Dibs: In Search of Self

by Virginia M. Axline

Out again into the night where the dulled light obscures the decisive lines of reality and casts over the immediate world a kindly vagueness. Now, it is not a matter of all black and white. It is not a matter of “this is it” because there is no glaring light of unequivocal evidence in which one sees a thing as it is and one knows the answers. The darkened sky gives growing room for softened judgments, for suspended indictments, for emotional hospitality.

A child is only confused by questions that have been answered by someone else before he is asked.

As I left that first play session with Dibs I could understand why the teachers and the other staff members could not write him off the books as a hopeless failure. I had respect for his inner strength and capacity. He was a child of great courage.

When the initiative is left up to the individual, he will select the ground upon which he feels his greatest security.

He needed to develop strength to cope with his world, but that strength had to come from within him and he had to experience personally his ability to cope with his world as it was. Any meaningful changes for Dibs would have to come from within him. We could not hope to make over his external world.

“You, too, feel that gladness, don’t you, Dibs?” I said, after a while. “It is a joy I would not want to lose,” he replied. “I come with gladness into this room.”

We never know how much of what we present to children is accepted by them, each in his own way, and becomes some part of the experiences with which they learn to cope with their worlds.

Sometimes it is very difficult to keep firmly in mind the fact that the parents, too, have reasons for what they do — have reasons, locked in the depths of their personalities, for their inability to love, to understand, to give of themselves to their children.

Probably she and her husband had learned early in their lives that their keen intelligences could be erected as a shield around them, could insulate them from emotions that they had never learned to understand and use constructively.