That's not accurate. Kids are little people. Ignorant of many things, but they're little people. My wife reads these 'how to raise your kids' posts and books and crap, and all it does is make her feel as if she is a terrible parent because he wasn't signing at 10 months and isn't using full sentences at 12. She feels guilt that he may be behind other kids already, because he's not doing things that these posts and books suggest (and are mostly ridiculous).
Let kids be kids, let them climb trees and ride bikes and be alone. But, spend a lot of time with them and have them watch how you treat people, what you say about people and how you interact with the world. Take him/her with you when you work on the yard, just have them help by carrying rocks around. Take him/her to the store to get the fuel filter you're fighting right now. Talk to them as if they're capable and they'll be capable. Have boundaries that are firm, but reasonable.
And always, always remember that you can say whatever you want about their character being great, or their traits being great, but if you show malice and spite, they'll be malicious and spiteful as well.
And yet I feel like a bad parent because we don't have the resources to enroll him for all the activities his friends do. One event particularly stands out from my own childhood. I tried out for the wrestling team and when I brought the paperwork home my mom said I couldn't, we didn't have health insurance.
I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Being good at something and then being told you can't because you don't have the right paperwork.
Children are not identical to adults, and treating them like they should be free to make all of their own decisions at 5 years of age would be negligent.
But they are like adults in many ways that we tend to ignore - they may not have a great conception of which things can hurt them how badly, but they have a sense of dignity, and they have a sense of independence. They want to make decisions for themselves, and they need to interact with adults that treat them as a rational peer to whatever degree that is possible.
Give them what freedoms you can, and respect them enough to explain the real reasons for the rules you impose. Sometimes you may find that they aren't very good ones at all, when you try to explain them - when that happens, admit that it wasn't a good rule, and work out a better one with them.
In hindsight, I think that left me unprepared for a lot of challenges I faced in college. A lot of times, I would ask him a question and get only half of a response, because answering truthfully would involve revealing less-than-ideal character. I wish that there had been more heart-to-heart and less 'raising your kid the right way'
In the terms of the article, I wonder if the behavior your dad was displaying was more motivated by "shame" than "guilt". Shame-based responses to me seem to be much more concerned with how a social group will perceive your behavior, whereas guilt-based responses deal with the rightness or wrongness of the action itself.
It almost strikes me as a choice between a moral absolute/relativist viewpoint.
I don't know what would have been best, but especially as I got older I would have preferred complete transparency. He was a good man, but I wish I had known more about his flaws. It would have given me more insight into my own.
We were having a debate about it one time, and I asked my dad how it was that we disagreed on these topics. He replied that he raised my sister and I to have what he felt were more ethical viewpoints on various issues than what his own perspectives were.
I was astounded when he told me this. He doesn't hide what his real thoughts are, but he recognizes that some of them aren't the most kind or moral and has actually raised me to have different views than himself.
Being a decent person is a great first step, but even so your child will eventually (probably often) do something you consider bad behavior. Possible responses range from ignoring the behavior to trying to beat it out of them, and you'll find parents all along the spectrum. This is how psychologists have found is a good way to deal with those situations. It's not entirely common sense.
If you respect your kid as an autonomous individual, your disapproval will matter to them, and a rational explanation is the only way they can internalize a rule that will persist without the presence of an enforcing authority.
It won't work out of the blue, of course. Children that have not been treated as rational entities won't respond as such, and children that are very young have a limited understanding of the world. But explaining things to them even before they understand the explanation has a lot of value - they may not understand your reasoning, but they will definitely understand that you're trying to explain, even before they can talk.
Sometimes you may find that the 'bad behavior' you perceive isn't actually a problem at all. I instinctively tried to stop my child from stomping through puddles and getting her feet wet; in reality that's only important if she's about to walk a long way, or if she'll have no chance to change her shoes for hours.
Reading behavioral psychology studies should require a skeptics hat. I'm not calling out these specific studies, but when it comes to miniscule sample sizes, unreproducible and sometimes out right made up results, this area is very suspect due to ease of fudging results. (Diederik Stapel comes to mind as an extreme case.)
The article actually covers this, note. The entire last section is about how children watch adults and decide based on their actions how they should act, paying comparatively little attention to their words.
;)
(think of it this way: how many athletics coaches tell their athletes 'just run as fast as I do'?)
Well yeah obviously, I was talking about the second-order effect of the parenting. Like a control signal being modulated onto the main signal (with the main signal being a child's endogenous drives, interests and character), or one-dimensional Perlin noise, the parenting needs to follow the primary amplitude.
If you're an athletics coach that tells your athletes to run as fast as they can, and you personally half-ass it around the track and have a bit of a beer gut, then you're doing a bad job.
That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold.
Even your own example does this by assigning a direction to your actions based on how it will impact the child.
Try Emile from Rousseau. In general, what you are describing is the difference between the sciences of pedagogy an psychology. In one sentence, (since the enlightenment) pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self, while psychology usually observes a misguided development and tries to find a treatment. Psychology therefore has to have some model of what constitutes normality to compare against. These specific studies and treatments are easy to write about as a scientific journalist or parenting literature author. It's telling that practically none of the parenting books I've skimmed through are based on pedagogy.
(that's no dismissal of psychology at all, but you have to use the right tool for the job).
"True self" is not a real thing - it's mystical psychobabble. In reality you are a product of your genetics and experiences, the ratios of which are still contested, however as of now the latter is much easier to influence than the former and as a result is really the only medium we have to work with if we want to influence outcomes.
>"True self" is not a real thing - it's mystical psychobabble.
Yep you are right, but I don't speak English natively and did not have much time :) A better phrasing probably would have been the true potential of the species, not of an individual. But true potential sounds too elitist... I'll try more verbosely: Mostly since the enlightenment (let's say the second half of the 18th century, one landmark was Emile by Rousseau), most central-european theory of pedagogy has a specific vision of an ideal of a developed human being (or species) to strive for. It's centered around development of practical, cultural and emotional skills, reasoning, the ability to assess the own actions relative to the state and necessities of society as a whole. Something like the living according to the categorical imperative of Kant while not feeling deprived of the own needs.
If you think 'treat people with respect and dignity' is about manipulating other people to behave as you want them to, then you're doing it wrong.
That's a big pile of self-contradiction. Both survival skills and religious rules are specific qualities.
Seems to me that all of them, when they describe anything that is objectively meaningful, refer to patterns of action adopted in particular circumstances. The only thing that changes over time seems to be the name applied to the patterns of action that parenting seeks to impose on children, not the actual substance that parenting is about creating desired patterns of action.
A skill is a capability learned through experience which is wielded with intention.
A behavior is simply a way of acting - it could be conscious or unconscious, it could be enforced or intentional.
A habit is an unintentional behavior.
A personality characteristic and a character attribute are basically the same thing: unconscious ways of perceiving value and making decisions.
There are of course dozens of ways to define each of those terms, and I'm not interested in debating which of them is 'correct' - I am here primarily focusing on the distinction between instilling value-judgments via rituals and enforcement and attempting to control the self-perception or decision-making styles by behaving in artificial ways.
Describing them all as 'patterns of acting' is like calling all matter 'arrangements of chemicals'. It is of course accurate, and even in some cases useful, but you muddy very important distinctions by generalizing to that degree. In the case in point, the distinction lost is between valuations and perceptions.
An other common sense thing: you don't magically get the child at 5, there's this long long process from the baby that can't feed himself and is pretty close to resistive clay on the moral point of view, to the 2 years old that becomes pretty good at understanding what's going around, the 3 years old that can do and think so much more by himself, to the 5 years old who's quite socialized etc.
There's many many stages, the kid has limited abilities, and and you actually have go teach a lot of things, not just sit you kid on some watch tower and wait for him to understand. For a long time he just won't get it if you don't make an effort to teach him. This is where you'll want advices on what ways you can teach him, what 'works' and what doesn't.
You never have to 'teach them things', they need to learn things from you. There's an enormous world of difference there.
Of course you should help him accomplish his objectives, and you should certainly do so with an eye toward the techniques or approaches he'll need to use to accomplish them on his own. There's a lot he doesn't know yet. But teaching technique and suggesting approaches is fundamentally different from attempting to impart characteristics and habits.
Cognitively, little kids are not people, at least not the way we typically think of what a person is. The analogy of a delicate and hard to work piece of clay is not a bad analogy for the reality of the situation.
What you dismiss as "tricks" is actually highly valuable technical knowledge. We would laugh at someone who said that all it takes to program a computer is to just "act smart." Well when you are raising a kid you are helping to program the most complex computer ever created.
I get the basic idea of what you're saying, but that sounds like a lovely way to raise a serial murderer. Sometimes, engineering doesn't translate well to other parts of life.
If ignorance is no virtue for preschool staff, why would it be a virtue for parents?
(implied insult redacted - sorry about that.)
You're trying really hard to claim some sort of moral high ground here, but there is nothing immoral or harmful about knowledge.
You've set up a false dichotomy between parents who are "good people" and parents who are interested in scientific knowledge about how children develop. Any parent can be both. In fact I would argue that parents who seek to learn more about child development will arm themselves with better tools for being good parents.
I don't know why you perceive scientific studies of child development as a threat, but you obviously do.
All humans are mechanisms in the physical sense, certainly. But unlike most mechanisms you might be accustomed to dealing with, they have self-will and can perceive differences in stimuli beyond your ability to control.
I have certainly set up no 'dichotomy' between goodness and knowledge - I have no issues with parents seeking to understand anything under the sun. (I do think that human nature causes parents to read correlative trends as consistent facts, which means that such studies are doomed to be misinterpreted by nearly all who read it).
I also don't specifically conflate 'goodness' (in whatever definition you choose to accept it) with any particular set of actions. I (for example) have no reason to believe that you are a bad person, I just rationally consider the techniques you are defending to produce harmful effects on the individuals to whom they are applied. I have claimed no 'moral high ground', I am engaged in rational debate about the effects of certain types of behavior.
Hop down off that very tall horse, Defender Of Science.
Edit: the article does use the word "tricks", although I would argue as shorthand for technique rather than deceive. Nevertheless to be fair I replaced it above with "manipulate".
It's exactly the kind of junk I invariably see when a good journalist attempts to write about any kind of science - they try to draw conclusions from the study that the study does not draw, because the conclusions drawn from a real study are never interesting to a normal readership.
The study most likely does not prescribe behaviors or approaches on the parts of parents when raising their children. The study ought to be purely about how individuals react to controlled and described stimuli - the study will draw reasonable conclusions, make appropriate cautions about the mapping between reality and experiment, and be very careful about inferring any real-world implications. I haven't purchased a copy of this particular study, so I can't judge it on its own merits, but it's from a reputable source, and the abstract makes reasonable claims.
Absolutely. And be consistent, that's the one main important result of developmental psychology for parents. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory and grep for Bowlby.
> Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them.
They are smart as in emotionally smart. And that heavily depends on trust in the social environment they are able to build from experience. A child having made consistend experiences of trust will have it easier to develop a model of self-efficiacy, and that in turn is fundamental for learning other things about the world. The emotional experiences are fundamental - but harder to see than a kid talking early or similar.
I think we mean the same thing, but to be sure: I tried to exclude the following authenticity with my phrasing:
If I am relaxed on a saturday afternoon and my child spills it's cornflakes over the print outs I left on the desk, it's no big deal. Me or both of us clean up the mess and I just print them out again. If the same thing happens on a stressfull thursday evening, I am angered and let that anger out.
In that example I am authentic, but from the view of the child my response to the same action of the child is not consistent. The child has to have reached a certain age to grasp that my anger is mostly about my stress and not about the actions of the kid (specificially the ability to empathize has to be developed).
tl;dr: What I meant with consistency is mostly the parents having a certain amount of affect control. That's probably what you meant with 'a stable individual'.
You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they will learn.
Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them.
Quit treating five-year-olds like they're some kind of resistant clay, and you have to cleverly shape them into the person they're going to be. That kid is already a person. Treating him like a puppy to be trained will certainly affect his personality and behavior, but the largest impact will not be the one you intended. You're teaching them how you want them to be, and you're also teaching them that the way to get what you want is to manipulate people into giving it to you.