Brain Rules for Baby (32 page)

If you are trying to teach a pigeon to peck on a bar but delay the reinforcement by 10 seconds, you can do it all day and the pigeon won’t get it. Shrink that delay to 1 second, and the bird learns to peck the bar in 15 minutes. We don’t have the same brains as birds, but whether we are being punished or rewarded, we have remarkably similar reactions to delay. The closer the punishment is to the point of infraction, the faster the learning becomes. Researchers have actually measured this in real-world settings.

The punishment must be administered in the warm atmosphere of emotional safety. When kids feel secure even in the raw presence of parental correction, punishment has the most robust effect. This evolutionary need for safety is so powerful, the presence of the rules themselves often communicates safety to children. “Oh, they actually care about me”, is how the child (at almost any age in childhood) views it, even if he or she seems less than appreciative. If the kids don’t feel safe, the previous three ingredients are useless. They may even be harmful.

How do we know about these four guidelines? Mostly from a series of experiments whose name and design would be right at home in a Tim Burton retrospective. They are called the Forbidden Toy paradigms. If your preschooler were enrolled in an experiment in Ross Parke’s laboratory, she would experience something like this:

Your daughter is in a room with one researcher and two toys. One toy is very attractive, aching to be touched. The other is unattractive, one she’d never play with. As she reaches out to touch the attractive toy, she hears a loud, obnoxious buzzer. She touches it again and gets the same unpleasant noise. In some experiments, after the buzzer sounds, the researcher issues a stern admonishment not to touch the toy. The buzzer never goes off when your child touches the unattractive toy, however. And the researcher remains silent. Your daughter quickly learns the game: The attractive toy is
forbidden.

The researcher now leaves the room, but not the experiment, for your child is being recorded. What will she do when flying solo? Whether she chooses to obey depends on many variables, Parke discovered. Experimenters manipulated the timing between the touch and the buzzer, the script of the authority figure, the level of perceived aversion, the attractiveness of the toy. From literally hundreds such manipulations using this paradigm, researchers discovered the effects of severity, consistency, timing, and safety—the very guidelines that we just covered.

Want a simple way to make any form of punishment more effective, long-lasting, and internalized—everything a parent could ask for? It’s the third leg supporting our stool of moral awareness. It just takes one magic sentence, Parke found, added to any explicit command.

 

“Don’t touch the dog, or you’ll get a timeout.”

 

“Don’t touch the dog, or you’ll get a timeout. The dog has a bad temper, and I don’t want you to get bitten.”

 

To which sentence would
you
be more likely to positively respond? If you’re like the rest of the world, it is the second sentence. Parke was able to show that compliance rates soar when some kind of cognitive rationale is given to a child. The rationale consists of explaining why the rule—and its consequences—exist. (Works well with adults, too.) You can use this after a rule has been broken, too. Say your child yells in a quiet theater. The punishment would include an explanation of how his yelling affected other people and how he might offer amends, such as apologizing.

Parenting researchers call this inductive discipline, and it is incredibly powerful. The parents of kids with a mature moral attitude practice it. Psychologists even think they know why it works. Let’s say little Aaron has been punished for a moral infraction—stealing a pencil from classmate Jimmy—just before a test. The punishment was subtractive in nature—Aaron would have no dessert that night. But Aaron was not just punished and left alone. He was also given the magic follow-up sentence, involving explanations ranging from “How could Jimmy possibly complete his test without his pencil? to “Our family doesn’t steal.”

Here’s what happens to Aaron’s behavior when explanations are supplied consistently over the years:

Cue the applause of a million juvenile correction and law-enforcement professionals. Inductive parenting provides a fully adaptable, internalizable moral sensibility—congruent with inborn instincts. (Aaron also was instructed to write a note of apology, which he did the next day.)

Kids who are punished without explanation do not go through these steps. Parke found that such children only externalize their perceptions, saying, “I will get spanked if I do this again.” They were constantly on the lookout for an authority figure; it was the presence of an
external
credible threat that guided their behavior, not a reasoned response to an internal moral compass. Children who can’t get to step 2 can’t get to step 3, and they are one step closer to Daniel, the boy who stabbed a classmate in the cheek with a pencil.

The bottom line: Parents who provide clear, consistent boundaries
whose reasons for existence are always explained
generally produce moral kids.

Note that I said “generally.” Inductive discipline, powerful as it is, is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. The temperament of the child turns out to be a major factor. For toddlers possessed of a fearless and impulsive outlook on life, inductive discipline can be too weak. Kids with
a more fearful temperament may react catastrophically to the sharp correctives their fearless siblings shrug off. They need to be handled much more gently. All kids need rules, but every brain is wired differently, so you need to know your kid’s emotional landscapes inside and out—and adapt your discipline strategies accordingly.

Few issues are more incendiary than deciding whether spanking is going to be in your parenting tool kit. Many countries ban the practice outright. Ours doesn’t. More than two-thirds of Americans approve of the practice; 94 percent of Americans have spanked by their kid’s fourth birthday. Generally, spanking is in the punishment-by-removal category.

Over the years, many studies have been devoted to assessing the usefulness of this method, often coming to confusing—even opposing—conclusions. One of the latest lightning rods is a five-year review of the research literature by a committee of child development specialists sponsored by the American Psychological Association. The committee came out against corporeal punishment, finding evidence that spanking caused more behavioral problems than other types of punishment, producing more aggressive, more depressed, more anxious children with lower IQs. A spring 2010 study, led by Tulane University School of Public Health researcher Catherine Taylor, confirms the findings. It found that 3-year-olds who were spanked more than twice in the month prior to the study were 50 percent more likely to be aggressive by age 5, even when controlling for differing levels of aggression among kids and for maternal depression, alcohol or drug use, or spousal abuse.

Hear that furious typing sound? That is the clatter of a thousand blogs springing to life, violently disagreeing with these findings. “It’s associative data only! says one (true). “Not all experts agree!” says another (also true). “Context-dependent studies are missing!”—i.e.,
do we know that spanking done in a loving inductive household is different from spanking done in a harsh, non-inductive atmosphere? (we don’t). What about parental intention? The list of objections goes on and on. Many come from a growing concern that today’s children are being parented less and less, that contemporary moms and dads are increasingly afraid to discipline their kids.

I am in deep sympathy with this concern. The numbers aren’t, however. In the brain, the fight appears to be between deferred-imitation instincts and moral-internalization proclivities. Spanking is just violent enough to trigger the former more often than the latter.

As researcher Murray Straus noted in an interview with
Scientific American Mind,
the linkage between spanking and behavioral unpleasantness is more robust than the linkage between exposure to lead and lowered IQ. More robust, too, than the association between secondhand smoke and cancer. Few people argue about these associations; indeed, people win lawsuits with associative numbers in those health-related cases. So why is there so much controversy about whether to spank, when there should be none? Good question.

I do know that inductive parenting takes effort. Hitting a kid does not. In my opinion, hitting is a lazy form of parenting. If you’re wondering, my wife and I don’t do it.

A number of years ago, several groups of researchers decided to get kids opinions of parenting styles. Using sophisticated surveys, they asked kids between the ages of preschool and high school what they thought worked and what they thought failed. The questions were
cleverly couched: The kids listened to stories about misbehaving kids, then were asked, “What should the parent do? What would you do?” They were given a list of methods of discipline.

The results were instructive. By a large margin, inductive parenting got the biggest statistical high-five. The next most-favored behavior was actual punishment. What came in dead last? The withdrawal of parental affection or laissez-faire permissiveness. Taken together, the style of correction kids liked the best was an inductive style spiced with a periodic sprinkling of a display of power. The results to some extent depended upon the age of the responder. The 4- to 9-year-old crowd hated permissiveness more than any other behavior, even love-withdrawal styles. That was not true of the 18-year-olds.

Overall, a clear picture emerges about how to raise well-adjusted, moral children. Parents whose rules issue from warm acceptance and whose rationales are consistently explained end up being perceived as reasonable and fair, rather than as capricious and dictatorial. They are most likely to evince from their kids committed compliance rather than committed defiance. Remind you of Diana Baumrind’s authoritative parenting style—restrictive but warm? This was the one style statistically most likely to produce the smartest, happiest children. It turns out these smart, happy children will be the most moral, too.

What does a perfect parent look like? Probably not like you or me. The perfect mom gets pregnant on her first try, quits her day job immediately, throws up for the next 12 weeks, then feels great. There are no mood swings, no hemorrhoids, no embarrassing leaks of bodily fluid. She cheerily supervises a stress-free remodeling of her basement, transforming it into Tools of the Mind, Home Edition. The perfect dad greets her every day after work with a passionate kiss and an optimistic “How is my queen for the day?” and then sprints off to the kitchen to do the dishes. The newly born baby breast-feeds on demand, never bites mom’s nipple, and quickly learns to sleep through the night.

The child masters sign language by 2, piano scales by 3, Mandarin by 4, and verbalization of even subtle emotions by 5. He or she openly expresses contempt for french fries and chicken nuggets. The empathetic parents have a wide group of empathetic friends who consistently visit one another, their similarly stable kids in tow. In preschool and at home, the child’s effort is reliably praised; rules are
consistently enforced and explained. The child grows up to be president, or pope, or both.

Or not.

A family based on every suggestion in this book is fantasy. The real-world experience of parenting ranges from waves of exhaustion to oceans of love to ripples of laughter (“No, poop will never come out of your penis is a sentence I have actually uttered). And it almost never cooperates with our expectations. My wife loves the way comedian Carol Burnett blasted the fantasy of an easy labor: “Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.” Forever after, kids tend to do the darndest, most frustrating, kid-like things.

The real world of moms and dads is a much richer, much more amazing experience than the two-dimensional world of data, including all the stuff in this book. It’s easy to feel like the exasperated new father in the comic strip
Baby Blues,
who says, “The only time I ever felt qualified to be a parent was before I had kids.” How can we summarize the science but still live in the 9-to-5, three-dimensional world of real life? The solution is to simplify. This book has two central themes, and they act in concert with each other. Understanding them may be the best way to remember all of the information that otherwise floods these pages.