Posted by
G Murphy Donovan on Wednesday, September 09, 2009 12:00:00 AM
At
the outset, let me explain my bias. I hate gerunds; and, I don’t care much for
people who use them, those who take perfectly good nouns or turn them into
verbs. Like euphemisms, gerunds obscure rather than illuminate; or worse still,
are coined to impress not express. Indeed, many gerunds are nothing more than specialized
jargon; code speak among the initiates. The education and psychology
professions are especially fond of gerunds, words like “parenting”.
We
do many things to and for our children; we feed them, we cloth them, we bath
them, we play with them, we change their knickers, we train them (as in
toilet), we teach them (as in reading, writing, and arithmetic), we try to
develop good morals by example, and we pray daily that they don’t grow up to be
serial killers or socialists. Pardon any redundancies.
None of this rich
context is captured by the word “parenting”. Parenting conveys two meanings;
either your plumbing works or you have a good lawyer. Any idiot can be a parent.
Adding an “ing” to what you do to your kids will not make you a good one.
It
doesn’t take a village and certainly it doesn’t take government at any level.
Raising children requires the deuce that produced, leavened by common sense.
The first full measure of devotion is time – your time.
If
we must have a verb form, “raise” or rear are much more descriptive terms.
Raise suggests that we take something that is less and make it more.
Surely we all
hope that all children will grow to become competent, functional adults. Yet,
as the need to “raise” suggests, the beginning is not auspicious. Indeed, an
infant is a loud, dependant, demanding, inarticulate, mean spirited, pink mass
of wet libido – and they don’t smell that hot either. Or if we must use some
psychobabble; a kid is Id wrapped in a very annoying ego. They eat, they make
noise, they defecate, make more noise; and then, thank God, they sleep. And
when they wake up again, they want you to change their napkins. In the naked
interlude between wiped and rewrapped, they might pee on you – and laugh.
The
road from the joys of infancy to butcher, baker, or candlestick maker is lumpy
and long. No mammal or primate in the animal kingdom spends more time in the
womb or more time tied to apron strings.
Nonetheless, maturity is the process
of moving from me to thee. Socialization is the process of going from taking a
dump in your diaper, to sending your dump to a treatment plant. Education is
the process of balancing your accounts between your ears instead of on your
fingers and toes. Culture is the process of being able to distinguishing
between Botox and Beaujolais. In life, process contains all the meaning we will
ever need; we’re all headed for the same place. How we get there, competence if
you will, is what makes us different – that and lipstick. Thank you, Sarah.
All
of which brings us to the subject at hand, another “how to” book on raising
children; Unconditional Parenting; Moving from Rewards and Punishments
to Love and Reason by Alfie Kohn. We have already dealt with the title now
let’s see if there’s any thing to salvage in the subtitle and text.
We
might think of the whole process of maturation as a process of diminishing
pleasure and increasing pain. No one
wants to walk the dog before bed, but it’s less painful than scraping a wet
pile off that nice Persian rug in the hall. Here we are talking about the pain
for gain or achievement, not necessarily a bad thing in itself.
Kohn
is not too crazy about any process of rewards and punishments; he thinks such
things are about manipulation and control, as if control were a bad thing.
The
fatal assumption here is utopian. Control is what pack animals do. Civilization
is the process of establishing norms; controlling behavior and manipulating the
environment. Life is a compromise between what we want and what we need. The
end game is simple; do you want your kids to live in your basement with a cell
phone, a video game, and an I-Pod or do you need them to get out to the mall
like the rest of us?
A
world without rewards and punishment is a lot like scoreless sports. Indeed, a
baseball analogy might help.
Not long
ago I watched several kids in front of my house attempting to play whiffle
ball; one was an older lad who was here for the summer. The visitor didn’t seem
to know much about the rules. When he finally hit the ball, he ran to third,
reasoning and arguing that the rules were “stupid” because third was closer to
home than first or second. I couldn’t fault his logic. He also argued that a
foul ball could not be a strike because you are already punished by not being
allowed to run to first. No double jeopardy in his version of baseball.
As
the locals became more frustrated, I tried to intervene as an umpire or adult
arbiter of the rules, to no avail. That idyllic summer evening ended badly with
most of kids muttering their way home while the visiting kid complained loudly
that no one liked him, no one wanted to play with him.
Clearly
he came from a place where argumentation and tedious rationalizations were the
order of the day. All interactions with peers and adults were some kind of
negotiation where anything arbitrary might be skewered on his brand of logic. By this metric, he was successful. There were
no arbitrary rules or restrictions, no give and take – and apparently no
friends.
He
was born this way, as are we all. His problem now is arrested development. He
still thinks he is the center of the universe; someone is still changing his
knickers. He has not even started the trip from me to thee. His universe has
been padded with acceptance or “unconditional love” and his mind given over to tedious
arguments.
For
him, reason is not just a tool; it is an instrument of torture. Every contact
with an arbitrary world requires some semi chaotic confrontation. His ego has
been cultivated at the expense of his character.
At the advanced age of eleven,
he does not know that life is a team sport. With no boundaries at home; everything
outside that bubble is an obstacle.
This
is Mr. Kohn’s new world, unconditional love and reason triumphant over rewards
and punishment. Unfortunately, the fact that you might have unconditional
affection for someone or something does not make them loveable – certainly not
for the rest of us. The real value of “unconditional” support is when it is
granted by peers not indulgent parents.
Kohn’s
understanding of reason is another cipher. He seems to confuse it with
collaboration, discussion, or consultation – as if these things were
synonymous. Reason is rule based thinking, nothing more; philosophers from
Aristotle to Pascal to Marx have understood this. Reason is not the discussion
of alternatives; it is the application of rules. Balancing your checkbook and
calculating the load bearing capacity of a toilet seat are examples. If you
believe the rules are arbitrary, you do so at your peril. We live in rule based
societies; our language, grammar, laws, science, religion, and even our manners
are governed by rules. We do not belch in a quiet church nor do we pick our
nose at the sushi bar.
The
author also seems to be more than a revisionist on the subject. He not only
believes that children can reason, he seems to think that by some magic kids
can reason their way to the correct
answer with more support and less control. Someone must have slept through
Piaget.
Almost
every society on the face of the earth has some version of a coming of age
ritual. The significance of these rituals is the recognition that children are
not adults. Kids require experience and training before they are burdened with
responsibility and choices. This age varies from place to place, but for the
most part, the spread is from eight to fourteen years of age. In many cultures,
it is called “the age of reason”. Other echoes of this universal wisdom are
legal driving, drinking, voting ages and at least ten years of mandatory
schooling?
The
purpose of all this tradition and attendant controls is the near universal
belief that youngsters must learn to follow before they can solo - or be
expected to lead. Nobody follows the
nitwit who goes to third before rounding first and second. Parents who
encourage such misguided independence and mischief ought to be given a time
out.
The pee-wee league may give every player a trophy, but in an adult world, rewards
are earned.
Allowing
children to make their own choices, when most are clearly not equipped to do so,
is another nugget of new age nonsense. Choice is one of the rewards of success.
Achievement, not affection, is the arbiter of choices, for children and adults.
If you are good at something, you get to choose all the rewards that success
begets. Only an idiot will give a good
grade, a place on a sports team, a good job or a promotion just to make you
feel better.
Being good at something is more important than feeling good. No
kid is well served by parents who worry more about feelings than competence. In
the end all losers feel bad about themselves. Love is not enough.
And
feeling bad about your self is not necessarily a bad thing. No pain, no gain;
as the jocks are wont to say. Indeed, regret is the engine of progress. Without
regrets no change is possible. If you can’t follow the rules, if you don’t
learn to play, the ump gets to say “out” or toss your sorry butt off the field –
talk about feeling bad.
Kohn
also tells us that “because I said so” is never a good reason to give the rug
rats; we must be less controlling and more supportive – less “to them” and more
“with them”. To this we should all say
balderdash; or maybe two other four letter words would do. Consistency is not
just the hobgoblin of little minds; that and repetition is the foundation of
all learning. For those who don’t believe in consistency and control, I
recommend story time.
Tell
or read stories to your children. After a while give them a choice of what they would like to hear.
Nine out of ten times kids will ask for their favorite, over and over. Try
changing Goldie to a brunette. You will be met with a barrage of indignation;
the kid wants to hear the original, not some revision.
Ask
your children what they would like to eat, if its buttered noodles or macaroni
and cheese, chances are he or she will eat it seven days a week if allowed. Left
to their own devices many youngsters develop a kind of gastronomic autism, the
symptom of which is the ready made litany of things they “will not eat”.
Unrestricted choice is the villain behind every autocrat of the breakfast
table.
Remember
when the little dears learned a new word or sound and you had to hear it a
thousand times a day. On such days mothers contemplate the virtues of
vasectomies.
Kids
need controls and they actually seek consistency and predictability; like
Linus’s blanket; it’s a comfort. If you don’t give or create sensible
boundaries, they will create their own.
I
know a guy with two and a half degrees who is still living with his parents and
two birds; he’s fifty years of age. Success for this guy will be two dead
parents; and the fruits of their
labors. He created his own boundaries.
The
number of recognized and diagnosable psychological aliments has grown a hundred
fold since 1950. Indeed, many practitioners claim the number of autistic kids
is one in a hundred and the number of children with a “deficit” disorder of
some sort is one in ten. Maybe our kids are catching these things from public
toilet seats, or maybe it is something closer to home. Or maybe today’s
behavioral problem is tomorrow’s pathology.
This
new age epidemic of juvenile neurosis suggests that medical science has given
us longer life just so we might be tortured by psychiatry. Yet, the aim of psychology,
like litigation, is to keep the ball in play. You may win or lose; therapists
and litigators get paid either way. And the pharmacies are doing nicely too,
thank you. Those who shun “controls” for their little darlings seldom reject
the chemical variety. Indeed, “controlled substance” is now our most infamous
oxymoron.
Contrary
to what Kohn and others suggest; rewards, punishments, and controls for
children are good things. Indeed, they are pillars of civilization. Flooding a
child’s world with choices is not a good thing; most kids do not have the
experience or maturity to deal with too many options. And choice and freedom
are not synonymous; true freedom comes from success. Indeed, success equates to
options. Feeling good is a really a function of being good – at something. An
immature kid, with too many choices and no controls, can only become one thing;
a lord of the flies.