As babies and children, we need to be seen, and we need to be loved. These are our most primal and most essential needs. They trump all other emotional and spiritual requirements.

What does it mean to be seen and loved? It means being seen for who and what we actually are. It means being loved unconditionally as this true self.

These are our two deepest psychospiritual needs, and when they are not fully met, we are negatively impacted not just as young ones, but often for the rest of our lives.

Our Western culture is not particularly good at meeting these two foundational needs in its little ones, and much of the distress experienced by Westerners today is due to the inadequate parenting we receive as children.

The problem is that our culturally accepted child-rearing practices do not provide the kind of love and the empathic seeing that babies and children require, but we are so accustomed to swimming in these cultural waters that we are blind to what we are actually doing and the damage we inflict on our children.

We tend to see our child-rearing practices as ‘normal’, not realizing that they are actually comparatively harsh, and we don’t see just how profoundly these methods affect the adults we become. One of the tragedies of our modern way of life is that we have extraordinary physical comfort, but great emotional discomfort. We are often deeply unhappy in the midst of plenty. It seems that in the mad rush to acquire more stuff, we have forgotten what really leads to inner contentment. And we have forgotten what our children need for health, happiness and true wellbeing.

As a materialistic culture, we unthinkingly assume that it is largely physical events that lead to emotional damage. We assume that babies and children are deeply damaged only if there is overt physical, emotional or sexual abuse, or if there are significant ruptures in the child’s life, such as hospitalization or divorce of the parents. The Adverse Childhood Events scale developed in the 1990’s reflects this view – 9 of 10 of its measures are for physical events. While this scale was a welcome advance on previous knowledge, it completely misses the ordinary, everyday damage inflicted by parents who are essentially good people but simply unable to see and respond sensitively to their children. What we take as normal and benevolent is actually deeply damaging, even if it never veers into the more extreme measures of the ACE’s scale.

So let’s take a brief look at the physical, emotional and spiritual effects of some of our normal child-rearing methods.

The primary way that we give our little ones the message that they are not loved is by physically isolating them. This starts at birth when the newborn is usually not placed on the mother’s chest immediately after birth while vital signs are checked. To be suddenly separated from the only human connection she has ever known is terrifying for the completely helpless baby, especially as she has no way of knowing if or when it will ever end. This separation usually continues as the baby goes home with her parents. The accepted custom is to place babies in their own crib to sleep, and often in their own room where they have no way of knowing if their mothering person is nearby. If they can’t see, smell or touch her, she is effectively absent, and again the baby has no way of knowing if or when she might ever return.

For most of human history, a baby separated from her parents quickly became a meal for the next hungry predator, and this knowledge is planted deep in our survival instincts. A baby who does not know if her parents are nearby is literally in a state of terror. At first she cries to call the parents back, but when that does not work, she ‘plays dead’ to avoid being found and eaten. She may appear to be calmly sleeping, but her stress hormones are measurably heightened, and when this situation is repeated many times, they remain permanently elevated.

At the physical level, the permanent stress hormone elevation leads to metabolic imbalances and autoimmune diseases which may appear at any stage of life. It also leads to poorer lifelong health. At the emotional level if leads to fight, flight or freeze responses. The child and adult who fights is angry, easily frustrated and combative. The child or adult who flees becomes dissociated, distant and avoidant, and runs away from difficulty. The child or adult who freezes becomes depressed, hopeless and lacking in enthusiasm for life.

The seeming abandonment by the parents also leads to an absolutely unbearable agony of terror and hurt. The baby has no way to understand or process these feelings, and thankfully they are quickly suppressed. However, they do not go away, but continue to profoundly affect her life as she grows, making her both wary of emotional closeness and searching desperately to find it. She both fears abandonment and does everything she can to bind others to her.

Spiritually, the abandoned child feels separated from the Oneness, and loses trust in the fundamental benevolence of the Universe. If as an adult she tries to engage in spiritual practice, she finds that her hyperactive nervous system gets in the way of the focus needed for personal and spiritual growth. She cannot surrender into her own inner experience, and does not trust that she will be supported by the Universe in her quest to become more whole. She is blocked from her True Self by the layers of pain that enclose her soul, not daring to encounter the agony there. It takes enormous courage to go inside when there is such a risk of encountering unbearable hurt.

Our normal childrearing practices also do not see who our babies and children truly are. As a highly materialistic culture, we tend to see them as purely physical beings. We see the body and tend to its needs, but we do not see the being inside that body. We do not see that babies are born as utterly precious, radiant beings of love. They arrive filled to the brim with unconditional love for their parents, but this is neither seen nor responded to in kind. The customary birth practices in hospitals do not welcome and handle newborns as totally precious, miraculous little beings, but just as bodies that need to be kept alive.

Parents tend not to see the absolute goodness within the child, instead attributing negative characteristics to their little one. They often see the child’s needs as excessive, and try to control them. One example of this is the Controlled Crying movement. Another is punishing a child for being ‘naughty’ when the child is simply being a child.

Because our culture values material success above all else, the parents tend not to see characteristics in the child that are not considered important for such success. They focus on the child’s intelligence, perseverance and academic skill, and in so doing miss so much else, including the child’s lovingness, creativity, playfulness, spontaneity, imagination and aliveness, all the qualities that bring zest and a love for life. They almost always miss the natural spirituality of children, who come in very much being – albeit unconsciously – a loving Oneness with all that they encounter.

Not being seen for who they are leaves a deep wound that has many manifestations in children and the adults they become. When the child does not have her true self reflected back to her, she loses touch with who she really is. Without a foundation of self-knowledge, she tends to make life choices that are not supportive of her true self, but are instead a reflection of parental or cultural values, or a rebellion against them. This leads to an inability to find and follow her passions, many inappropriate life decisions, and a great lack of life satisfaction.

Not being truly seen also makes the child feel unworthy and of little value. This leads to poor self-esteem and a sense of having little to contribute. It may also lead to the opposite, where the child and adult takes on an inflated sense of worth and capability that is staunchly defended, but innately fragile and easily threatened, and when it collapses, devastating.

Almost all parents project onto their child qualities that the child does not necessarily have. The very first relationships we have, generally with our parents, give us a relationship blueprint, which includes the expected qualities of the other. We go through life unconsciously projecting those qualities onto all others, including our own children, whether or not this is accurate. So inevitably we will see our own children through this distorting lens, and will not see them for exactly who they are. If for example, we have had a highly controlling parent, we are likely to see our child as out to control and manipulate us, when they are simply letting us know what they need in the only way they can.

Parents also project their own needs onto their child, along with the desire that those needs be met by the child, plus the illusion that the child will be able to do so. The needy parts of them unconsciously see the child as a parent, the meeter of their needs, which is a distorted view of who the child is and the qualities it actually has. They create a ‘parentified child’ whose relationship blueprint becomes the meeting the needs of others regardless of their own inclinations. In later life they find themselves repeatedly caught in codependent relationships.

Parents may feel as though they deeply and sincerely love their child. However, they are often loving a distorted, idealized view of their child, loving the child for qualities she does not actually have. When parents love their projection of the child, the love feels confusing and unreal to the child. Her parents keep telling her, often quite sincerely, that they love her, and yet that love has no place to land in the child, and the child does not experience their words as love. The disconnect between the words and the experience is very confusing for a child. She is being ‘loved’ without being seen, and this takes her away from who she really is. She may try to become the person that her parents love, but this means that she has to construct a false self, which then hides her from herself.

When we don’t have access to who we truly are, we don’t have a secure foundation for making the best life decisions for the unique being that we are, and lose our own inner guidance about what is best for us. Instead, we use cultural or parental values to guide us through a life that feels fake and never truly like our own.

But perhaps most tragically, we lose touch with our divine nature, not knowing ourselves as precious beings of light, love, beauty and value. Instead we feel unsure of our worth, unable to love ourselves, and unable to truly love others. We become distant, materialistic and unhappy, and try to find satisfaction in work and success. This makes us good soldiers for our materialistic culture, but human beings who have lost what truly matters.