Parenting it’s just Common Sense

The sad thing about the notion of common sense is that it is a mechanism for dismissing attention to something.  The process of dismissal is something I investigated in my research into fundamentalism.  People who assume a position of superiority to the fundamentalist often dismiss the logic and sense of the fundamentalist.  Fundamantalism is not a matter of people being stupid or unintelligent indeed, the evidence shows that many young intelligent people are suicide bombers.  The write off that people lack “common sense” is just unhelpful.  The language of common sense is simply not helpful but we need to understand much more the process of sensemaking undertaken by people whose behaviours we don’t understand.  To do this, we need to understand much more about the arational decision making process.  I wrote about this a few entries ago in One Brain Three Minds.



In a previous life I was ACT Manager of Youth, Community and Family Support.  In that role I served on a range of working groups and task forces on parenting, child protection and young people in out of home care.  When I established the Galilee School and worked in youth detention, I saw first hand the results of the most terrible abuse of children.  I saw many people who didn’t know the fundamentals of parenting. But hand on, isn’t effective and good parenting just common sense?
Well, if good parenting was common sense, why is the welfare budget so high?  The welfare budget, the level of child abuse, the neglect of children and the number of welfare institutions should tell you that the very fundamentals and logic one would expect of parents is not held in common.  Indeed, the level of abuse and neglect in our society would tell you that 20% of the population don’t know how to do it.

When you work in welfare you cannot assume that someone knows the fundamentals of care, love, respect, tolerance and selflessness.  Indeed, many third and fourth welfare generation children exhibit all the behaviours they learned from their parents despite strong efforts to educate them otherwise.  Whilst there is some success with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), not everything gets through to Mind No. 1, the rationalist systematic method.  Many ways of thinking are intuitive and learned unconsciously which deny the logic of reason through cognitive dissonance.



The welfare sector is a sector of high risk.  Children who are taken out of homes, who suffer abuse are at high risk of many things: early school leaving, detention, crime, substance abuse etc.  One can learn a great deal about the nature of risk by spending some time with these kids.  Their risk taking behaviour may not make sense to you but its their common sense.  For them, its common sense to fight, steal, live on the streets, abuse others, cheat, take drugs and live in squats.  Their sensemaking doesn’t make sense until you get out of your shoes and live a day in theirs.  But you won’t be able to help anyone with the language of common sense, if they smell any superiority or patronising language in your speech, they will switch off.  Understanding sensemaking by others is the beginning of making sense of risk.