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The Continuum Concept - Jean Liedloff |
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(Jean Liedloff,1986)
Jean Liedloff, an American writer, spent two and a half years in the South American jungle living with Stone Age Indians. The experience demolished her Western preconceptions of how we should live and led her to a radically different view of what human nature really is. She offers a new understanding of how we have lost much of our natural well-being and shows us practical ways to regain it for our children and for ourselves.
After five visits to the Yequana of the Amazon jungle in South America, Jean Liedloff wrote a book about her belief that the mental, emotional and physical vitality of the Yequana was due to their child rearing practices. The Yequana, unlike most Western mothers, were in constant physical contact with their babies until the babies started moving around on their own. By day mothers carried their babies in slings. This way the baby had access to the breast and could nurse at will. By night each family shared a single sleeping place, allowing the baby's attachment to the mother to proceed uninterrupted. Liedloff noticed that the babies were not the center of their mothers' attention. The mothers would stop and lovingly address the baby's signals; otherwise they went about tending to household, village and social needs, and the infant was simply along for the ride. She noted, too, that Yequana parents and other adults didn't initiate contact or activity with their children after babyhood, but were readily available when the children needed them. Children spent most of their time with their peers, as did the adults with theirs. Because Yequana parents placed such great faith in a child's instinct for self- preservation, the children enjoyed a great deal of freedom and displayed a corresponding level of autonomous functioning rarely seen in children in the West.
The Continuum Concept, has been translated from its original English version into numerous other languages and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies throughout the world. "
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