I have held a firm belief and have voiced that position many times at the Dream Forum of how early life experiences and care have an affect on later life behavior. This article 'Study finds that effects of low-quality child care last into adolescence' from the Washington Post supports that position. Its findings show that early life care, especially during the first 4 1/2 years of life, can and do have a profound affect on learning later life behavior. Although this study states there is a 'small' affect I am convinced it is much stronger. My belief is largely due to my experiences in working with dreams and the evidence from those who provided follow up posts that confirmed an early age experience that was the focus in a dream. It also has been focus by Rob Reiner's supported initiative First 5 California. Here is part of the opening paragraph from their web site:

First 5 California.

First 5 California and 58 County Commissions throughout the state work to improve the lives of children from the time they are in the womb until they enter kindergarten. Research shows that a child's brain develops most dramatically during the early years of life. We’ve worked hard to educate parents and caregivers about the important role they play in their children’s first years. First 5 California’s programs are designed to meet its goal of ensuring more children are born healthy, raised in nurturing homes and ready to succeed in school.

In my experience with dreams it has been almost universal that a mention of a particular early age in a dream is an actual focus on experiences of the dreamer from that age in life. Usually the mention of age is within the first sentences of the dream {the exposition, the initial situation} and may or may not make a direct statement about the dreamer but will have language of such as 'a boy at the age of 5' or this 'unknown 4 year old girl'. In my interpretation I will suggest the dreamer look back at that period of time and see what experiences they can remember that could be the focus of the dream language. In the dreamer's response there is ALWAYS a recognition of such experiences of the age mentioned {when the dreamer could remember those early experiences} and an emotional conflict from that age in life. Since dreams are therapeutic the intent of such dreams is for the dreamer to recognize the early life conflicts so he/she can begin to start the healing process from the emotional 'trauma' caused by the experience{s}.
Here are a couple of dreams that illustrate my point. I'll post more examples later today {I must feed the dragon this morning, off to work}.

Small Child

Finding Something In The Ocean

Jerry

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If emotional problems can be traced back to such an early stage, some of these disturbances could be difficult or impossible to remember. Yet even at two yrs. of age there is a pretty complex personality with a relatively impressive memory. Although a concrete traumatic experience might be difficult to remember later in life, the whole complex of related experiences must manifest in dreams with an emotional equivalent to the original experiences. Ironic that the conscious ego was ever dependent on anything for its existence and determining it's characteristics, given that the ego likes to feel that there is no other force directing its thoughts and behavior, no matter how benevolent it may be.

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Sam presents a good point. Early childhood memory is something research has found to be very impressive. It was once thought infants had a limited capacity to learn. Now we know better.

As for early life traumatic experiences. They become unconscious and may not be found in conscious memory. But the influences are still there. The brain has this capacity at early stages in life to comprehend actions and experiences. Early childhood experiences become the foundation for much of the adult personality, the influences of those years being imprinted in the brain. My earliest memories are from the age of 4 or 5 but many others retain memories at even early ages. My belief is that such memories are the result of energized emotional experiences and not benign references that have any value. My earliest memory was about my father. Of course much of my childhood experiences were without his presence and guidance in my life. That earliest memory is confused to a great degree but I sense it was like many other experiences I had in association with my father. My seeking his approval, love and acceptance but him never being there to give either. After many years of 'inner' searching I now know that lack of father relationship had a big influence on my actions as a young adult. And I see the same experiences in the many posted dreams here at the Dream Forum. Such lack of parental nourishment doesn't necessarily make a person but it does push them in a certain direction. The old saying 'like father like son' is true to very great degree. Imitation alone proves that. Imprinting on a young psyche only enhances the possibilities/probabilities.

For those who dismiss such possibilities, and there are many who do, I have but one thing to say. You most likely have something in your childhood that makes you think/feel that way. I suggest therapy.

Jerry

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I spent almost twenty years of my life working very closely with severely abused children. I have been away from that work for over twenty years so I am very out of date with the modern research but my experience absolutely coincides with Jerry's view.

The great difficulty with children severely traumatised before they are three is that although much of their brain is working well, they have yet to acquire the language skills to understand what has happened to them in words, and so it is very difficult when they are older (and acting out) to access the feelings they may have or had. Even when using drawings or puppets or other non-verbal methods, in the end you end up having to use words in most cases, and they, bless them, do not have the conceptual/verbal hooks on which to hang their fear and their shame. It's difficult, at least I found it so. The most damaging abuse is neglect, it leaves children with nothing, not even anger, they are just empty souls. It very hard to fill them up, particularly as one of the holes in them is usually trust.

Intelligent creative children do dream and can talk about their dreams but it seems harder for other children, both to remember their dreams and then to put them into words.

It is my strong belief that one loving competent parent needs to be home full-time until the youngest child reaches five. Not a fashionable point of view, I know. But you know, you really don't need all that crap that a second income allows you to buy, you really don't! And guess what? You'll have strong children who love you. Cool, hunh. Oh and another thing: send them to a good Montessori elementary school.

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David,
Thanks for sharing your experiences. It is so important that we understand the infant years have so much influence on later life. Your statement 'It is my strong belief that one loving competent parent needs to be home full-time until the youngest child reaches five' is correct. Unfortunately in the world as it is so few children have that luxury.

I am happy to say my two youngest grandchildren have the privilege of a full-time parent {their mother} saying at home with them. It is one reason came out of part time work and to put so much time into my day job, managing the fence construction business full-time for my son here in Tennessee while he starts up the business in Orlando. It is not many who can afford to have one parent at home, the cost of living as great as it is. And it gets more difficult with time, the social dragon being so controlled by corporate America and putting so much on the rest of us. If it weren't for my belief that we will do ourselves in environmentally I would be so afraid of the corporate 'monster' do it to us. Of course we are experiencing both evils with the oil spill in the Gulf.

Who would have 'thunk' such a thing would ever happen. No one except those of us who knew it could, and eventually would.
No more offshore drilling.

Had to get that off my chest.

Jerry

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So many interesting points Jerry.

I think that one parent being home is more often a choice than we want to say it is. We have become so inoculated to the idea that we need two or three cars, designer clothes, processed food etc etc. You know the list I am sure. Maybe I am naive. Parenting these days is an act of subversion and rebellion to teach our children they have the choices that the corporate world spends billions trying to strip away from them. Just be good producer-consumers!

Yes, the oil spills are scary. When that oil gets into the Gulf Stream, which it seems it almost certainly will, I have no idea what the damage may be. I really don't.

But for all that, the world is filled with good people. In the time I lived in the USA, I learned that Americans are some of the most generous and kind-hearted people I could hope to meet.

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David,
True, Americans are kind and caring people. But we are so material driven we are so focused on that aspect of consumerism that we are beginning to lack the ability to think and do for ourselves. Corporate American knows and understands this and exploits it at every chance it can make a profit from it. Perhaps one of the most obvious is the fast food we eat {which has slowly but surely infiltrated the rest of the world and caused serious health problems where there was none previously}. They know if food tastes good we will consume it without end and the salt and fat content has affected our health to the point that obesity in children, and adults, is at an epidemic. And the way they go about pushing it on us, Burger King and Hardees developing and selling even bigger and badder burgers, is shameful. But it is the lack of control and giving in to the desires of the 'body' that Americans are least capable of over coming. Add to that the lack of proper parental 'nutrition' at an early age and you begin to see a people who are becoming so dependent on outer influences we are unable to be our 'true' selves no matter how much we may wish to be.

As for the oil spill. The whole world is so dependent on oil we can not separate ourselves from the addiction and the harm it is causing to the environment, let alone the dependency economically it causes us to have from outside resources. BP and the whole industry is about making profits. Stockholders are more important than people and the environment. And with this insane 'Tea Party' mentality {even though is really small in real numbers} the ability of Americans to focus on reality is lacking and becoming worse.

Then we add to the mix of children not being raised with the proper love, acceptance and a feeling of closeness to the parents. The young mind naturally looks for something to grasp on to, and cling to, and with the development of the amazing electronic devices our children are becoming addicted to IPhone, electronic games {full of violence and sex} and could very well be losing whatever creative instincts they naturally possessed. Not that I am against all such devices, I would be lost without my computer. But are we raising a generation of dependent children who will become so consumed by outer influences that they lose all contact with the inner resources? I think part of my responsibility of being a webmaster is to direct those young minds {as well as anyone else I can influence} to the inner world. We are a race of natural influences and if we lose touch with the inner resources then we are bound to lose contact with those outer resources that gave us life to begin with. And those outer resources are within nature, and the environment we are slowly but surely destroying so we can feed or dependencies of the desires of the 'body'.

I was once such a person to a great degree. So I find myself at odds with my old self. But perhaps that is what should happen when we age. Become wiser and more influenced by the inner resources and less by the outer.
You have much experience on this earth and know better how the world has become a tool of the 'social dragon'. Your escape from the bounds of the dragon is a story we all can benefit. I greatly appreciate the time you give at the Dream Forum.

Jerry

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Add that to our collective blank stare at the avalanche of human population - 250 million 0 c.e. - 1 bilion finally at 1800 c.e. and only took another 30 years, 1930, to reach 2 billion. The world at almost 7 billion now is twice as populated it was when Kennedy became president in 63 or whatever exact year it was.

Maybe we should immigrate to corporate tax exiled communist china, where the free market can run without the burden of democracy. I heard Exxon paid No federal taxes last year and funneled all their record 45billion profit to wholly owned subsidiaries in places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, China, the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, Vietnam, where taxes for corporations are almost non-existent. I don't see entirely why people are so worried about Mexican's coming here and taking all our skilled jobs that have already been outsourced to other third world countries. It seems like it's only made possible by our trade policy which has stopped laying 25% import tarrifs on foreign made goods in order to protect its domestic economy. Of course it's another example of the attitude that we are here for the corporations, and not that they are here for us.

We are raising our baby at home, my wife raises her. I only make 30,000 a year, and I'm not blaming monopoly capitalism or investments in foreign workforces on my limitations, but I would blame the 10% unemployment rate on it. I still have a lot of ego checking to do, and I often have dreams of my talk radio guru, THom Hartmann and progressive from Portland, I dream that he sometimes behaves selfishly or something, very compensatory to a one sided ego dominance. THat said, I think there's plenty of ego dominance to go around among the tea party ranks which was willed into being by American's for Prosperity, a think tank funded by some of the richest and most powerful people and corporations in existance, like Dick Army and the Koch brothers, OILigarchs. They hate paying taxes but they have no problem with a couple thousand bankers paying themselves 148 billion in bonuses after they were bailed out, not a whisper. Do they realize that before Reagan, taxes on anything anyone made beyond 3million dollars, was taxed at 75%, in order to prevent the emergence of the kind of aritstocratic and dynastic wealth that the Revolutionary War was an open revolt against?

I think jung was slightly more aristocratic in his convictions than I would like to give him credit for. I read a seminar he hosted about Nietzche's Zarathustra in which he said that Rosevelt's New Deal was a kind of levelling down to the lowest common denominator. He did mention, however, the issue of the problem of regulating wall street spectulation.

The Texas board of Education, in their recent decision to rewrite American history, by taking out Jefferson and adding John Calvin, attempts to somehow redefine the meaning of the first amendment "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Apparently Christianity gets special treatment in affairs of political policy. This is so sad, I know a lot of school books come out of Texas, but I'm not gonna send my child off to learn a tea party manifesto, and if this is what is going to be taught in my kid's school, then maybe private school is the answer, like Montessori, which I'll have to look into a little more, or even home schooling, god forbid. Thanks for letting me show my intolerance for my own inferiorities.
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Jerry and Sam

You're right Sam. The unspoken problem (except by military strategists, which makes me uneasy) is there are just too many of us. It's the elephant in the room.

I agree with all that you and Jerry say but I don't want to get lost there either. Yes, capitalism has morphed (perhaps inevitably) into a machhine that gratifies the greed of the amoral, and yes we have been sold into the slavery that this creates. It is a slavery created not only by the powerful but by ourselves. The way out of this slavery is the way in, the inward journey, the journey of the inward warrior, and as these webpages so eloquently show, this is not an easy trip.

Kia kaha, brothers!

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