‘Valential (Lat: valere, to be strong, to be well, to be worth) love’ is a sociological theory-concept grounded in the life-worlds of flourishing 12-14 year olds in an eastern Spanish city.
It refers to the triple bi-directional ‘beams’ of tutelary-formative energy in which they are held and enabled to become who they are: beams experienced in their relations with family, with peer group and with school*. The theory-concept is properly sociological in that the focal issue is how the most fortunate children experience positive developmental energy with all social institutions in which they are involved. Valential love is thus posited non-reductively as an achievement of the culture in constructing a cosmos/’world’ (Uexküll’s Umwelt) which evokes the self-creation (Polanyi’s ‘ontogenesis’) of hierarchically higher-level organisms: self-confident children.
The research from which this theory-concept has emerged aimed to elucidate why measured self-confidence (WHO 1996) among Spanish children was the highest in Europe, while Scottish children reported among the lowest. Funded by Spanish public health authorities, c.45 recorded interviews were carried out and transcribed by a local social worker. Selection of interviewees was by theoretical sampling stratified by attendance at three schools differentiated by socio-economic class of parents. The majority of interviewees were, by design, successful in school, well-liked by friends and from apparently happy homes. The design of the research being comparative (intended comparators Denmark and Scotland), data analysis has focused on the cultural level, asking ‘Is there an influence working above and across the family to produce such high levels of wellbeing in the children?’
The presentation will retrace the formulation of the theory-concept from the data, contextualising it in a Phase 5 (Checkland 1982) paradigm of public health, ‘self-sickening theory’ (Ryan 2001). ‘Valential love’ is a supra-individual field-level concept identifying a process-culture – a socio-ecology as a metamorphosing holon – of beneficent concern for each child, concrescently (Whitehead) integrated from the three most powerful sources in their life-world: family, school, and peer-group. This collective concern is distinguishable into three inter-penetrating modes:
- valuing: the child experiences themself as valued, obviously, but also has to evaluate/validate/give value to the world in which they are coming to be;
- connecting: bonds of mutual feeling/attachment are the conducting channels for the powerful energies of this life-stage as they continuously dissolve and re-create (Whitehead’s ‘creative advance”) the form of the child-system (the socio-ecology) as it metamorphoses into a thriving adolescent;
- organizing: life is lived forwards, humans are creatures of purpose. Keeping children motivated (e.g. for school-work) and future-building (e.g. doing age-appropriate things with suitable friends) emerges as fundamental to successful negotiation of the expansions/discontinuities/integrations of adolescence.
As interviewees described their lives, the form of an animating field-force keeping them connected, valued and purposeful could be sensed in the background, here construed as valential love. Predominantly the boundary conditions of this formative energy were maintained by parents (Bowlby’s ‘organizers’), under ideal conditions supported by a distributed system of ‘co-parenters’ (Ryan 1999) working to/improvising on the same (child-specific) script. The children themselves – ¡categorically! – are not programed robots, but rather self-creative agents of their own tomorrow. Most played a significant part in determining the process of their relationships, demonstrating high levels of insight, mutuality and commitment as friends, pupils, and family members. As sunlight becomes a tree, so they transformed love into power.
_____________________
* A ‘think-with’ may help here: a real-world model of this energy field would be the core elements of a colour CRT TV, three electron guns separately emitting beams of electrons, each beam electrically charged to create the colour frequency of red, green or blue, the three beams integrated/transformed into human-readable colour pictures by/at a correspondingly structured ‘colour-sensitive’ screen. Analogically speaking, ‘valential love’ is a theory of the production of the whole picture, not of the gun, the beam, or the screen. As TVs presume viewers who can read a picture, so ‘valential love’ presumes readers who can recognise a child. Irreducibility is a key issue.
21 March 2008/1 November 2006 Please, no further distribution or public discussion
