A little baby will give you quite a bit of attention

A little baby will give you quite a bit of attention

Ron Says…

“So what do you expect the attention span of a little baby is? Actually, a little baby will give you quite a bit of attention, but in little brief spans. And the second you try to crowd the baby to give you more attention, it’s just–the baby can’t tolerate it. They just don’t have the ability to look at you any longer than they look at you.

“And parents who will get impatient about this and they’ll sit a kid down and they’ll start talking to the kid. Well, their act of getting the kid to sit down has normally exhausted the kid’s attention span and the kid isn’t there all the time they’re talking. The kid is just gone; he just can’t fix on them. He just disperses all over the place or something.

“You sort of have to get it in quick with a kid. You give him some kind of a snap of some sort or something that alerts them. You shake him by the hand–make a motion toward him and shake him by the hand and say, ‘Can you get a picture of a dog?’ Thuhhnt! And then he goes off playing with his toys. He’s had his processing for the day.”

L. Ron Hubbard

from Lecture:

Question and Answer Period, Part II, First International Congress of Dianeticists and Scientologists Series

Disc 14, page 531 of transcripts

You ever hear of a child being spoiled?

Ron Says…

“ You ever hear of a child being spoiled? Well, children don’t get spoiled with affection or by being given things. You can give the kid Ford cars to hammer and break the windshields on or do anything you want to with this kid. You can give him anything, but don’t interrupt him. He hasn’t any big vengeance against the world and you haven’t built him up with a lot of force, you can give him practically anything and he’ll handle it all right. He won’t break it up except by accident and his own clumsiness, but it’ll be actual clumsiness, inability to handle himself.

“Give him the car now and let’s say, ‘Now, of course, you can go everyplace but down to your clubhouse and to school in this car. And I think you better have it oiled and greased every Monday. And I’m giving you this car only on the conditions that…’ A person’s independence is wrecked about this car. So, taking the supercontrol over the child, the child will come back this way: that car will wind up against a lamppost. That’s right, that’s where your destruction angles come in on these things. ”

L. Ron Hubbard

from Dianetics Professional Course Lectures lecture
“The Anatomy of Circuitry”
25 November 1950

It means probably they will be very sane citizens

Ron Says…

“No happier kids have I ever seen, however, than the kids of a couple of parents. They weren’t interested in anything for their kids particularly; they were interested in somebody next door who was in, kind of, a little bit of bad shape.

“And here were two kids that were round-faced and they were very happy, cheerful little kids. They came in, they sat down quietly and they listened very alertly—one was six and the other was eight—and they sat there, two little boys. And they sat there very quiet and they listened about it. And the mother told them, ‘You can go outside and play if you want to.’

“And they said, ‘No, we’d rather sit here.’ And they agreed to this and they sat there. Gee, those kids were calm! They gave me the spooks! This was so unreal, I mean, the kids sitting there; no noise and so forth.

“Finally, experimentally I shoved over a gimmick and a gadget I thought they might be interested in, a ship telescope, thinking, of course, it would be pulled to pieces in the next five minutes. And they didn’t; they found out how it was used and they found out how it was focused and a few minutes later were over at the window looking out and examining the neighborhood, using it the way it was supposed to be used, not beating each other over the head with it. This fascinated me.

“So I said to the lady, ‘How do you and your husband get along?’ And she said ‘Why, what do you mean? We get along all right.’

“I said, ‘What church do you belong to?’

“’What…what church? We don’t belong to any church.’

“’Well, what kind of a fellow is your husband?’

“’Oh, he’s a swell guy.’

“’What does he do?’

“’Oh, he does, he does pretty well.’ It turned out the fellow was a man in shipping and he wasn’t doing anything really to be super proud of but according to this woman, why, he was about the biggest shipping man that ever got to ship anything!

“And I got more curious about this and I met this fellow a day or so later and I said, ‘Say, what do you think about your wife? What kind of a wife do you have?’

“He looked at me with great surprise, ‘But about the finest woman alive; you’re not going to say anything against her, are you?’

“And I said, ‘No!’ and I said, ‘Do you get along well with her?’

“’Oh, sure.’ He says, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I never really amounted to anything,’ he says, ‘until I got married,’ he said. ‘And things are very nice.’

“I said ‘What happens at night when you come home?’

“’Oh, I don’t know, eat supper and play cards with the wife and kids and maybe go for a drive, something like that.’

“And I said, ‘Well, where are the kids’ grandparents?’

“’Well, they’re all dead.’

“And here were two very bright, alert, calm little kids. They never got into trouble in the neighborhood with their fellow man. But you would very occasionally find them on a highly punitive expedition—the two of them—to sort out this bully who had assaulted somebody younger than himself; knights-errant! Very serious about the whole thing. Well, they beat up a kid that was about ten. And this was something that shouldn’t have happened to this ten-year-old kid according to his parents. And I heard some future history on this thing. And they came over and evidently they got—this complaining parent got very short shrift about the whole thing. In other words, these kids were not only being backed up in the house, they were being backed up outside the house. Nobody questioned their reasoning, so they had no reason to question their own reasoning; and life was very, very beautiful all the way around the line.

“This doesn’t mean these children are going to be dumb vegetables. It means probably they will be very sane citizens and actually amount to something very, very fine in life.

“I give you this as a model of what happens.”

L. Ron Hubbard

from lecture
“Child Dianetics—Part II”
8 November 1950

Completely overwhelm him

Ron Says…

“Scientologist with child has a hell of a responsibility, by the way. It’s so easy to use Scientology on the child – completely overwhelm him. Kid wouldn’t know whether he was going or coming. See, you actually could just positively and directly control him and monitor him – have no kid at the end of it.

“A lot of Scientologists bend too far the other way, you know? They say, ‘Well, a child is self-determined.’ Well, I’d like to call to their attention, as long as I’m making a remark on it, they’re not using Scientology, they’re using child psychology which is ‘Never control. Never control.’ That’s child psychology – common denominator. ‘Let the child grow of his own responses, let him abreact out of his…’ and make all the adults miserable.

“Well, my idea is adults have rights, too. And the way I keep a kid leading, by the way, is to explain to them that these are adult rights and someday he will inherit them. And that keeps him leading, you know? That gives him something to go forward to.”

L. Ron Hubbard

from 19th American Advanced Clinical Course lecture
“E-METER IDENTIFICATION AND ASSOCIATION, Q AND A PERIOD”
24 January 1958

Present in a two-months-old child

Ron Says…

“And I’ve known kids in this society (in strange homes, it’s true) who grew up with a very great concept of their own personal worth and a feeling of great dignity. And I’ve run back–interested, very interested in this–on the time track and have found when dignity first starts to come in. And I have found dignity very much present in a two-months-old child, taking a person back down the time track.

“Somebody comes in and says, ‘Kitchy-kitchy-coo,’ and the kid says ‘Who the hell is this!’ But he can’t express it in words. So we take this child that’s normal, whose parents are worried about the child, the child gets a cold, has asthma, is sick. The parents say ‘We’ve done everything in the world that you could for this child.’ You echo to yourself, ‘And probably everything in the world that you could do to it.’ And we will carry this thing along. And what do we do with this child, you as an auditor? This child is sick.

“Well, the first thing you can try to do is to take the child by itself, no parents. Get them very definitely off the scene. You try to examine a child around his parents and you will find that he is falsely valuing everything. He is still a bit squirrelly and you find out that the bulk of children, if you talk to them on a rather dignified level, that you’ll find them talking to you on a rather dignified level. And you have entered the case right at that moment because this child is not spinning. The child is more in possession of self!

“Now, let’s just treat the child on an as adult a level as possible! Let’s not talk baby talk to it. And just talk to it on a very adult level and start giving the child Straightwire without saying this is Straightwire and without explaining what all this is about. And you’ll find out that you can go straight along with most cases and you can start blowing locks out very rapidly.”

L. Ron Hubbard

from lecture

Child Dianetics – Part II – 8 Nov 1950

Become upset occasionally with your father

Ron Says…

“You could cause automobile accidents by training children into (quote) “safety” (unquote). You would eventually raise a whole generation that would do nothing but go out and have accidents. You see this? You gave them no familiarity with accidents and you told them they should flinch from accidents.

“So you could say all flinchingness and all reactivity is the result of erroneous training which forbids observation. You see where we got here? Now, this is no condemnation of the American university. It’s no condemnation, at all, of training in any particular field. But it does show you that training could have two sides – there could be two sides to this coin called training.

“You could train toward observation or train away from observation. It isn’t training that is at fault. It is a type of training that is at fault. The reason you become upset occasionally with your father and your mother and the way they handled you is because they gave you so much training away from observation. When you protect people from observing directly, you debar them from as-ising.”

L. Ron Hubbard

from 19th American Advanced Clinical Course lecture
“THE PHENOMENA OF ENTRAPMENT IN THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE”
03 Feb 1958