the optimistic child

ok, enough about work, back to reading..quite appropriately, before the latstest workcrisis broke out i was reading 'The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children from Depression & Build Lifelong Resilience' by Martin Seligman. it's a down to earth, easy access guide for parents to help them 'avoid' bringing up their children as pessimists, according to Seligman something that has become a 'trendy' thing to be...which is something i ddin't automatically link with the average american citizen. i always had a sterotyped idea of americans being on average overly optimistic and self-assured, but if you believe the author, the current generation of american children (at least, back in '95 when the book was published) are growing up making unhelpful attributions, what Seligman coins the 3 p's: pervasiveness, permanence and personal explanations about things that go wrong. if these 3 p's characterize a childs thinking, they are more likely to show depressive symptoms.

the book give tips to parenst on how to check whether their child has depressive symptoms, and also makes has a 3 P thinking style. and also gives nice examples of how to combat this negative way of thinking and promote an optimistic way of thinking (but not overly so, that point is made clear in the book a few times - the idea is that the child starts thinking realistically, not blindly making external atttributions for everything)

Seligman is famous for coining the term 'learned helplessness' (and demonstrating it empirically), and for being an advocate of positive psychology.

for me, it was nice to get the full picture of the theory of learned helplessness, and how it can relate to bringing up your kids as positive thinking people: the idea that there are certain ways of explaining events and attributing causes leading to depression -like if you think that something will never change, why bother. in his experiments they gave dogs electroshocks and when the dogs couldn't escape them (they had no control over the adminstration of them), they began to show symptoms like not eating, listelessness, etc.

at the moment i sort of feel like i have no control over the shocks life is throwing my way. my life is characterized by weird fluctuations - periods in which everything goes well - feeling intense happiness at the sight of the smallest things - an embracing couple, a child reaching for his mother. and then i wake up and the world is somehow less rosy, and my pessimistic 3 P way of thinking gets activated. then everything is a blur and i feel like i'm being dragged through the day by my hair, carried by a current in my own glass bubble. i guess i feel sometimes that i don't have any control over what life throws at me, and at those times i have less energie to say to myself that i can exert some influence. thinking away the 3 Ps is easier said than done, but acknowledging them is the first step i guess.