Another day and another walk at the beach. As soon as I arrived this morning I heard a mother saying to her little boy who was about four years of age, “but you shouldn’t BLAME your brother, he didn’t mean it”.
At that point, Dad spoke up and said, “he’s not BLAMING him, he was trying to help him”. I walked on by struck by how we perceive everything in our lives through our own filters that relate back to our own experiences. I thought that little boy will be creating his beliefs about the world just as his parent have, based on the interactions he has and continues to have directly with his brother and indirectly through the feedback he gets, both positive and negative from his parents. With his relatively limited set of resources it is likely that the little boy will experience some confusion from the conflicting feedback he just received and depending on how the messages continue to be delivered will determine whether he sits with a sense of comfort or guilt about his behaviour and in turn this begins to form, shape and change who he is to become in his world and so it goes.
© Patricia Herreen 2012