The Garden of Eden renews with the birth of every child. These innocent entities enter the world from a relatively perfected place, the womb, and when they enter, they still feel bound inextricably to the person of that paradise, the mother. Indeed, each child enters the world as an extension of the mother, a parental figure as all encompassing as God to the baby. This closeness finds expression in the often expressed beauty of simply holding and cherishing the baby to the even more intimate and unity produced and experienced by breast feeding. There exists a kind of melodious hum, a mutual resonance between mother and baby which makes for a kind of paradise of absolute oneness.[17] Such an oneness holds its beauties, but it also denies the baby the possibility of entering into the process of the becoming self. The paradise of the newborn and the mother must come to an end for the newborn to begin to express itself as an independent entity.
The end comes naturally and, for most, shockingly at an age the many people call "the terrible twos." Somewhere around two years old, the sweet innocent child looks toward the parental figure, often the mother, and says, "No." The exact situation doesn't matter as much as the word matters, word itself in its fully extended meaning. When this sweet, cute, adorable child says the word, "No," she/he says it by way of expressing separation. This reenacts the "No" spoken by Eve. Eve and Adam disobey the edict of the parental figure and eat of the tree. In that "No" to God, they say "yes" to the self, so they can enter into the process of becoming a self. When they say, "No, I am not you," they move beyond a negation of the previous intimate relationship into an assertion of individuation which will open them to a new relationship with the parental figure when that figure will open to that relationship. Adam and Eve said and almost every child says "No" not in denial but in needed separation. In doing so, they all say "Yes" to the affirmation of the becoming self and a possibly renewed, now conscious, loving relation with the parental figure and the world. In that way, they open themselves to the exchange of unconditional positive regard that can only come with consciousness and some degree of independence.
When a child in our lives says her/his Edenic equivalent of, "No," we will want to make a very conscious choice about how we respond. If we ascribe to the well known cliché of the "terrible twos," we will choose to see this "No" as a kind of shocking insubordination, a betrayal of the previous child/parent relationship and a violation of the authority of that parent. We can choose to hear this as a rejection of everything we felt worthwhile and loving thus far, and such a choice, to feel rejection, will result in hurt and a sense of diminished power which will trigger defensiveness, anger, and a need to reestablish hierarchical rectitude through some immediate and often upsetting action. We withdraw our unconditional positive regard through some form of "consequence," and "discipline," which come to just plain punishment.
In that we teach the child in our care with every action in which we engage, we can always ask ourselves about what we teach in any given action. When we punish a child for expressing the self through saying, "No," we teach this beginning, becoming being that any real expression of self, of difference from the parental figure is, in some very essential way, just plain wrong. When the child internalizes this sense of wrong, it can become a meaning perspective which will limit the vision of that child permanently until they question that perspective and transform it. That seemed to my interview class students part of their shared fear of self-awareness and the interview. They knew themselves to be essentially "wrong" in their independent selves, and they feared exposure of that wrongness.
That first real "No" is formative." Do we really want to deny the right to difference and to the becoming self at such a moment? Is that what we really want to teach?