Children and Power

Anyone who has ever witnessed a two year old's tantrum knows that children inherently acknowledge the power that is in them. Talk to them and you see how easily they are enchanted with magic swords and carpet and the ability to fly and shape shift. After two weeks with my grandchildren,my head is spinning with extraordinary stories and visions.

However, there is a catch. Often this sense of power is so intense in children they cannot see beyond the self. Power becomes the self-serving tantrum, the scuffle in the school yard. And it is here that stories and peer interaction become important as tools not to diminish power but to re-direct it in the service of creative good.

In a culture that worships physical strength, there is little opportunity to understand the power of love, compassion, the power of the yielding bamboo as opposed to the power of the mighty oak. Yet, this power of compassion is ,more often than not, cultivated through personal suffering and conflict. St. Paul before his revelation on the Road to Damascus was a very different man ! It was his lack of compassion( on his way to slaughter the Christians) that led to the dramatic change in his life.

Fairy Tales pit Good against Evil ; unfortunately, not much is delineated in the profile of the villain ; he is often just killed off, eliminated so that Good can triumph. But such fairy tale endings can be problematic, especially in the way they cut off all sources of villainy, which in essence is the destruction of the source of power as well.

Such an uncompromising elimination of the villain destroys all possible dialogue with the "other." Children are closer to the field--the Akashic Field, which remembers All events--both "good" and "bad." That's why it is in the nature of children to be perfect angels in one instant and demons the next-- something we adults have difficulty understanding because we are so distant from the Field.

The Field works as a whole and change is its process. In effect, power is a process that encompasses both "good" and "bad," a conversation between unlike tendencies because it is through tension that power is conceived.

Perhaps something can be done with this raw energy( even villainy is energy and power). Native Indian tales have incorporated the figure of the trickster, the archetypal shapeshifter that is both good and bad, creator and destroyer.

According to Paul Radin, "Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being ."

Sounds like the typical five year old ? Precisely.

And what are we as parents and grandparents to do? Recognize the power that is inherent in all of us and do what we can to channel it into a creative source-- without killing off the power.

Perhaps the most significant task for us is to allow our children to understand that everything ( even the villain) can become a source of creative good through dialogue, through the power of intent and transformation.




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Mary Desaulniers is a freelance writer at Suite101