A Brain Gone Wrong.
Who is This Child?
Part Three of a Ten Part Series
By Dr. W. Dean Belnap
Today’s accelerated, free and open lifestyle is causing children to grow up before their time. The result is negative imprinting, a brain gone wrong.
The brain determines how we will act, what we will say, when we will respond and why. God has endowed the human brain with the ability to perceive the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, positive and negative value systems. These positives and negatives are called imprints. They are a function of agency.
Research has shown that the defining characteristic of the brain is the remarkable endowment of free agency and free will. This feature distinguishes man among all creations of God. The distinct plasticity of the brain its structure, never connections and function endows man with the ability to grow, develop and evolve to a higher level or regress to a lower, compulsive, animal-like level defined by the loss of agency and will. That’s what happens when imprinting impairs pure functions of the prefrontal cortex of the brain: judgment, analysis, agency, comprehension, relationships and even spirituality are diminished. The baser needs of aggressions take over.
Positive imprinting is grounded in firm, basic moral values that are learned at homes where parents reflect such thinking. More important than math skills or ACT achievement is the ability to understand the values that act as the hinges for the world in which we live. Love of God. Honesty. Respect. Honor. Love. Kindness. Fair play and the time-honored Golden Rule. When amplified in daily life, these qualities create positive imprints that tie youth to more than passing events or popularity. Such imprinting shores up the core spiritual framework of the mind and soul. Families provide much of the setting for many positive imprints. Yet even healthy families have much to fear.
Fathers and mothers have been duped into thinking that parenting merely means guiding adolescents through the formation of a value system shaped by peers and by the permutations of society. Not so. Our culture has duped parents and schools, neighbours and extended family into thinking it is wrong to create structure, expectations, and family values. Children have lost their description as young men and women in training. They have lost their moorings – another way of saying negative imprinting has taken over. By 2010, there will be 35 million youth between the ages of 12-19. How they feel, act, deal with others and with themselves, and how they shoulder their place in leadership at home and in the communities in which they live will either sustain the best of society or lead to a devastating decline of a great and noble people.
Family has a key role in feeding and sustaining a well-wired brain. The lack of strong family values, family talk, and family time is a clear invitation for negative imprinting. Homes are fragmented: fathers work; mothers work; youth attend school, take lessons, play sports and tend each other. Most often, a home cooked meal means one warmed in the microwave. The “home-fires” have given way to fantasy-addicted, highly manipulated teen populace, connected to practically every form of media and the undermining of a faithful culture is the plague of today. Add divorce to already fractured lives and their “survivor” instinct – not the entertainment packaged “survivor” but the real day-to-day one – takes over and adds another layer of desperate times to an already burdened child.
The surge of addictions in its many forms – pornography, drugs, alcohol, sex cast as love, and violence – has much to do with rerouting the brain and hence our society. It is a $100 billion market and growing. Seeking relief, social acceptance, a life of their own better than the one they find at home – a teenager takes one drink, turns to pornography, violence, sex, gang activity, food or no food and the brain is compromised, “imprinted.” Youth begin to act without connecting to higher thinking skills.
Sobering.
A Disconnect
So why, when so many parents seek to give more than they were given, do we have this battle for the mind – and hence soul – of each child? Because the mind is disconnecting from its God-given role at an alarming rate. Self-medication – the soft-sell name for addiction ion all its abhorrent forms – is the growing answer to the life they have been handed. Ahead is a slow death of betrayal, rage, hopelessness, lost opportunity, and broken dreams. Recent studies indicate that the dominant influences on youth in society today include popular music, movies, television, books, politicians, polls and, yes, parents. But religion, God, spiritual strength and resources do not even make the top ten.
Parents and religious leaders are the key to the youthful mind nurturing and holding on to its God-given potential and identity. The authority figures in a youth’s life must pick up that mantle of responsibility. A young, headstrong youth and his handful of teenage brothers were asked in a family meeting to identify what the parents and siblings could do for each other. They wrote their answers on pieces of paper, mixed them up and then tried to guess who had made which response. No one guessed it was the youngest, the “I can do it” child, who had written, “To know someone is there for me.”
Another young man knelt at the side of the bed with his family and before offering the evening prayer looked at the tired faces around him and asked, “Does anybody need anything?” Such expressions are born of time together, trust, kindness and the usual doses of rivalry, cruelty and competition held in check by wise parents.
The Cradle
Love at home is not a 1950s sitcom outdated by today’s standards. It is the cradle of positive imprinting. Togetherness, support, and belonging blunt the desire to try something, just this once. Families need to be led by parents. For families to make a difference, to be a reservoir of strength and purpose, they must meet four structured needs:
· Keep in contact. Know the comings and goings, the friends, the pressures.
· Be together as often as possible. Dinner, family night, morning prayer, evening wrap-up.
· Be genuinely concerned about the welfare of family members.
· Talk. And keep talking.
· Rally when one is floundering.
· Reach back to those who have gone before. Although society and even education have turned their backs on greatness, family histories are replete with records of men and women who struggled to rise above meagre existence. The birthright of every youth is grounded in the great deeds of those who had faith when life was hopeless, who fortified reason against unreason, and who stood for justice, God-given purpose and vision. This is what we call heritage, and it has worth beyond date, time and place.
Simple? On the surface. But a family whose structure is designed to move together day after day is a family that will spot – and recapture – one who drifts. Parents will need to shape the setting and identify the desired outcomes. Like-minded takes on new meaning when put in the context of family life.
Positive imprinting is the goal. Youth can stand up to the negative influences that slyly draw them off. A support system can bring them back, one positive imprint at a time.
Next: Inner Speech: Conversations with Ourselves