The "teaching through storytelling" thing rubs me up the wrong way, too. We yell at our kids if they deserve it, but we do our best never to lie to them.
And of course, any time someone expounds on "the" way to raise or discipline children, you know they're talking through their hat, because children vary wildly in terms of how they behave and what will work with them, even within the same family. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
"Santa sees all, so behave"
"If you misbehave you go to hell"
"Don't sit too close to the TV or you'll go cross-eyed"
"Masturbating makes you go blind"
"Respect your elders because they are more mature/knowledgeable"
Basically we constantly lie to our children.
How'd your child deal with their friends believing in Santa and them knowing it's a hoax at that early age?
- What do you think, dear?
Followed by discussion of the evidence... if all goes well they learn to use their own judgement and cope with coming independently to their own conclusion in opposition to 99% of their peers...
and
"A lot of other kids really enjoy the Santa game. So don't spoil it for them. Like when you're playing being a pirate captain you don't like it if another kid says you're too young to be captain or your cardboard pegleg is fake..."
Kids more easily accept games and makebelieve, and happily hop into different games.
(2 kids, 4 3/4 and 2)
So we still do presents from Santa at Christmas, Easter Bunny baskets, and Tooth Fairy money, but they know it's us doing it. So far it still seems to have enough magic of anticipation that they enjoy it.
And let's face it, Santa works pretty well as a cryptid alongside the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny... :)
Fear, induced by having made that mistake and paying the price, or induced by elevating your voice, does seem to work, albeit imperfectly.
So one time I was at the house alone with the kid. I turned my back on him for a couple minutes, he came walking into the living room from the kitchen carrying a butcher knife almost as long as his leg. I yelled at him got that knife away from him. When the mom got home I told her the story and she laughed and said 'oh Damien!' (kid's name was Damien)
When I told my friend later he sort of buried his head in his hands and said something about how hard it was and he was always mean to the kid and having to yell at him because basically he was the only adult in his life that kept him in check. Probably my friend should have found a better way of handling Damien, but on the other hand some situations are more difficult than others.
Four years old can be taught to cut soft vegetables under close supervision. However, if you constantly yell at four years old, four years old will learn to ignore everything except yelling.
Not that occasional yelling harms that kid or something. But, yelling often is more of adult emotional reaction, not a rational reaction to real acute danger.
A 4-year-old is old enough to know what they are and aren't allowed to grab, in terms of common household items.
> However, if you constantly yell at four years old, four years old will learn to ignore everything except yelling.
If you consistently show a four-year-old that only yelling will be followed by physical intervention, then they will learn to ignore everything except yelling. If you consistently show a four-year-old that a quiet "I'm going to count to three... one... TWO..." will be followed by physical intervention, then they will learn to pay attention to that.
The default attitude of most four-year-olds is "make me" and if you let them know what will result in you making them do the thing, they will pay attention.
Not that I never yelled at kids. I did. But this reaction on that situation sound like that.
So, he was probably wrong in how he handled it, but it was quite heartfelt what he said, he was handling it as well as he could, and perhaps that was badly. It was hard for me to second guess him under the circumstance.
The implication is strongly that a group of people, identified by name, has what is generally regarded as a successful way of teaching kids to control their anger. Again, based on the title.
The narrative of the piece builds this up with pieces of evidence all cherry picked to support how successful they are. This post, on the other hand, asks about contradicting evidence.
So, agreed that you can't just assume this parenting style is bad from the contradicting evidence. I question if you can truly assume it is good from the positive evidence. Random walks and all.
Alcoholism is not an Inuit cultural problem because Inuit culture predates the introduction of alcohol by thousands of years.
Unemployment is not cultural because people living off the land are not unemployed.
And hitting kids is something picked up from forcible re-education in Indian Schools where every aspect of the original culture was forbidden by generous use of beatings.
There is a tendency to quickly believe anything that treats our culture as innocent by blaming the victim, to easily believe anything contrary to what "rubs us the wrong way". I believe this is a dangerous fallacy we should resist.
Some people call it cultural genocide.
Basically we tried as hard as we could to "take the indian out of the indian."
They would come into villages, as late as the sixties and take all the children away from their parents and put them in "residential schools" where they were beaten for speaking their language.
Thousands died in these institutions.
So perhaps another way to read it, is from the positive side. That is to say that some native people of Canada can remember their traditions and are attempting to practise them despite a hundred and fifty years of persecution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
The article praises the Inuit for a "no scolding, no timeouts" form of child-rearing, talks about how "the culture views scolding — or even speaking to children in an angry voice — as inappropriate...even if the child hits you or bites you, there's no raising your voice" and quotes Inuit elders as saying that "they're upset about something, and you have to figure out what it is". It says that this is why adult Inuit have "an extraordinary ability to control their anger".
I Googled some studies about Inuit to see if I could find anything that didn't fit with this narrative, and came across this article on how Inuit leaders are protesting Canada's anti-child-abuse policy, because they say it is too harsh on traditional Inuit child-rearing practices like spanking. They complain that child protective services are unfairly removing children from Inuit homes, because they don't understand that Inuit tradition permits forms of physical discipline that might not be acceptable in broader Canadian society.
I also found this collection of interviews with Inuit elders where they describe how things were in the traditional old days. When asked about discipline, Elder Tipuula:
"If it was a boy, it was his father’s responsibility to discipline him. If he only wanted to spank him once, then he would only spank him once. He would behave for a while, and if he started to misbehave again, the father could spank him a second time.We women took care of our daughters. Some children reached adulthood without ever needing a spanking. Some of them needed to be spanked, and would thank us when they were older for correcting them. Parents would spank children to make them aware of things they had not been paying attention to. Some children were spanked when they did not deserve it and this was bad for a child’s development. When they realized they did not deserve a spanking, they became angry. Children who deserved to be spanked grew up being thankful for the discipline they received. Children who did not deserve to be spanked grew up to become angry people."
Elder Ilisapi adds:
"Some of us tended to take out our frustration on our children when it was our husband who we were angry at. Even if the child had done nothing wrong, if he made one small mistake, we took out our frustration on him. If children were treated like that,they could be damaged. It was their spouse they were angry at in the first place but they took their frustration out on their child. That is not the way to treat a child. It is not good."
Modern-day studies are downright appalling. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708004/ is studying Inuit suicides, but finds that 27.5% of the non-suicidal placebo group stated they were abused as children. goo.gl/gX4hFi says that 86% of Canadian Inuit women experience verbal abuse, and 48% experience physical abuse in the first postpartum year. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3402/ijch.v61i2.17443 finds that 48% of Inuit in Greenland report having been abused, about three times the Western population they compare this with.
(some of these are adult abuse statistics rather than child abuse statistics, but if adult Inuit never get angry or act impulsively, why are they doing all this abusing?)
To be fair, the Inuit are a very diverse population, and maybe some bands are unusually lenient parents and others are unusually strict (but the anthropologist in the article studied in northern Canada, the same region as many of the studies I'm citing). Also, the Inuit have changed a lot recently as they get influenced by European culture (but NPR did their interview with Inuit this year, who talk as if they're describing the present).
I don't want to contradict an anthropologist, but I hope people keep their skepticism glasses on for articles like this one.