We continue today interviewing in Babies and more to Elvis Canino, director of the page "Do not mistreat me, I am a child", an activist of respectful parenting and responsible parenthood, in the topics we are going to discuss in this March, Father's month. We published the first part of this interview yesterday.
Why do you think the father sometimes mixes his role as protector with an aggressive role?
Our Patriarchal Society has taught us for generations. So much so that he has insisted on disconnecting us as men from our own feminine side, relegating him to a corner of supposed "inferiority." I believe that this disconnection is responsible for the imbalance in which we live. Affecting us as humanity both in the social, as in the spiritual and even in the ecological. That is why we live in a world so madly unbalanced and disoriented.
We are taught that man must be hard, aggressive, to repress his feelings, right?
Look at the "normal" that results from being taught to boys from a very young age to repress emotions, to "stand out" in rough sports, to be self-sufficient, to behave like "little boys."
All this guarantees us the approval of the environment, of society and of course, that of our own father and sometimes even that of our mother.
The boys are prevented from doing some activities or they are negatively labeled if they like them, do you mean that?
For example, I know that most of the parents I know, few to say none, would dare to approve in public that their little boy plays with dolls or loves to dance ballet. These exploration activities are perfectly valid for any child regardless of gender. All of this speaks volumes about how entrenched patriarchal and macho values are in our psyche. How insistent the environment has been in clarifying from early that one side is blue, another pink and period. Something that is absurd because we no longer live in caverns, so it is not necessary to roar to be respected.
Why does it still cost so many adults to break the cycle of violent communication with their children that they learned from their parents?
Because we don't heal that same relationship with our parents, just as they didn't heal it with their parents. It is a chain that only breaks with a great work of internal gaze, healing and forgiveness. This would not only break the cycle of violent communication with subsequent generations, but also solve many of our problems, both individual, as well as society and species. Problems that, although we are not aware of it, have their origin there, in the lack of forgiveness and reconciliation with the Father, the Mother and the Son that make up our emotional psyche.
But, it's never too late, Elvis.
That's. It is never too late to observe, discover and heal everything that we have been carrying around throughout our lives, there in a corner of the soul. The healing work never ends, I see every day of my life as an opportunity to heal something else, to lighten my burden and be free. I think it is the only way to teach my daughter what freedom is, knowing her.
What benefits have you noticed by breaking the cycle of habitual educational violence?
I think that breaking the cycle of violence is the only way to end the prevailing violence, even if it sounds redundant.
Look Mireia, how do we get to the world? With violence. Childbirth has ceased to be something natural to become something artificial, medicalized and fully technified in the name of progress and "civilization." It has become an act in which, in the name of science, the mother and the baby are violated, thus losing the sacredness thereof. We are deprived at the same time that we reach the planet of our most basic need for protection, contact and security, replacing skin-to-skin contact with the artificial heat of the evil called "maternal retention" or "nest", for example.
Should childbirth care change to respect our mammalian nature and the need for intimacy and contact?
Science seems to have forgotten that we are mammals and treats us as a kind of machines that are born in a kind of "mechanical workshop", called an operating room to subtle the thing.
With cold methods that are far from the intimacy and peace that requires such a magical and crucial moment for what will be the rest of our lives. So much that it has forced the woman to give birth in the unnatural horizontal position, so that the doctor feels comfortable and is in a position of superiority, although mom and baby have to suffer, or worse, are anesthetized. And not to mention the violence perpetrated with unnecessary caesarean sections, all in favor of the pocket and the personal convenience of a guild.
And after childbirth, does the violence continue?
Then, society does everything in its power to detach us from the magical link of breastfeeding before natural time. They attack us, forcing us to control sphincters ahead of time to throw us into a nursery, because daddy and mommy must work. It puts us in the hands of a very violent nanny called television. We are forced to sleep alone, to grow fast, to please others, to "behave" ... all in exchange for approval. There are so many subtle forms of violence in traditional upbringing that I don't know how there are still people who are surprised at how hostile our world is.
Does all that violence then have a reflection in the whole society?
To eradicate the violence of our lives, we must stop using it as fertilizer for the seed of the future, which are obviously children. Instead of continuing to pay them with violence, separation, competition and disconnection, it is time to start applying the only cure that exists. That which every spiritual teacher who has passed through this planet has reminded us, emphasizing that everything heals: nothing more and nothing less than Love.
My huge thanks to Elvis Canino for this beautiful interview. As always, when talking to him, I feel twinned and discover a person committed to the end of violence in the world through love towards children. I hope you felt the same. The new fatherhood comes to us with men like him.
In Babies and more | "The best place for a newborn is the arms of his mother." Interview with Jose Ernesto Juan, of the Besos y Brazos Association, The month of the father in Babies and more, "The father must become an emotional stronghold". Interview with Elvis Canino of "Do not mistreat me, I am a child"
