This is not true. Every day, even the smallest babies are making decisions for themselves about their immediate needs and wants. Every mother knows the effect of their own baby's cry - that cry alone is the result of a decision-making process that the baby has initiated by him or herself. If a baby is in real distress, it is usually successful in communicating this fact to its carers. If a toddler is in pain or suffering dis-ease of any sort, again there will be signs that almost anyone can recognise. So it goes on through childhood, adolescence and into adulthood. Every one of us is fully able, at every stage of our lives, to recognise when something in our emotions or bodies is out of balance. Accepting that this recognition of pain, illness or dis-ease is a straightforward ability that we all have, enables us as parents to start thinking of our children, however young, in a slightly different way than we have probably been accustomed to. Knowing that any child can communicate with us to let us know when something is badly wrong, is a major step toward understanding how responsibility can relate to our children. That recognition of suffering, which might be through severe pain, or a long period of listlessness, for example, is their way of taking responsibility. As parents, we then have to decide what course of action will be best for them and what treatment, if any, needs to be sought. Perhaps the most important aspect of our behaviour is to be conscious of our own mental approach toward their illness. Children of all ages are very responsive to our thoughts and can be affected by our fears straightaway. As has been shown in this book, we have all been brought up to fear illness. There is no blame to attach to anyone for this, it has just been a fact of life for many centuries. As we carry out the ideas that we have suggested and begin to realise that each illness has a reason, we have started to ease the burden of fear on ourselves from each illness that we may get. Exactly the same rules can be applied to our children. Just as with adults, every child gets an illness for a reason. It can be an opportunity for both child and parent to learn. For example, a child may get an illness in order that its immune system can become stronger thus enabling it to fight off more dangerous viruses that may try to invade in the future. We see this working with a virus such as chickenpox which most of us get during childhood and which is generally not too serious. This is in order to avoid an attack in adulthood, when it often results in severe suffering. It is usually sufficient for the parent to give love and support, whilst allowing the child's immune system to deal with the virus. Another reason a child may get an infection or illness is in order to expel any toxins that its body may be housing. The source of these toxins may have been drugs such as antibiotics or vaccines, or environmental pollution. Because their energy bodies have not suffered as many attacks as the average adult's, children usually have much less to deal with before reaching the cause of dis-ease. The efficiency of their bodies' action can be very fast; that is why it is not unusual for a child to manifest a second illness soon after having drugs for an initially different symptom. The chemicals have suppressed the first symptom and the body must find another way of correcting that initial imbalance as well as trying to rid itself of the chemicals as quickly as possible before they cause too much damage. To know that this self-healing process is going on inside every single child, just as it is (usually in a less successful way) in every single adult, is to give us and our children a great deal of faith in our own ability to recover from illness. To give our children this faith, which we can do by finding out how they really feel - that is by listening to them - is to start them on the right path of taking responsibility in life for their own well-being. When they begin to realise that it is up to them to be honest about how they feel, they will experience a new strength and sense of responsibility that will stay with them throughout life. By expecting them to express their feelings openly and honestly, we will find that they will begin to do exactly that. The biggest problem that many of our children have is not their own view of illness, but the view of illness that we project onto them. Again this is true of children from the age of one month to the age of twenty-one years. We tend to project our own fears of illness and of our inability to cope; being young and easily influenced, they pick up on this fear and immediately find themselves unable to cope. After all, sensing that our parents are worried on our behalf can be disconcerting enough for an adult; for a child it can mean the difference between creating health and creating ill-health. For example, let us imagine a mother, who, though she may instinctively know that there is nothing seriously wrong with her baby, starts to become worried by the fact that she has just taken the baby's temperature and the thermometer has read over 101 degrees. At this stage, the baby may be showing little sign of discomfort. The father comes home and, upon hearing that his child has a temperature of 101, promptly takes the temperature again himself, gets the same reading and also starts to worry. This worry accumulates over the next hour as the temperature, which is measured often, shows no sign of coming down. The parents talk about this worrying condition in the baby's room, and the baby starts to react to the fear in their voices. Soon the baby becomes anxious as a direct result of the parents' concern. The baby starts to cry, the parents worry even more, and soon the cries turn to screams. The parents rush the baby out into the cold night for an emergency appointment at the surgery, all the time showing signs of fear which only increase the baby's distress. By the time they reach the doctor's surgery they are all in a highly anxious state. The doctor takes one look at the child and recommends a dose of paracetamol and a good night's sleep. As the mother's own instinct told her at the start, there was never anything seriously wrong. The parents immediately start to relax, the baby responds to their changed mood and stops crying. They all return home having gone through an alarming set of circumstances which, had the parents really paid attention to the baby's state of mind instead of to the thermometer, need never have happened. The authors believe that there is a tendency in our society to treat children with far less respect than they deserve. Children must be listened to. They hold the key to their own health and only need to be guided by us in the right direction for them to benefit from all the power that we have talked about in this book. Getting to know our children, building up a relationship with each of them to such a degree that they are not only our children but they are also our friends, is a vital part of enabling them to have good health. For it is only by understanding them fully that we can help them to help themselves. As our own self-knowledge and trust grows through processes such as meditation and lists of intention, so our confidence grows in our ability to give our children exactly what they need when they need it. Whether they need to be left alone for a while to rest, whether they need hugs and reassurance that nothing is really wrong, whether they need to visit a holistic practitioner or an orthodox doctor, the feelings that we have as a result of their state of mind will guide us towards the appropriate action. As visits to the doctor become necessary less often, our children will become accustomed to feeling in charge of their own bodies and their own health. If treatment is necessary, we would always recommend visiting a holistic practitioner first, because they will enable the continuation of this natural approach. In this way the child will be dealt with in a complete way that will remind both child and parents that every aspect of life is important in dealing with illness. The emphasis will remain on the person, not the dis-ease. When children are aware of this approach in conjunction with experiencing the security that their parents give them by demonstrating that what the children themselves are doing, saying and feeling is important, they do not lose the feeling of responsibility that is so vital to maintaining optimum health. It is never too late for any of us to start taking responsibility; it is certainly not too late to start teaching our children how to do the same thing. The body is there to be trusted and our children can be made aware of this from the start of their lives. We do them a grave injustice if we consider that their youth makes them incapable of accepting any type of responsibility, or makes them too untrustworthy to be telling - or to being told - the truth. By teaching them now what we as adults are just beginning to learn, we can help them to attract only those things in life that they want right from the start. By enabling them to create only what they want, they automatically avoid creating the things that they do not want. Dis-ease can play no part in a life full of ease. Case Study - Sophie Sophie is the authors' daughter. After a very traumatic birth, she had always enjoyed very good health apart from the usual minor coughs and colds. One day in the middle of March 1996, by which time Sophie was 3 years old, we noticed a little mucus discharging from her right ear. She was given the homeopathic remedy Aconite every two hours for two days. We observed her progress closely, ensuring that we did not show our distress at the unpleasant-smelling, copious discharge that her ear was steadily emitting. Our main focus was on Sophie's state of mind which was absolutely serene - she did not appear even to notice her ear. Four days elapsed during which the ear continued to discharge and Sophie behaved absolutely normally, oblivious to the ear. She was given another homeopathic remedy, Mercurius, five tablets for two days. Several more days elapsed before the discharge stopped smelling and became clearer in colour. A few more days after that it finally began to dry up. The condition lasted for a total of nearly two weeks, during which a large quantity of material had been emitted from her ear. At no stage throughout this period was she feverish, in pain or in any way suffering distress. She had a good appetite and played and slept normally. These factors alone kept us as parents confident about not needing to consult a medical doctor. We made a special effort to show no worry or fear as to the seriousness of her condition. We believe that this relaxed environment was crucial to Sophie's continued peace of mind and lack of fear, which in turn enabled her to self-heal successfully. This example also shows what happens when we allow toxins to come out instead of stopping them with drugs. Had we taken Sophie to the doctor at any stage of the process, she would almost certainly have been given antibiotics. These, doubtlessly, would have stopped the ear discharging very quickly. But where then would those toxins have gone? The body wanted them to escape which is why they were being ejected. We believe that if they had been trapped within the body, although sterilised by the antibiotics, they would have remained to cause problems in the future. Sophie's hearing, ears and general health have all been excellent from that time until going to print (a period of eleven months).