So what is human nature? What are the needs of any human child? It doesn’t matter what human child. Whether you are looking at human living close to the North Pole or the South Pole, in the East or the West, in Europe or in Africa or Asia or North America, wherever, what are the needs of the human child? The essential needs of the human child is for attachment. Attachment is a biological drive for connection with another human being. And it is an essential drive because without it we can’t survive. The human child is the most immature, most dependent and most vulnerable creature in the universe. So without somebody looking after her or him, they just don’t survive. So that attachment drive, you can say that is part of our human nature. In other words, we are born for love because another word for attachment is love.Not only the love of the child or the attachment of the child to the parent, but also the love and attachment of the parent to the child. So attachment is this drive that pulls two human beings together for the purpose of being taken care of or for the purpose of taking care of. And, of course, attachment also pulls human beings together for reasons throughout the lifespan. Human beings did not live the way we live through most of human existence. For most of our existence we live in small-band hunter-gatherer groupings, 60 to 80 to 100 human beings living together.And that meant that children were always around their parents, always. There was no separation. Not only around their parents, but around a whole group of adults, all of whom acted as parental figures in the child’s life. So a child grew up and ensconced in a network of very safe attachments. Safe in the sense that everybody cared for the child. Number two.. when you study hunter-gatherer groups, they always carried their kids everywhere. The North American natives had the papoose where they carried their children everywhere. It is not infrequent these days to see a parent pushing a buggy and playing with their cellphones at the same time. Do we think that the kid in the buggy whose parents are on their cellphone is getting the same kind of information about the world as the baby who is being carried on the parents’ chest, back or belly?Number three.. they didn’t let their kids cry. I don’t mean that they forbade crying.. you can’t forbid a 2-month-old from crying, but if they cried they were immediately cuddled. Here in North America we actually tell or teach parents not to pick up their kids when they are crying. That’s called “sleep training.” We are actually telling parents “don’t pick up your kids when they are crying because we want them to sleep through the night and if you pick them up, they will learn that they can just wake you up in the middle of night and then you can’t go to work in the morning.”And the fourth thing is, generally, hunter-gatherer groups don’t hit their kids. If they do, it is only in an acute situation when the kid is about to crawl into an anthill and pick them up and quickly slap them in the bottom, teach them not to do that. But it is not a question of spanking as punishment. ― Gabor Maté

So what is human nature? What are the needs of any human child? It doesn’t matter what human child. Whether you are looking at human living close to the North Pole or the South Pole, in the East or the West, in Europe or in Africa or Asia or North America, wherever, what are the needs of the human child? The essential needs of the human child is for attachment. Attachment is a biological drive for connection with another human being. And it is an essential drive because without it we can’t survive. The human child is the most immature, most dependent and most vulnerable creature in the universe. So without somebody looking after her or him, they just don’t survive. So that attachment drive, you can say that is part of our human nature. In other words, we are born for love because another word for attachment is love.Not only the love of the child or the attachment of the child to the parent, but also the love and attachment of the parent to the child. So attachment is this drive that pulls two human beings together for the purpose of being taken care of or for the purpose of taking care of. And, of course, attachment also pulls human beings together for reasons throughout the lifespan. Human beings did not live the way we live through most of human existence. For most of our existence we live in small-band hunter-gatherer groupings, 60 to 80 to 100 human beings living together.And that meant that children were always around their parents, always. There was no separation. Not only around their parents, but around a whole group of adults, all of whom acted as parental figures in the child’s life. So a child grew up and ensconced in a network of very safe attachments. Safe in the sense that everybody cared for the child. Number two.. when you study hunter-gatherer groups, they always carried their kids everywhere. The North American natives had the papoose where they carried their children everywhere. It is not infrequent these days to see a parent pushing a buggy and playing with their cellphones at the same time. Do we think that the kid in the buggy whose parents are on their cellphone is getting the same kind of information about the world as the baby who is being carried on the parents’ chest, back or belly?Number three.. they didn’t let their kids cry. I don’t mean that they forbade crying.. you can’t forbid a 2-month-old from crying, but if they cried they were immediately cuddled. Here in North America we actually tell or teach parents not to pick up their kids when they are crying. That’s called “sleep training.” We are actually telling parents “don’t pick up your kids when they are crying because we want them to sleep through the night and if you pick them up, they will learn that they can just wake you up in the middle of night and then you can’t go to work in the morning.”And the fourth thing is, generally, hunter-gatherer groups don’t hit their kids. If they do, it is only in an acute situation when the kid is about to crawl into an anthill and pick them up and quickly slap them in the bottom, teach them not to do that. But it is not a question of spanking as punishment.
― Gabor Maté

Like Gabor Maté?

Buy Gabor Maté products

[easyazon_link keywords=”Gabor Maté” locale=”US” tag=”bestsellerlisting-20″][/easyazon_link]

Do you Like Positive words, poetry and words to describe someone you love?

Check out