12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (21 page)

Consistent correction of such action indicates the limits of acceptable aggression to the child. Its absence merely heightens curiosity—so the child will hit and bite and kick, if he is aggressive and dominant, until something indicates a limit. How hard can I hit Mommy? Until she objects. Given that, correction is better sooner than later (if the desired end result of the parent is not to be hit). Correction also helps the child learn that hitting others is a sub-optimal social strategy. Without that correction, no child is going to undergo the effortful process of organizing and regulating their impulses, so that those impulses can coexist, without conflict, within the psyche of the child, and in the broader social world. It is no simple matter to organize a mind.

My son was particularly ornery when he was a toddler. When my daughter was little, I could paralyze her into immobility with an evil glance. Such an intervention had no effect at all on my son. He had my wife (who is no pushover) stymied at the dinner table by the time he was nine months of age. He fought her for control over the spoon. “Good!” we thought. We didn’t want to feed him one more minute than necessary anyway. But the little blighter would only eat three or four mouthfuls. Then he would play. He would stir his food around in his bowl. He would drop bits of it over the high chair table top, and watch as it fell on the floor below. No problem. He was exploring. But
then he wasn’t eating enough. Then, because he wasn’t eating enough, he wasn’t sleeping enough. Then his midnight crying was waking his parents. Then they were getting grumpy and out of sorts. He was frustrating his mother, and she was taking it out on me. The trajectory wasn’t good.

After a few days of this degeneration, I decided to take the spoon back. I prepared for war. I set aside sufficient time. A patient adult can defeat a two-year-old, hard as that is to believe. As the saying goes: “Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.” This is partly because time lasts forever, when you’re two. Half an hour for me was a week for my son. I assured myself of victory. He was stubborn and horrible. But I could be worse. We sat down, face to face, bowl in front of him. It was
High Noon
. He knew it, and I knew it. He picked up the spoon. I took it from him, and spooned up a delicious mouthful of mush. I moved it deliberately towards his mouth. He eyed me in precisely the same manner as the playground foot monster. He curled his lips downward into a tight frown, rejecting all entry. I chased his mouth around with the spoon as he twisted his head around in tight circles.

But I had more tricks up my sleeve. I poked him in the chest, with my free hand, in a manner calculated to annoy. He didn’t budge. I did it again. And again. And again. Not hard—but not in a manner to be ignored, either. Ten or so pokes letter, he opened his mouth, planning to emit a sound of outrage. Hah! His mistake. I deftly inserted the spoon. He tried, gamely, to force out the offending food with his tongue. But I know how to deal with that, too. I just placed my forefinger horizontally across his lips. Some came out. But some was swallowed, too. Score one for Dad. I gave him a pat on the head, and told him that he was a good boy. And I meant it. When someone does something you are trying to get them to do, reward them. No grudge after victory. An hour later, it was all over. There was outrage. There was some wailing. My wife had to leave the room. The stress was too much. But food was eaten by child. My son collapsed, exhausted, on my chest. We had a nap together. And he liked me a lot better when he woke up than he had before he was disciplined.

This was something I commonly observed when we went head to head—and not only with him. A little later we entered into a babysitting swap with another couple. All the kids would get together at one house. Then one pair of parents would go out to dinner, or a movie, and leave the other pair to watch the children, who were all under three. One evening, another set of parents joined us. I was unfamiliar with their son, a large, strong boy of two.

“He won’t sleep,” said his father. “After you put him to bed, he will crawl out of his bed, and come downstairs. We usually put on an Elmo video and let him watch it.”

“There’s no damn way I’m rewarding a recalcitrant child for unacceptable behaviour,” I thought, “and I’m certainly not showing anyone any Elmo video.” I always hated that creepy, whiny puppet. He was a disgrace to Jim Henson’s legacy. So reward-by-Elmo was not on the table. I didn’t say anything, of course. There is just no talking to parents about their children—until they are ready to listen.

Two hours later, we put the kids to bed. Four of the five went promptly to sleep—but not the Muppet aficionado. I had placed him in a crib, however, so he couldn’t escape. But he could still howl, and that’s exactly what he did. That was tricky. It was good strategy on his part. It was annoying, and it threatened to wake up all the other kids, who would then also start to howl. Score one for the kid. So, I journeyed into the bedroom. “Lie down,” I said. That produced no effect. “Lie down,” I said, “or I will lay you down.” Reasoning with kids isn’t often of too much use, particularly under such circumstances, but I believe in fair warning. Of course, he didn’t lie down. He howled again, for effect.

Kids do this frequently. Scared parents think that a crying child is always sad or hurt. This is simply not true. Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying. Careful analysis of the musculature patterns of crying children has confirmed this.
¹⁰⁰
Anger-crying and fear-or-sadness crying do not look the same. They also don’t sound the same, and can be distinguished with careful attention. Anger-crying is often an act of dominance, and should be dealt with as such. I lifted him up, and laid him down. Gently. Patiently. But firmly. He got up.
I laid him down. He got up. I laid him down. He got up. This time, I laid him down, and kept my hand on his back. He struggled, mightily, but ineffectually. He was, after all, only one-tenth my size. I could take him with one hand. So, I kept him down and spoke calmly to him and told him he was a good boy and that he should relax. I gave him a soother and pounded gently on his back. He started to relax. His eyes began to close. I removed my hand.

He promptly got to his feet. I was impressed. The kid had spirit! I lifted him up, and laid him down, again. “Lie down, monster,” I said. I pounded his back gently some more. Some kids find that soothing. He was getting tired. He was ready to capitulate. He closed his eyes. I got to my feet, and headed quietly and quickly to the door. I glanced back, to check his position, one last time. He was back on his feet. I pointed my finger at him. “Down, monster,” I said, and I meant it. He went down like a shot. I closed the door. We liked each other. Neither my wife nor I heard a peep out of him for the rest of the night.

“How was the kid?” his father asked me when he got home, much later that night. “Good,” I said. “No problem at all. He’s asleep right now.”

“Did he get up?” said his father.

“No,” I said. “He slept the whole time.”

Dad looked at me. He wanted to know. But he didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell.

Don’t cast pearls before swine, as the old saying goes. And you might think that’s harsh. But training your child not to sleep, and rewarding him with the antics of a creepy puppet? That’s harsh too. You pick your poison, and I’ll pick mine.

Modern parents are terrified of two frequently juxtaposed words: discipline and punish. They evoke images of prisons, soldiers and jackboots. The distance between disciplinarian and tyrant or punishment and torture is, indeed, easily traversed.
Discipline
and
punish
must be handled with care. The fear is unsurprising. But both are necessary.
They can be applied unconsciously or consciously, badly or well, but there is no escaping their use.

It’s not that it’s impossible to discipline with reward. In fact, rewarding good behaviour can be very effective. The most famous of all behavioural psychologists, B.F. Skinner, was a great advocate of this approach. He was expert at it. He taught pigeons to play ping-pong, although they only rolled the ball back and forth by pecking it with their beaks.
¹⁰¹
But they were pigeons. So even though they played badly, it was still pretty good. Skinner even taught his birds to pilot missiles during the Second World War, in Project Pigeon (later Orcon).
¹⁰²
He got a long way, before the invention of electronic guidance systems rendered his efforts obsolete.

Skinner observed the animals he was training to perform such acts with exceptional care. Any actions that approximated what he was aiming at were immediately followed by a reward of just the right size: not small enough to be inconsequential, and not so large that it devalued future rewards. Such an approach can be used with children, and works very well. Imagine that you would like your toddler to help set the table. It’s a useful skill. You’d like him better if he could do it. It would be good for his (shudder) self-esteem. So, you break the target behaviour down into its component parts. One element of setting the table is carrying a plate from the cupboard to the table. Even that might be too complex. Perhaps your child has only been walking a few months. He’s still wobbly and unreliable. So, you start his training by handing him a plate and having him hand it back. A pat on the head could follow. You might turn it into a game. Pass with your left. Switch to your right. Circle around your back. Then you might give him a plate and take a few steps backward so that he has to traverse a few steps before giving it back. Train him to become a plate-handling virtuoso. Don’t leave him trapped in his klutz-dom.

You can teach virtually anyone anything with such an approach. First, figure out what you want. Then, watch the people around you like a hawk. Finally, whenever you see anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in (hawk, remember) and deliver a reward. Your daughter has been very reserved since she became a teenager. You wish she would
talk more. That’s the target: more communicative daughter. One morning, over breakfast, she shares an anecdote about school. That’s an excellent time to pay attention. That’s the reward. Stop texting and listen. Unless you don’t want her to tell you anything ever again.

Parental interventions that make children happy clearly can and should be used to shape behaviour. The same goes for husbands, wives, co-workers and parents. Skinner, however, was a realist. He noted that use of reward was very difficult: the observer had to attend patiently until the target spontaneously manifested the desired behaviour, and then reinforce. This required a lot of time, and a lot of waiting, and that’s a problem. He also had to starve his animals down to three-quarters of their normal body weight before they would become interested enough in food reward to truly pay attention. But these are not the only shortcomings of the purely positive approach.

Negative emotions, like their positive counterparts, help us learn. We need to learn, because we’re stupid and easily damaged. We can die. That’s not good, and we don’t feel good about it. If we did, we would seek death, and then we would die. We don’t even feel good about dying if it only
might
happen. And that’s all the time. In that manner, negative emotions, for all their unpleasantness, protect us. We feel hurt and scared and ashamed and disgusted so we can avoid damage. And we’re susceptible to feeling such things a lot. In fact, we feel more negative about a loss of a given size than we feel good about the same-sized gain. Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope.

Emotions, positive and negative, come in two usefully differentiated variants. Satisfaction (technically, satiation) tells us that what we did was good, while hope (technically, incentive reward) indicates that something pleasurable is on the way. Pain hurts us, so we won’t repeat actions that produced personal damage or social isolation (as loneliness is also, technically, a form of pain). Anxiety makes us stay away from hurtful people and bad places so we don’t have to feel pain. All these emotions must be balanced against each other, and carefully judged in context, but they’re all required to keep us alive and thriving. We therefore do our children a disservice by failing to use whatever is
available to help them learn, including negative emotions, even though such use should occur in the most merciful possible manner.

Skinner knew that threats and punishments could stop unwanted behaviours, just as reward reinforces what is desirable. In a world paralyzed at the thought of interfering with the hypothetically pristine path of natural child development, it can be difficult even to discuss the former techniques. However, children would not have such a lengthy period of natural development, prior to maturity, if their behaviour did not have to be shaped. They would just leap out of the womb, ready to trade stocks. Children also cannot be fully sheltered from fear and pain. They are small and vulnerable. They don’t know much about the world. Even when they are doing something as natural as learning to walk, they’re constantly being walloped by the world. And this is to say nothing of the frustration and rejection they inevitably experience when dealing with siblings and peers and uncooperative, stubborn adults. Given this, the fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.

In the Disney movie
Sleeping Beauty
, the King and Queen have a daughter, the princess Aurora, after a long wait. They plan a great christening, to introduce her to the world. They welcome everyone who loves and honours their new daughter. But they fail to invite Maleficent (malicious, malevolent), who is essentially Queen of the Underworld, or Nature in her negative guise. This means, symbolically, that the two monarchs are overprotecting their beloved daughter, by setting up a world around her that has nothing negative in it. But this does not protect her. It makes her weak. Maleficent curses the princess, sentencing her to death at the age of sixteen, caused by the prick of a spinning wheel’s needle. The spinning wheel is the wheel of fate; the prick, which produces blood, symbolizes the loss of virginity, a sign of the emergence of the woman from the child.