author is repeated in different chapters, but it happens that several topics are revealed in the same story, making it impossible to break it down into different chapters.
I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who warmly responded to the very idea of the reader and to my requests to recommend interesting memories of childhood known to them. Sincere gratitude to Maria Petrova for the illustrations, in which she managed to successfully solve the difficult task of skillfully conveying the meaning of the author's texts and taking into account the wishes of the compiler.
Special thanks to my husband, Alexei Nikolaevich Rudakov, a constant sympathetic interlocutor and the first strict editor of my texts.
...Professor Yu.B. Gippenreiter
Chapter 1 The World Through the Eyes of a Child
..."The eyes of a child" is a special vision of the world. Children are surprised at things and events that we pass by without noticing; are mesmerized by colors, sounds and words in which we find nothing special. They have different scales, different values, a different understanding of what is important and unimportant.
Many childhood memories reveal the amazing originality and richness of the child's inner world. At the same time, they show how delicately adults should deal with this world. After all, the child lives in him for real, seriously. Through his prism, he perceives the outside world, other people and himself. And if we do not always understand the hidden life of a child, then, in any case, we can respect and protect it along with its cherished "secrets", fantasies and dreams.
To all children living with us and within us
Foreword
This book is composed of living stories - memories of various people about their childhood, in which the authors managed to mentally return to that time, again deeply experience it and tell about it heartfeltly. Children, as a rule, cannot reveal to us all the complexity of their inner world. They lack words, and sometimes they lack faith in our understanding. And this most difficult task of an excitedly open message about oneself for all children and on behalf of all children is talentedly solved by the authors of the memoirs!
Reading these memories, you will be surprised to learn how sometimes our ideas about what it means to be a child are far from the truth. They provide an opportunity to visit the "skin" of a child, hear his inner voice, see the world through his eyes, learn about his problems and joys.
The purpose of this anthology is to help us adults understand children deeper, better, and more compassionately.
I hope that such an understanding will enable readers to look completely differently at communicating with their own child, to see their mistakes and, conversely, good luck in raising him. Moreover, in the texts of memoirs, we also get acquainted with the patterns of behavior of some parents and teachers and have the opportunity to borrow the brilliant experience of these adults.
This reader forms a single row with my first two books for parents: “Communicate with a child. How?" and “We continue to communicate with the child. So?". She continues the themes of these books and the general humanistic approach to child rearing.
In the books mentioned, I already had to use examples and life stories, including those taken from memoir literature. But the genre of those books did not allow me to quote large excerpts from the works of other authors, no matter how much I wanted. Then the idea of a reader arose. In it, the reader will meet with the names and stories already familiar from my books, set out, however, in a broader context, and with many new well-known and less well-known authors.
In addition to memoirs, the book contains several texts by talented scientists and educators, in which they share their thoughts and practical experience on the same topic: how to understand a child and how to make his life happier.
All texts are abbreviated. They are accompanied by my comments. 1
highlighted with quotes
The comments were written with the aim of helping the reader to understand the psychological meaning of many facts, details and conditions of children's life.
The structure of the anthology posed a particular problem. It seemed necessary to highlight a few general chapters that would highlight significant moments in a child's life.
The authors of the memoirs themselves helped to solve this problem. In their stories, most often topics such as children's special perception of the world, dreams and hobbies, parents and family, study and school are heard. As a result, four chapters of the book were defined, the titles of which reflect these themes: “Through the Eyes of a Child” (Chapter 1); “From passion to calling” (chapter 2); The Meaningful Close Adult (Chapter 3); "Classes, study, school" (Chapter 4).
For some authors, in their memoirs, one of the above topics sounds more, others - two or more. As a result, the name of the same author is repeated in different chapters, but it happens that several topics are revealed in the same story, making it impossible to break it down into different chapters.
I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who warmly responded to the very idea of the reader and to my requests to recommend interesting memories of childhood known to them. Sincere gratitude to Maria Petrova for the illustrations, in which she managed to successfully solve the difficult task of skillfully conveying the meaning of the author's texts and taking into account the wishes of the compiler.
Special thanks to my husband, Alexei Nikolaevich Rudakov, a constant sympathetic interlocutor and the first strict editor of my texts.
Professor Yu.B. Gippenreiter
Chapter 1
The world through the eyes of a child
"The eyes of a child" is a special vision of the world. Children are surprised at things and events that we pass by without noticing; are mesmerized by colors, sounds and words in which we find nothing special. They have different scales, different values, a different understanding of what is important and unimportant.
Many childhood memories reveal the amazing originality and richness of the child's inner world. At the same time, they show how delicately adults should deal with this world. After all, the child lives in him for real, seriously. Through his prism, he perceives the outside world, other people and himself. And if we do not always understand the hidden life of a child, then, in any case, we can respect and protect it along with its cherished "secrets", fantasies and dreams.
This chapter opens with excerpts from the book M. Osorina - a talented researcher of childhood. They are followed by texts from memories P. Florensky, A. Christie, M. Tsvetaeva and L. Chukovskaya. Although the title "The World through the Eyes of a Child" can be attributed to the entire book, here are selected those episodes that reveal the originality and "dissimilarity" of a child's attitude to our, adult's, perception. Hopefully, these talented descriptions will help us remember our childhood and understand our children more deeply.
M.V. Osorina
Two worlds: this and that 2
Osorina M.V. The secret world of children in the space of the world of adults. SPb: "Peter", 1999, 2004. "Speech" (with abbreviations).
Maria Vladimirovna Osorina (born December 6, 1950) is a Russian psychologist, associate professor at the Faculty of Psychology at St. Petersburg State University, vice president of the St. Petersburg Psychological Society, author of numerous original studies in the field of children's subculture, children's drawing and creativity.
With excerpts from her book "The Secret World of Children ..." we open this section. The materials of the book are the result of the author's extensive experience - a master of careful observation of children and compassionate communication with them. You can see how much an "understanding" adult learns by entering into confidential contact with a child.
For a one-year-old, it is important to crawl, climb, reach the intended goal. A two-three-year-old discovers a lot of things, their names, the possibility of using them, their accessibility and forbiddenness. Between two and five years of age, the child's ability to visualize and fantasize develops progressively.
This is a qualitatively new event in the intellectual life of a child, which will revolutionize many aspects of his life.
Previously, the child was a prisoner of the particular situation where he was. He was influenced only by what he directly saw, heard, felt.
Now he discovers that he has received a new ability double the world presenting imaginary images on the inner psychic screen. This gives him the opportunity to be in the world at the same time. externally visible (here and now) and in imaginary the world of your fantasies (there and then) arising from real events and things. An amazing property of the child's perception of the world during this period (as well as several years later) is that most of the significant objects surrounding the child in everyday life are represented in his fantasies as heroes of many events. Dramatic situations are played out around them, they become participants in strange serials created by the child from day to day.
Mom does not even suspect that, looking at the soup in a plate, the child sees the underwater world with algae and sunken ships, and making grooves in the porridge with a spoon, imagines that these are gorges among the mountains along which the heroes of his plot make their way.
Sometimes in the morning, parents do not know who is sitting in front of them in the form of their own child: whether it is their daughter Nastya, or Chanterelle, who neatly spreads her fluffy tail and requires only what foxes eat for breakfast. To avoid getting screwed up, it can be helpful for poor adults to ask a child in advance who they are dealing with today.
This new capacity for imagination gives the child completely new degrees of freedom. It allows him to be extremely active and autocratic in the amazing inner world of the psyche, which begins to form in the child. The inner psychic screen on which imaginary events unfold is somewhat similar to a computer screen. In principle, you can easily call any image on it (it would be a skill!), Change it as you want, present events that are impossible in reality, make the action unfold as rapidly as it does not happen in the real world with the usual passage of time. The child learns all these skills gradually. But the appearance of such a psychic ability is of great importance for his personality. After all, all these amazing possibilities, which the child enthusiastically begins to use, give a feeling of their own strength, capacity, master's attitude to imaginary situations. This is in sharp contrast with the child's ability to cope with objects and events of the real physical world, which is not very well listened to, for the time being.
By the way, if you do not develop the child's contacts with real objects and people, do not encourage him to act "in the world", he can save himself in front of the difficulties of life. In this world of physical reality that resists us, does not always obey our desires, and requires skills, it is important for a person sometimes to suppress the temptation to dive and hide into an illusory fantasy world, where everything is easy. Toys are a psychologically special class of things for a child. By their very nature, they are designed to embody, "objectify" children's fantasies. In general, children's thinking is characterized by animism- the tendency to endow inanimate objects with a soul, inner strength and the ability to an independent secret life. It is this string of the child's psyche that self-propelled toys always touch: mechanical chickens that can peck, dolls that close their eyes and say "mother", walking cubs, etc. Such toys always find a response in an enchanted child (and sometimes an adult), because in his soul he knows internally that this is how it should be - they are alive, but they hide it. During the day, toys obediently fulfill the will of their owners, but at some special moments, in particular at night, the secret becomes apparent. Left to themselves, toys begin to live their own, full of passions and desires, an active life. This exciting topic, associated with the secrets of the existence of the objective world, is so significant that it has become one of the traditional motives of the works of children's literature. The toy nightlife is at the heart of the Nutcracker events by E.-T.-A. Hoffmann, "Black Hen" by A. Pogorelsky and many other books, and from the works of contemporary authors - the famous "Travels of the Blue Arrow" by G. Rodari. The Russian artist Alexander Benois in his famous "Alphabet" of 1904 chose this very theme to illustrate the letter "I", which depicts the intensely mysterious revival of the nocturnal community of Toys.
It turns out that almost all children tend to fantasize about their home and almost every child has favorite “objects of meditation”, concentrating on which he plunges into his dreams. Going to bed, someone looks at a spot on the ceiling, similar to the head of a bearded uncle, someone - a pattern on the wallpaper that resembles funny animals, and comes up with something about them. One girl said that a deer skin hung over her bed, and every evening, lying in bed, she stroked her deer and wrote another story about his adventures.
Inside a room, apartment or house, the child selects for himself favorite places where he plays, dreams, where he retires. If you are in a bad mood, you can hide under a hanger with a whole bunch of coats, hide there from the whole world and sit like in a house. Or crawl under a table with a long tablecloth and press your back against a warm radiator.
You can look for interest in a small window from the corridor of an old apartment, overlooking a back staircase - what can you see there? - and imagine, and what could be seen there, if suddenly ...
There are also frightening places in the apartment that the child tries to avoid. For example, here is a small brown door in a wall niche in the kitchen, adults put food there, in a cool place, but for a five-year-old child this can be the scariest place: there is a gaping blackness behind the door, it seems that there is a hole in some other world where something terrible might come from. On their own initiative, the child will not come to such a door and will never open it.
One of the biggest problems of children's daydreaming is associated with the lack of development of self-awareness in the child. Because of this, he often cannot discern what is reality and what is his own experiences and fantasies that envelop this object, sticking to it. In general, adults also have this problem. But in children, such a fusion of the real and the fantasy can be very strong and gives the child a lot of difficulties.
At home, a child can simultaneously coexist in two different realities - in the familiar world of surrounding objects, where adults control and protect the child, and in an imaginary world of his own, superimposed on top of everyday life. He, too, is real to the child, but invisible to other people. Accordingly, it is not available for adults. Although the same objects can be in both worlds at once, however, they have different essences there. Here it seems to be just a black coat hanging, but you look - as if someone is terrible.
V This the world of the child will be protected by adults, in Volume- they can’t help, because they don’t enter there. Therefore, if in Volume the world is getting scared, you need to run faster in This, and even shout loudly: "Mom!". Sometimes the child himself does not know at what moment the scenery will change and he will find himself in the imaginary space of another world - this happens unexpectedly and instantly. Of course, this happens more often when adults are not nearby, when they do not keep the child in everyday reality with their presence, conversation.
For most children, the absence of their parents at home is a difficult moment. They feel abandoned, defenseless, and the usual rooms and things without adults, as it were, begin to live their own special life, become different. This happens at night, in the dark, when the dark, hidden sides of the life of curtains and wardrobes, clothes on a hanger and strange, unrecognizable objects that the child did not notice before are revealed.
If mom has gone to the store, then some children are afraid even during the day to move in a chair until she comes. Other children are especially afraid of portraits and posters of people. One eleven-year-old girl told her friends how afraid she was of a poster with Michael Jackson hanging on the inside of her room door. If the mother left the house, and the girl did not have time to leave this room, then she could only sit, huddled, on the sofa until her mother arrived. It seemed to the girl that Michael Jackson was about to step off the poster and strangle her. The friends nodded sympathetically - her anxiety was understandable and close. The girl did not dare to take off the poster or reveal her fears to her parents - they hung it up. They liked Michael Jackson very much, and the girl was "big and should not be afraid."
A child feels defenseless if, as it seems to him, he is not loved enough, is often blamed and rejected, left alone for a long time, with random or unpleasant people, left alone in an apartment where there are some dangerous neighbors.
Even an adult with unresolved childhood fears of this kind is sometimes more afraid of being alone at home than walking alone along a dark street.
Any weakening of the parental protective field, which should reliably envelop the child, causes in him anxiety and the feeling that the impending danger will easily break through the thin shell of the physical house and reach it. It turns out that for a child, the presence of loving parents seems to be a more durable shelter than all doors with locks.
Since the topic of home security and scary fantasies are relevant for almost all children of a certain age, they are reflected in children's folklore, in traditional scary stories, orally passed down from generation to generation of children.
One of the most widespread stories throughout Russia tells about how a certain family with children lives in a room where there is a suspicious stain on the ceiling, wall or floor - red, black or yellow. Sometimes it is found when moving to a new apartment, sometimes one of the family members will accidentally put it on - for example, a mother-teacher dropped red ink on the floor. Usually the heroes of a horror story try to scrub or wash this stain, but they fail. At night, when all family members fall asleep, the stain reveals its sinister nature. At midnight, it begins to grow slowly, becoming large, like a trapdoor. Then the spot opens, a huge red, black or yellow (in accordance with the color of the spot) hand protrudes from there ...
True, these horrors occur in horror stories only if the parents have gone - to the movies, to visit, to work the night shift, or fall asleep, which equally deprives their children of protection and opens access to evil.
… For the child's consciousness, there are other places of potential breakthroughs of a rather thin protective shell of the house into the space of another world. Our surveys have shown that most often children are afraid of closets at home, closets, fireplaces, mezzanines, various doors in the walls, unusual small windows, paintings, stains and cracks. Children are also intimidated by the holes in the toilet bowl, and even more - by the wooden "glasses" of the village latrines.
So, individual children's scary fantasies are characterized by the motive of the child being carried away or dropped out of the world of the House into Another Space through a certain magical opening. This motive is variously reflected in the products of collective creativity of children - the texts of children's folklore. But it is also widely found in children's literature. For example, as a plot about a child leaving inside a picture hanging on the wall of his room (analogue - inside a mirror; remember Alice through the Looking Glass). As you know, who has what hurts, he talks about that. Add to this - and listens to it with interest.
The fear of failure into another world, which is metaphorically presented in these fictional texts, has a real basis in the psychology of children. We remember that this is an early childhood problem of the fusion of two worlds in the child's perception: the world of the visible and the world of mental events projected onto him as a screen. The age-related cause of this problem (we do not consider pathology) is a lack of mental self-regulation, the lack of formation of the mechanisms of self-awareness, defamiliarisation, in the old way - sobriety, which makes it possible to distinguish one from the other and cope with the situation. Therefore, an adult is usually a sane and somewhat down-to-earth creature that brings a child back to reality.
In this sense, as a literary example, we will be interested in the chapter "Hard Day" from the famous book by the Englishwoman P. L. Travers "Mary Poppins".
On that bad day, Jane, the little heroine of the book, did not go well at all. She spat so much with all the household that her brother, who also became her victim, advised Jane to leave home so that someone would adopt her. For her sins, Jane was left home alone. And since she burned with indignation against her household, she was easily tempted to join their company by three boys painted on an old dish hanging on the wall of the room. Note that two important factors contributed to Jane's departure to the green lawn for the boys: Jane's unwillingness to be in the home world and the crack in the middle of the dish, formed from an accidental blow inflicted by the girl. That is, her home world cracked and the food world cracked, as a result of which a gap was formed through which Jane entered another space. The boys invited Jane to leave the lawn through the forest to the ancient castle where their great-grandfather lived. And the further, the more terrible it became. Finally it dawned on her that they had lured her, they would not let her go back, and besides, there was nowhere to return, since there was a different, ancient time. In relation to him in the real world, her parents had not yet been born, and her House Number Seventeen in Vishnevy Lane had not yet been built.
Jane screamed as best she could: “Mary Poppins! Help! Mary Poppins!" And, despite the resistance of the inhabitants of the dish, strong hands, fortunately, turned out to be the hands of Mary Poppins, pulled her out of there.
- Oh, it's you! Jane stammered. - I thought you didn't hear me! I thought I would have to stay there forever! I thought…
“Some people,” Mary Poppins said, gently lowering her to the floor, “think too much. Undoubtedly. Wipe your face, please.
She handed Jane her handkerchief and began to set for dinner. "
So, Mary Poppins fulfilled her adult function, brought the girl back to reality. And now Jane is already enjoying the comfort, warmth and peace that she exudes from familiar household things. The horror experienced goes far, far away.
But Travers's book would never have become the favorite of many generations of children around the world if it had ended so prosaically. Telling her brother in the evening the story of her adventure, Jane looked again at the dish and found there visible traces of the fact that both she and Mary Poppins had really been in that world. On the green lawn of the dish was left a scarf dropped by Mary with her initials, and the knee of one of the painted boys remained tied with Jane's handkerchief. That is, it is still true that two worlds coexist - That and This... You just need to be able to go back from there. While the children - the heroes of the book - help in this Mary Poppins. Moreover, together with her, they often find themselves in very strange situations, from which it is rather difficult to come to their senses. But Mary Poppins is strict and disciplined. She knows how to show a child in an instant where he is in.
