One Step Back From the Edge

8/14/2019 One Step Back From the Edge

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One Step Back from the Edge

A person should not have to learn the most important lessons about life fromexperience. Most of them can be taught, if we know enough to teach them

to our children.

Not knowing those lessons, not knowing how to cope with the adversities

that life throws at every one of us, means we must suffer pain. Not just thepain of each tragedy, but also the pain associated with the stress of having a

severe problem (or a bunch of them) and not knowing what to do about it.

My sister didn't know. She smoked herself to death from cancer at age 54,

never understanding why she had to live alone, on welfare, never havinganyone she could trust or depend on. Never having a friend in her life. Never

having any happiness in her marriage because she didn't know how. Never

being able to hold a job because she didn't realize employers need skills andemployees who can get along with each other.

Her children don't know. Her daughter, my niece, at one time displeased

with me because I told her about lies her mother had told about her andabout me, suggested that I should kill myself. Her son, my nephew, joined

an extreme religious cult where he feels loved and respected.

No doubt my father chose a remote rural area to rent the apartment above a

general store when I was a baby because he didn't want his family to sufferthe indignities he had suffered as a child. He and my mother didn't know

that children learn from each other by playing together. I rarely saw anyother children and never played with one until I was nearly six years old.

My parents understood that parenting consisted of providing food, shelterand clothing to their children. And punishing them when they did something

wrong. It never occurred to them to teach a child what the child needs to

know to avoid getting into trouble. My parents didn't teach their childrenanything. Except how to eat with a knife and fork and how to use toilet

paper.

My mother, who never worked a day after she got pregnant with me,eventually needed to hire a cleaning lady once a week because she couldn'tkeep up with dusting, cleaning and laundry. No one knew why. Chronic

fatigue syndrome, now recognized as a widespread problem, was just calledlaziness in those days. My mother never talked about it.

The same way she never talked about why she chased me around our house

at couple of times when I was 10, brandishing a broom and threatening to



kill me if she caught me. I hadn't a clue about why she was angry. But Ididn't let her catch me either. I couldn't spell "menopause" let alone

understand what it meant. All I knew was her words.

My father, a naturally clever man who never managed to pass grade nine,

found considerable success in business. He became an alcoholic because hehad no idea how to cope with the stresses associated with his business

success.

He adopted the advice of someone he worked with as a young man. It was:

Never learn how to do something if you don't want to do that thing. Myfather disliked working with his hands. One of his employees, a mechanic,

bought him a simple screwdriver one day because he thought my fathershould be able to tighten a screw himself. My father never taught me any

skills. He didn't have any mechanical skills or interest in learning to do

things with his hands. He never used the screwdriver either.

My father's father had a thriving florist business until the First World Wardestroyed it. My father was five years old when his father committed suicide.

Suicide is not genetic, but it tends to run in families. I didn't want to become

an alcoholic or to kill myself, though I knew no coping skills because I had

never been taught any. By anyone. Lacking coping skills, I now know, is theleading cause of alcoholism, suicide and many other severe problems.

As I knew nothing about being a father, in fact I was afraid of little children,

I avoided having much to do with my own children when they were young.Their mother raised them through those first few critically important years of their lives. She taught them everything they knew. They became everything

she was.

She believed that success at work was more important that success as a

parent. She believed that money was the sign of success. That's what thesociety we lived in taught. She left our kids with me when they were about

ten years old and went out to be successful as a school principal and a savvyinvestor. She had money, a great car and an impressive house. She had

taught those values to our children.

She died of cancer at age 44, having spent her last year alone, at home,

rarely receiving a visitor. Neither her children nor her business friends hadanything more to gain from her, so they abandoned her. When she died, our

daughter didn't even hold a funeral because she thought no one wouldcome.



After their mother died, our children decided they wanted nothing more todo with me. They wanted money and I didn't have much. I didn't believe

that money was the most important thing in life. They thought I was stupid.My daughter told her children--whom I was never allowed to see--that all

their grandparents were dead. Only one was.

Sitting on a loading dock on a break from my first summer job at age 15, I

overheard two men talking. One said to the other, "I never haveconversations with young people under age 25. They never know enough to

talk about." As I thought about that, I realized that he was right.

I had no skills or hobbies. I had learned nothing from books or newspapers.

In fact, I could barely read. I didn't have friends I could learn from. Myteachers repeatedly told my parents I was lazy. It never occurred to them

that I couldn't read. It never occurred to them that I had a learning problem

caused by restriction of blood flow to my brain at birth--I was born breech. Ican think as well as anyone, but I do it slower and my capacity to learn at

any one time is more limited than most.

I have a very mild form of cerebral palsy, undiagnosed until recently, as aresult of that birth problem. When I went to school, every kid was either

good, a trouble maker or lazy. My teachers had little trouble placing me in

that third category. In reality, life in schools is little better for kids withproblems today. "Special needs" is a category for kids with severe and fairly

easily recognized problems.

I passed through high school without ever reading a book all the waythrough. I received a certificate after a three year course at college withoutever having read a book all the way through. I passed through teachers

college without having read a book all the way through.

I went to York University, in Toronto, and received my B.A. without ever

reading a book all the way through. I received a Master of Education degreefrom the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of

Toronto, without ever having read a book all the way through.

That's survival. That shows how a person can learn to cope with challengesand problems if they learn how in time.

I also taught elementary school for 17 years, around the same period I wastaking university courses. A few times the children I taught were reading

books for reading assignments that I had not read myself. I was functionallyilliterate. I didn't know that because no one had told me.



In fact, I was functionally illiterate until after I left teaching and had startedmy own business with my wife.

Although I had written long papers in my university and post graduate

courses, most of what I wrote had come straight out of my head, not from

books. I discovered how to snatch quotes from relevant texts withoutactually reading those books. I only started to learn how to write something

that people other than professors would find interesting in the late 1990s.

In 2005, my book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's

Epidemic Social Problems was published. A social problem is any problemthat is experienced by enough people in a community that it becomes a

community problem. Like drugs, violence, addictions and so on.

I found solutions to problems most people believe are unsolvable,

consequences of the way life is in the 21st Century. How? Because I wasn'ttied to what others had written in books. Books by so-called experts who

told how tragic social problems are but offered nothing in the way of solutions.

The solutions begin at home. They begin when each child is born. They begin

when a child is taught what he or she needs to know, when they need to

know it.

That begins when young adults know about children and how they develop.It begins when adolescents and young adults learn the skills of parenting.

That's the message I want to take to the world.

Here's one comment written a few days ago by a member of one of myinternet groups, directed to me:

"During all these years as, member of the group had the I privilege evidence

that you are extremely cultured and have an excellent text.With you I learned an enormity of things. And reading your mensages I

know sail that for all the areas of the knowledge."

That was written by a friend in Brazil, one I know as Maita. "Maita" inPortuguese, means "little mother."

Maita's real name is Maria Alice Baptista de Oliveira. That's Dr. Oliveira, apediatrician with decades of experience at bringing babies into the world and

teaching mothers how to look after them.

Maita is one of many people, some of whom are medical doctors, some



professors, people in every field of life including factory workers, who live onsix continents, who believe that there is a better way to raise children than

most of us have been using over the past few thousands of generations.

It's a complex world we live in. A complex world creates complex problems.

Those complex problems require solutions so complex they areunmanageable.

The only way to change anything is to prevent the problems from arising in

the first place.

That's what Turning It Around is all about.

Until recently I have been experiencing stress--not at a controllable level but

at a primal level beyond the control of my conscious brain--stress that has

taken me to the edge of sanity and suicide. I have stepped back from thatedge. I survived. Again.

Stress can be the cause of many physical diseases and organ failures. But

it's also an effect. Stress results when a person lacks the emotionalresources to cope with problems in their life. Knowledge about stress and

the coping skills needed to avoid it are teachable. Teaching them is easy,

cheap and would not meet any resistance because it helps wholecommunities.

I want to teach people the skills they need to cope with problems that seem

insurmountable, that seem beyond their control. That begins with teachingchildren, right after they are born.

That's who I am. That's what I do. If you want to help spread the word, youare welcome to join us. It doesn't cost anything. All you have to do is talk to

people. It's that easy. But nothing will change until we get enough people

talking to each other about this.

Lots of people are talking about this, but it's a big world with lots of problems.

As adults we don't necessarily always learn from our experience. Some of usmake the same mistakes over and over, causing ourselves and others

around us a great deal of grief. However, life lessons we learned as childrenusually stay with us and shape our lives.

Teaching children what they need to know about life and coping with it are

as important as learning to read and do arithmetic. We need to teach the



children. They want to learn. They want to know about life.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents

who want to know what children need and when they need it, rather than

what adults believe children should be forced to learn.Learn more at http://billallin.com

http://billallin.com/

http://billallin.com/

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One Step Back From the Edge