“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If, on the other hand, parents view the body as a healthy, dependable vehicle of expression and feeling, then their children will look at their own bodies in the same fashion. It is very important that parents express a fond affection toward each other, and toward their children. In this way most children are assured of their parents’ love, and hence need not resort to illness as a way of gaining attention or testing a parents’ love and devotion.

(Long pause.) Parents who are actually quite worried about their childrens’ susceptibility to illness often go overboard, stressing all kinds of sports and sports-related projects, but the children sense their parents’ unspoken fears, and they try to reassure their parents through achieving high goals or merit in sports programs.

It goes without saying that parents should hold the bodies of their male and female children in equal favor, so that one is not considered inferior to the other. Each child should be educated as early as possible by their parents, so that the youngsters are repeatedly reminded of the body’s natural resources and healing abilities.

(Very long pause.) Good health is closely related, of course, to a family’s beliefs about the body. If parents believe that the body is somehow an inferior vehicle for the spirit, or if they simply view the body as unreliable or weak and vulnerable, then children will at an early age begin to consider good health as a rarity, and learn to take depression, poor spirits, and bodily aches and pains to be a natural, normal condition of life.

They pick up their first ideas about health and disease from parents and doctors, and by the actions of those people to their own discomfiture. Before they can even see, children are already aware of what their parents expect from them in terms of health and disease, so that early patterns of behavior are formed, to which they then react in adulthood.

Many children acquire poor health habits through the well-meaning mistakes of their parents. This is particularly true when parents actually reward a child for being ill. [...]

Parents who are aware of these facts can start helping their children at an early age by asking them simply the reasons for their illness. [...] So if the parents begin such questioning and reassurance when the child is young, then the youngster will learn that while illness may be used to attain a desired result, there are far better, healthier ways of achieving an end result.

THE STATE OF CHILDHOOD IN
RELATIONSHIP TO HEALTH, AND HINTS FOR PARENTS

“OUR PARENTS DO NOT BETRAY US”
JULY 23, 1974

Our parents do not betray us

Our parents do not betray us

our parents lead us into truth

There is always a reason, and so each parent will represent to each child an unspeakable symbol, and often the two parents will represent glaring contrasts and different probabilities, so that the child can compare and contrast divergent realities.

[...] Each parent also represented opposites to them—but different ones, and so they saw your parents differently. [...]

[...] She said that she knew Seth had a “whole bunch of stuff there about parents.” [...]

Now: each person chooses his parents, accepting in terms of environment and heredity a bank of various characteristics, attitudes and abilities from which he draws in physical life.

The child understands that it is itself, and yet that it is simultaneously a portion of its parents, alive within their lives (intently), as well as within its own. [...] The child expects the parents to come to its support in the same way that it expects its own fingers and toes to support its various positions and decisions. The child understands that in a certain fashion (underlined) the parents are an extension of its own identity. At the same time it knows that the parents are equally independent, and that its own identity is a part of extensions that are the parents’. [...]

From their parents they learn to pare down the dimensions of their own practically accepted personhood. [...]

People write you or call as they would to dearly beloved parents, parents in another level of reality. So you become parents of thoughts and feelings that can help to transform your world. [...]

[...] Never think that you and Ruburt do not have children, for you are closer to many individuals than their parents, and you provide an emotional creativity that will enable physical parents to communicate far better with their offspring.

Children are extremely sensitive, of course, to their parents’ feelings and beliefs, particularly since they are dependent upon the parents to meet their needs. [...]

[...] And wondered what the child was picking up from the parents. [...]

[...] The parents did not want the child to suffer. [...]

(Pause.) The child wanted to please the parents. [...]

[...] But Ruburt did not even dare to express his violence verbally, because of the parent-child relationship. Added to this was the fact that the child loved the parent much more strongly, you see, than the parent ever loved the child.

Now symbolically any attack upon Ruburt becomes an attack by the parent, against which the child in Ruburt dares not retaliate. Flight becomes the only answer, the only sure solution, as flight from the parent was the only solution, for the parent could not run after.

[...] In most cases the child can slap the parent. It may be slapped back, but it knows the slap will not really kill the parent. [...]

In this case the child did not dare slap the parent, for even the slightest move upon the mother’s bed, the slightest most unintentional motion, made the mother cry out in pain. [...]

Ruburt is learning much to his advantage in the present circumstances regarding your own parents. [...]

This is the adult’s chance to understand and emotionally exorcise parental ghosts from the child’s past. [...]

[...] On Ruburt’s part he is finding himself able to handle a parental situation with you, along with you, even though the crisis evokes long repressed, highly charged emotions from his own past.

In facing the situation in your parent’s house, he faces and conquers the situation once existing in his mother’s house. [...]

[...] There is some information necessary to physical survival that must be taught and handed down from parent to child. [...] So it is necessary that the child accept beliefs from its parents.

The beliefs that you receive, therefore, are your parents’ conceptions of the nature of reality. [...] You receive ideas about the world in general and your relationship to it; and from your parents you are also given concepts of what you are. [...]

From the earliest stages the child automatically compares its interpretation of reality with its parents’. Since the parents are bigger and stronger and fulfill so many of its needs, it will attempt to bring its experience into line with their expectations and beliefs. [...]

[...] This sharing of mutual ideas not only protects the new offspring from dangers obvious to the parents; it also serves as a framework within which the child can grow.

[...] He was used to dealing with parents as enemies. [...] His loyalty to you would make him by turns deny any backed-up feelings toward your parents, and then he would be forced to recognize them, and in doing so he would become angry at you for having parents.

He was ready to move the minute your parents got in difficulty, and, was outraged that you did not do so. He is discovering through your own parents that parents are simply people. [...]

The feeling-tone of Ruburt’s mentioned earlier in your terms, the negative one, was triggered as you know by his reaction to your illness, which was followed by rising difficulties on the part of your own parents. [...]

All in all he surprised himself by his performance with your parents. [...]

[...] You may love a parent, and if the parent does not seem to return the love and denies your expectations, then you may “hate” the same parent because of the love that leads you to expect more. [...]

[...] Parents, taught to believe that hatred is wrong, do not know how to handle such a situation. [...] If a parent shows fear, then the child is effectively taught to be afraid of this anger and hatred before which the powerful parent shrinks. [...]

[...] Some such individuals, model sons, for example, who seldom even spoke back to their parents, were suddenly sent to war and given carte blanche to release all such feelings in combat; and I am referring particularly to the last two wars (the war in Korea, 1950–53, and the war in Vietnam, 1964–73), not the Second World War.

[...] If you hate a parent it is precisely because you expect such love. [...]

[...] Jane had been interrupted once during her delivery.) If their parents are overly indulgent, then the youngsters may actually feel as if they were adjuncts to their parents, or possessions alone. [...]

They do not visualize themselves as future parents, or as having certain careers. [...] Along the way, whether or not it was obvious to parents, such youngsters begin to feel that life is meaningless. [...]

In most cases these youngsters are actually quite secretive — though the self they show to parents and friends might appear to be lively and gregarious.

This is not to say that all such children should be cared for at home, or that parents should feel guilty if they are forced through circumstances to place their offspring in an institution. The intuition of the parents, however, will often direct the most proper course in each individual case. If it is understood that there is indeed a reason behind such circumstances, then that realization alone can help ease the parents’ burden, and help them decide which course to take in their own particular case.

Children who are labeled mentally deficient or even called idiots, can often grow and develop far beyond medical science’s suppositions — particularly if they are aided by loving parents who constantly provide stimulation and interest.

[...] When you were a child you could be angry at the parent. When you are a parent you can feel the child’s anger but you do not know what to do. When you are a child you can blame the parent. When you are a parent there is no one to blame. [...]

[...] When you are a parent it is impossible for you to completely remember your own childhood or to understand the feelings of consciousness that are growing at that time. Now, as a parent, your chore is to train a consciousness to manipulate in physical reality. [...]

[...] Also, remember your own childlike self and the two of you, when you think of your son, imagine what you were like at that age and how difficult it was to communicate to your parents. [...]

([Gert:] “What causes parents to become so irritable?”)

(The material given above, aside from the specific points verified by me, is typical of possible situations involving my parents and the Martins, who were good friends in those days. I saw many similar situations evolve and resolve themselves, involving my parents, the Martins, and a few other couples who moved in the same circle.

[...] You put up what you could loosely term a psychic screen to protect yourself in your parents’ home. [...]

[...] Both of your parents supposed themselves to be thinking about the other. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) The children literally were buffers between the parents. [...]

2. I think that as a child I often sensed my parents’ feelings of strangeness about this reality, although I was quite unable to express myself in those terms. [...] On several occasions Seth has given very blunt, very perceptive interpretations of the churning relationship involving my parents. [...]

(9:44.) Give us a moment … Your parents literally did not share the same reality at all. [...]

In your family life in this reality, your parents acted opaquely to each other. [...]

[...] Each of your parents had their strongest reality, this time, and in your terms, in a probable system of reality — and here (in this reality) they were offshoots. [...]

[...] The date 1873, connected with Dr. Instream’s parents, or parent.

[...] Jane then remembered that the parent begonia here at the house had its pot, until recently, wrapped in an orange-colored burlap type of fabric. As a matter of fact, she had cleaned the last shreds of this fabric from the pot holding the parent plant today; these shreds had been stuck, unnoticed, on the bottom of the pot.

[...] As stated Jane has never seen the plant at the office in its fine growth—merely a slip from a parent plant here in the apartment. [...]

[...] This parent plant, given to Jane by our neighbor on the same floor of our apartment house, Miss Callahan, also has other descendants growing very well.

[...] These are but one set of parents. As a parent yourself you performed exceedingly well, and as a son also. [...]

[...] I repeat: In all your past lives you dealt with the problems of both parenthood and childhood well, in relation to your own parents. This present trouble is a result of your parents’ inabilities and false conceptions, and of your own over-conscientiousness resulting from your Denmark life.

First of all personally: You, Joseph, have acquired an unjustified sense of inferiority as far as not only your dealings with your parents are concerned, but also concerning your dealings with the outside world; and even, for what unknown reason, with your dealings with your own talent.

[...] As far as parents are concerned, face it. [...]

[...] This is the somewhat complicated sequence of events here: Marie Colucci took the train to her parents’ home in New Jersey, and drove her mother back to Elmira in the parental automobile. When Marie’s father died of a heart attack in NJ, Marie drove her mother back to Jersey in the parental car, then returned to Elmira herself by train.)

(We regarded, offhand, the data on my parents as probably distortive or associative, as the material on Jane’s aunt and uncle. [...] Older than yourselves”, referred to the parents of Marie Colucci, the dentist’s wife. [...]

There was a very slight connection with your own parents, however, in that Ruburt mentioned the dentist and the trance to them at their latest visit here. And a secondary connection with a car—not close, not a close connection—in which your parents traveled on that occasion.

[...] (Pause.) A connection with an afternoon scene, perhaps your parents, Joseph, and an automobile.