The subject matter of the next Chapter is Systems Theory and I will mention it briefly here.
When I develop a skill, in addition to a cause having a particular effect, I will notice that my increased skill level will change me, and will change the relationship that I have with others in my environment.
For example the child who masters the skill of cycling will have far more independence which will cause parents to both enjoy the experiences that the child’s new found independence brings and worry about her safety on the road.
The child who masters art or drawing will bring pride to his parents and perhaps awaken an interest in art in a grandparent that had been long dormant. (The interest in art, that is, not the grandparent).
So thinking systemically, it would be virtually impossible to regard children learning to cycle, or knit, or to develop skills in languages or art, as stand-alone events that affect nothing else around them.
Similarly a teenager may master a skill that might be very undesirable in the eyes of parents (such as rolling a joint or telling lies very convincingly) and this will, in turn, cause parents to learn new skills to limit the potential harm of such actions on both the teenager and the family at large, e.g. younger brothers and sisters.
As parents try and adapt to what they perceive as danger, the new skills that they learn will probably involve negotiating, compromising, bargaining, and developing extra vigilance that they did not need when the child was younger. The result of the application of the new skills, (i.e. the cause) has the effect of steering the teenager through the rocky road of adolescence to being a mature adult.
Of course the exact same thing happens if we, as parents, observe a trait that we consider to be desirable. The skills we might learn may be an appreciation of something with which we were previously unfamiliar and had no knowledge of (e.g. sport, music, art etc.) and perhaps it may spark an interest in such matters.
Once again the cause of us being interested in new things has the effect of encouraging our child as well as perhaps opening up new areas of interest for ourselves that we didn’t know were out there, or in which we might have some potential.
So throughout my life I constantly learn new skills, put them into practice, achieve a certain degree of mastery and influence those around me as they adapt their lives to my new skill, and I am in turn influenced by the skills that others around me learn and put into practice.
As I mentioned above, these processes will be described in the following posts and more particularly in the next Chapter on Systems Theory.