Together time

Nicholas Albery

Here are three ideas for which my son, when younger, was either the guinea pig or the inspiration.

I used to give my son (from about the age of five onwards) a two hour period each week of 'together time' in which I let him take any initiatives for action. The rules we agreed were that during this period he initiated conversation or suggested activities, and I followed, paying him as near 100% attention as I could. I could only refuse to do something if it went strongly against my moral code, or if it involved going shopping, and we had to remain within reasonable 'playing distance' of each other. It is a way for a child to imagine and pre-plan what he or she wants to do at a particular time in the future; to become inventive and to develop personality, and to have more of a feeling of autonomy.

'It is a way for a child to pre-plan what he or she wants to do, to become inventive and to develop personality, and to have more of a feeling of autonomy'

Other parents tend to comment that they do something like this anyway most of the time. But I think that there is a crucial difference between giving a child all of one's attention rather than some of it, and between a period a child can plan for and one that is uncertain.

I got the idea from the American humanistic psychotherapist Alvin Mahrer, who calls it 'Effectance Training' and suggests a half hour period every day, starting in a modified form with the young baby. Mahrer believes that it is vital that children dismantle the parental 'primitive field' which has encompassed them and largely operated their surface personality in the early years. Maintaining the primitive personality undissolved into adulthood is 'the ultimate cause of problems, of psychopathologies, of painful behaviour.' Mahrer argues that the principal route to worthwhile social change lies through such Effectance Training.

'Maintaining the primitive personality undissolved into adulthood is the ultimate cause of problems, of psychopathologies, of painful behaviour'

See 'Experiencing, a Humanistic Theory of Psychology and Psychiatry' by Alvin Mahrer (published by Brunnel/Mazel, New York, 1978, pages 627 ff).

Together time

I suggest that all film review editors send some young people along to U, PG, 12 and 15 category movies (how young would depend on the movie) and that they get the young people to give a rating out of 10 for how enjoyable the film was, plus a few words of comments - some of these comments and a numerical 'Rating by the Kids' could then be tagged on to the end of adult reviewers' comments. The films that reviewers hated seemed to be the ones that my son enjoyed most.

Together time

One experiment to discourage my son from spending too much of his summer holidays consuming endless TV was to insist that for every programme he watched, he had to write in his diary a minimum 40 word review, saying what he liked and did not like about the programme, with a small drawing to go with it. This was not enough of a deterrent to stop him watching a programme he really wanted to watch, but it did make him think twice about just switching on at random. But the main improvement was that it cured me of minding him watching TV, since I knew that now it was helping him to develop his critical faculties, rather than stupefying him.

Nicholas Albery, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 081 208 2853; fax 081 452 6434).

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