Why Return Freedom To Children

There, in the luminous darkness of the inner world, where everything is pulsation, life breaks out. The new being is an explosion of vitality. The energy springs up inside him and struggles to expand, to go beyond unknown limits and connect with the world.

But the world is not prepared to receive this enormous living potential : the baby does not find an organized society to understand its needs and respect its development.

Starting with the protocols of pregnancy and childbirth, and continuing with school, our children grow rigid and submissive.

The key importance of birth and the first year of life

The first ecosystem of human cubs is the mother’s womb, which they leave when they are ready for it. The journey through the vagina is a massage that stimulates your nervous system and awakens the development of internal organs.

And , once outside, the mother’s body continues to be the baby’s vital ecosystem : skin-to-skin contact with the mother is essential for the full development of enzymatic functioning, brain metabolism, and pulsation regulation. of the heart, of the cellular unfolding of the recycling lymphocytes and of the nervous system and its connection with the emotional and the rational.

The conditions in which most hospital deliveries occur disrupt or block these crucial processes. They establish a rigid calendar for the time of delivery and overwhelm the woman in labor and the baby with aggressive protocols that excessively medicalize what should be a spontaneous and joyous life process.

To promote this healthy and harmonious development of life, one of the first changes to be addressed is to restore control of pregnancy and childbirth to women.

It is also necessary to give future mothers and health and education professionals accurate information on the fundamentals of life and, especially, on the importance of self-regulation in the human animal and its original need for contact with the mother.

With her he maintains –at least during the first year– a biological symbiosis that requires permanent emotional, epidermal, and energetic contact. Hence the importance of breastfeeding the baby from the first moment of life and until it is able to separate in a natural and healthy way.

An important part of that information will have to be directed to end with the antivital clichés deeply ingrained in a society that does not understand the living.

“It is normal for him to cry”, “Do not let him get used to the arms”, “He does not want the breast”. .. are topics aimed at supposedly facilitating the separation of the mother to leave the child in the hands of relatives, caregivers or in daycare centers that accept babies long before they are biologically ready.

We are not referring to mere individual behavior changes but to a transformation of society intimately linked to a vital functional development of the human being.

This means reforming health and educational institutions, starting with those that affect the conception-pregnancy-childbirth-parenting cycle. It is about humanizing delivery rooms and consultations, and establishing maternal leave that allows babies to remain with their mothers from the moment of delivery and until their first year of life.

Promote the autonomy of the baby

Once the first year is over, if the biological relationship with the mother has been established in a healthy and self-regulated way, the baby will be in a position to begin to relate to the outside and to take charge of its autonomy in a natural and mature way.

But if this process of opening up to the world becomes difficult due to social or individual pressures, impositions, customs or beliefs, we will have a sick, manipulable human being, lacking autonomy, critical capacity, intellectual and emotional maturity : what the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich called a “little man” who will pass on his weaknesses to the next generation.

Reich wrote in 1952: “ The future destiny of the human race will be created by the character structure of the children of the future. This great decision will be in your hands and hearts. They will have to clean up the chaos of the 20th century. This concerns us who live in the midst of this chaos. We should not be the ones to build that future. We cannot tell our children what kind of world should be built, but we can equip them with the kind of character structure and biological vigor that will enable them to make their own decisions and find their own ways to rationally build their own future. and that of their children ”.

Adults have turned childhood into a state of siege in which they indiscriminately exercise power using specialized institutions to adapt, normalize, integrate and, ultimately, control childhood.

The current problem of schools: a debate that has not been resolved

Among these is the school, which fulfills this crucial function of confinement and normalization.

The school does the opposite of what it says it does, the opposite of what it should do in a free society : it turns children en masse, disciplines them, bores them ; it spreads ignorance, divides thought, represses sensitivity, promotes lack of solidarity and competitiveness, kills spontaneity, and fuels frustration and hatred.

So we can say that there are creative children who investigate and have fun learning, despite school.

The debate about its public or private nature hides the fundamental thing : the school that children suffer is, in essence, the same. It fulfills the same function: to manufacture obedient citizens, incapable of critical thinking and, therefore, easily manipulated by the established powers.

If we want to protect life and make a radical commitment to the “children of the future”, we must also tackle another profound change: that of the school institution.

Almost a hundred years ago, the pedagogue Alexander Neill, defender of education in freedom, and Wilhelm Reich laid the foundations for this transformation. Unfortunately, it has only materialized in specific places and times, although other authors have continued to make valuable contributions to this crucial task, such as obstetricians Michel Odent and Frédérick Leboyer, psychologists Henri Laborit and Alice Miller, or sociologists Ivan Illich and Carlos Lerena.

Meanwhile – with the very few exceptions of those children who live near a school that follows the path of the aforementioned authors – perhaps the only alternative is the individual, well-founded and conscious decision not to abandon our children in kindergartens or schools. .

Normal is not equal to health. Rather the opposite: at present, what is normal is precisely what is pathological. Health is based on self-regulation, which requires extraordinary qualities that we do not have. But we can learn them from children, allowing them to develop the enormous spontaneous vital force that they bring with them.