How should parents behave when a child (a girl aged 3 to 5) starts fighting for her father's attention? Or a boy for his mother's? How do you react when, for instance, a girl competes with her mother for daddy's attention and tries to “knock” her mother out of the conversation? What do children often do when they see mum and dad hugging? They try to wedge themselves in between them.
They come running and say, “oh, we are a big family, let's all hug together”, and push their head in between the parents to prise them apart.… Or they suddenly fall over and you have to rush to them and help. That is precisely how competition shows itself.
What is the parents' task?
Or take this example. A little son comes to his father and says:
“Daddy, I want to kill you! Then I will sleep with mummy!”
The little son said to his father
The father's reaction: be glad inwardly, and outwardly say, “Good lad! Off to your room, tidy up your toys!”. Be glad, because the boy has begun to live in competition, and at the same time he has no chance of winning.
The mother does not give the girl her “victory”, and dad does not give her that victory either. The more the child competes for a place in the sun, the more firmly mum and dad show the child what a man-and-woman relationship looks like. The more sharply the child wedges itself in between the parents, the more clearly the parents show closeness, contact, emotional contact between husband and wife. The more often they hug, kiss and pay each other attention in the child's presence. And in doing so they mark out the child's place. Because in a normal system the child's place is at the bottom.
Let us listen on this subject to the psychologist Sergey Shishkov in the programme “The Woman's Path of Development”,
The child's place in the family
The family is a hierarchical system.
Another example from life. A son comes to his father:
“Daddy, are you the head of our family?” - “Yes!”
“And after you, mummy?” - “Yes!”
“And then granny?” - “Yes!”
“But I am above the cat, aren't I?” - “Yes!”.
author
And the child went off to play again, quite content: he had grasped the hierarchy he lives in, who answers to whom, and how the system of authority works.
And while the child is showing competition, the vertical system of authority has to be made visible, one in which the child has its own rightful place. “You are ours, we love you!” Not “mine”, but precisely “ours”, since it matters to a child to feel belonging, to be part of something. On the other hand, the horizontal “togetherness”, the wholeness of the position, has to be made visible too. If mum has said something and dad does not agree with it, discuss it later behind closed doors, but in that moment dad “agrees”. If mum does not agree with dad, say nothing! Discuss it later, when the child is not there. In front of the child you are always as one!
And in the end what comes of it is...
The more the child understands that you cannot be split apart, the better the outcome. Because the most positive thing is the position of losing. When a girl, having lost the Electra complex, takes on a centre-forming decision. “Fine then! I don't need any of this!” I will grow up and I will have everything of my own! I will grow up and I will have my own home, my own husband, my own children! That is when I will win!” It is exactly this decision that lays down great potential for development. Early childhood decisions, taken before the age of five or six, are built on it. These decisions are simple and, in their structure, very powerful and strongly motivating. They are decisions that helped the child survive back then, and which he goes on acting out all his life. What we decided then is how we live. They are decisions about who we are, what the world is like, what has to be done.
If the girl has “lost” the competition with her mother, her relationship with her mother improves sharply. “I still want one just like daddy, after all. And who can teach me better than mum how to rope in a man like that?” That is why the relationship with mum suddenly falls into place. And her self-identification as a woman rises sharply. A positive, developmental competition appears, in which people take the path of improving themselves. They like something about another person and go: “Yes! I want to learn that too! I want to achieve the same! I will go into the same profession”
