Firstly, all behavior or beliefs are not made equal. If a child’s views are ‘respected’ as are a parents beliefs, then the child gets an incorrect view of the worth of their ideas. No need to develop actually good ideas when childish views garner all the respect you will get anyway! I don’t mean by this that a child shouldn’t be shown love and affection but this doesn’t imply that their childish views merit respect defacto. If childish ideas are given time and effort (by the child) then some encouragement is in order but often praise is given for no great effort and this leads the child to an entitlement viewpoint that is very counterproductive. Respect should be earned regardless of the age of the person and it only has value if that respect doesn’t come easily. An analogy to this is if your parents give you an allowance or you have to work at a real job for your money. The money is treated in two very different ways even though on the face of it, it is identical.

Secondly, I child has no right to be rude or show anger toward an adult. If respect is given to a child’s ‘right’ to get angry, then anger will be a much bigger part of them when they get older. Anger IMO is never a constructive emotion. It normally shuts down the rational thinking of even smart people and results in things being said that the person wishes they hadn’t said. Anger also stops the person receiving the emotion from listening to anything the angry person is saying. Learning to control one’s temper is an ability that needs to be learned at the earliest of ages. (No age is too young for a child to be forced, if necessary, to control their temper.) Anger is also useless in adults but unlike a child, the adult doesn’t have a parent around to help them stop this destructive emotion. For the adult, they either have to look after this problem themselves or very diplomatically from their significant other. The best thing to do is to make sure that kids never become adults without a firm control on their anger.

I agree that parents don’t try to understand the view of games or other things from their child’s point of view. They seem to forget what it was like to be a particular age themselves. If parents actively tried to learn the priorities and views of their children, then maybe they could help them better to balance their time among the things that would match their desires and what is healthy for them. I think advice from a parent to a child should be through the priorities and likes of the child, not the adult just giving what they would do in the same circumstance.

I am a great believer in manners and respectful behavior. (Not the same as having respect for someone’s ideas.) Adults are deserving of respectful behavior from children and teens just by the fact that they are adults. If this wasn’t the case then you would have kids trying to decide through their immature brains which adults deserved respect and which ones didn’t, with disastrous results. Manners and respectful behavior never hurt the person who uses them so there is no price to be paid for erring on the respectful side toward some adults who actually might not deserve that respect.

I didn’t go read the original post, but some of the reactions are examples of ideas about parenting that I’ve really had to sift through since becoming a parent.

There’s a sense out there that parents are responsible for their kids’ behaviour: which is true, to an extent - the problem is, that it’s not universally true (or even desirable). There’s pressure on parents to “control” their “beastly” kids in public, and lots of head shaking when kids get out of control. It is true that parents are the adults and their kids see them as the universe: therefore, there’s a need for parental responsibility, commitment, and work. Unfortunately, there’s no one way that works for all kids: the punitive comments to me reflect more the messages we give *parents* about the way their kids should behave than any real sense of understanding of the dynamics. IE: If your kids are being beastly, it’s because you’re a horrible person and parent.

The problem is that parents do not control the personality of a child, they can only provide frameworks and lessons through which a child’s self and emotions are channelled. This is hard when your kids are very different from you. When I was a kid, I was deeply hurt by my mom’s “mismanagement” of me at times - now, I understand that she didn’t have a crystal ball to see into my heart, and I didn’t have the ability or language to make myself explicit. I made the mistake of parenting Ripley as the young me would have wanted to be parented. Utterly, completely irrelevant to who he was/is right now - frustrated him (and me) to no end. I’ve had to cast around a lot, and actually (for him), the best system seems to be time outs and privilege removal without much discussion. Sometimes, though, he lodges a complaint that we’re being unfair, and I will always listen if I see that’s what is going on. There will be times that I don’t know that’s how he’s feeling, and I will look totalitarian to him. The best I can do is try to show that “the door is open”, and hope that he’s able to step through it.

It comes down to respect, I guess. I respect Ripley, even when I don’t utterly understand where he’s at.

Anyway, I’m getting the sense that the kid’s feelings were getting roundly disrespected and you’re sticking up for the kid, and I have to agree. Even if the kid was being exceedingly disrespectful, responding with disrespect teaches nothing but Hobbesian big-stick values. I would respect the kid more than what’s being described, but also expect respect. With Ripley, removing privileges would be the way to go - although it sounds like that system rubs you the wrong way. Parents do have to have some way of responding to culturally inappropriate behaviour if they’re hoping to raise children who will be able to function in the culture…. As a hippie kid, I saw and experienced ultra permissive lack-of-parenting that left some of us under-socialized, and some of us scared by a chaotic world. Of course, it may very well work for some parents and kids: I believe one such philosophy is encapsulated in the non-coersive parenting movement.

Interesting post!

I know that the “screaming 4-year-old in a restaurant” scenario does still incite poor thoughts against the parents in me. I wonder to what extent it’s legitimate.

“responding with disrespect teaches nothing but Hobbesian big-stick values”

Well put.

“removing privileges would be the way to go - although it sounds like that system rubs you the wrong way.”

I’m not sure why. I can see where, ideally, it could be a necessary step. Perhaps what bugs me is parents that think it’s all they need to do. Instead of setting guidelines letting the child know where they went wrong and how they can improve, they get some arbitrary “ten-days without videogames” punishment with little connection to improving the actual family dynamics that are broken. Perhaps in combination with a clear policy of “here’s what you have to do to get back into my good graces and then you can play again” I would approve of it. It puts the child in control of their own reactions and relations, which is the right thing to do in the situation, I think. Otherwise it’s a simple and raw form of punishment, and carrot/stick parenting is dehumanizing, and ineffective. Ask Alfie Kohn.

Again, I think it depends on the kid; and, I think you’ve hit in on the head that discipline needs to be part of a larger relationship with a child. If a parent is just trying to modify behaviour and not really enjoying or attempting to relate to their kid, the overall message to the kid is pretty heinous.

(Still, since becoming a parent I’m less judgemental - for some parents, getting through the day without exploding may very well be what they’re able to provide. Abuse is inexcusable, but lack of sensitivity makes more sense to me now than it did when I was solely on the other side of the equation.)

With Kohn’s analysis, I conditionally agree for myself and for other kids I’ve cared for. As a kid, I didn’t need rewards or punishments, really: just a way to own and explore behaviour. Fundamentally, I felt reward in getting along and understanding. With kids like I was, non-coercive education and discipline worked. I’m a classic introvert, though, and am motivated with respect to myself for a variety of societally approved behaviours: education, lack of conflict, nurturance. I am risk-avoidant, though, and in this way I’d need exernal reinforcement to learn HOW to take risks.

Also, external reward has sometimes led to new avenues of exploration. I wasn’t a maths/sciences kid in high school: it was an entirely external reward that put me on that path - although internal motivation kept me going.

What is it that moderates our behaviours, anyway? So much of our behaviour is contextual, cultural. For example, in Canada, we line up for things like busses and in shops. In many other parts of the world, that’s not the way it’s done. You put a Canadian in a pushing mass, and everyone seems uncaring and uncivil. Why? It’s not a norm that will be arrived at simply by internal motivations, but parenting and cultural environment. Our parents may tell us to be less pushy or whack us if we push or reward us as we learn to pull back, but they’re forcing a non-instinctual conformist behaviour on their offspring…

There’s culture and community, and those things are external - your motivation is to fit into the tribe. Much of childrearing is this socialization. Some kids are more *self* motivated to find and fit the tribal rules. Some kids like to challenge the tribal rules. My feeling, as a parent, is that my children should know the tribal rules and how to respect them, and how to make a cojent argument for rejecting those rules. Civil disobedience is okay with me, but only in the context of constructed argument, not in the context of sheer selfishness. (Rosa Parks, though a lawbreaker, was not the moral equivalent of a rapist.)

Anyway, my sister is someone who likes to break, to challenge. She’s an extrovert, too, who is motivated primarily by her reflection in the community. She needed a lot more stars-on-charts to do her part in taking care of the housework than I did, because she didn’t care about cleanliness to the same degree that her community did. (And do all of us really care about everything to the same standard that the community has decided is acceptable? Not really.)

The thing is to pick and choose. Not to go out of the way to own or take over something that your kid IS self motivated to do: to let them know that you see and support their pride in their own achievements: but to give a child the tools they need to make their case in the community. That might mean stars on a chart for chewing with their mouth closed, or time outs for nagging/whining/hurting self or others, if those things aren’t within the kid’s makeup, and rigorously avoiding stars on charts for the times kids show empathy on their own - and this is why parenting is so tricky, and so many people make lots of money selling books to insecure parents who are sure they’re failing.

Frankly, kids with parents who are trying to relate and do the right thing probably do better than any kid parented under any rigourous philosophy… Which is what I’m hearing in your comments.

Well. Thanks for that. Lots of fun to think about what I do all day….

I don’t know about this. While I obviously can’t say for sure, perhaps the rewards don’t deserve so much credit from you here. Even Kohn wouldn’t say that they automatically spoil whatever behavior they enforce, though they often do. You were in a situation where you just needed to be introduced to the benefits of some changed behavior, then you’d see for yourself the benefits of them. You probably didn’t need rewards, specifically, or even any form of external motivation, to discover your interest in math/science. You could have just picked up a good piece of fiction in the library that inspired the interest in you. And, later in life, befriending someone who was a risk taker, along with some introspection, could have introduced you to some of the benefits. So even though rewards are capable of accomplishing a little bit long term, in some people, it’s only because they can see past the punishment/reward aspect and reflect on whether the behavior it’s trying to produce is desirable independently, and that’s probably not a terribly common ability. (That you and I have it is why, in a culture dominated by punishment and reward, we are relatively healthy.)

Then again, when the ultimate motivation that will produce X behavior, say open-mouth-chewing, is external anyway, punishment might not make a difference. You’re just doing at an early age manually what will eventually be done with social mores. (Good point about those.) But what about something like nagging/whining? That one’s more complicated. In an adult, what keeps them from doing it with, say, a romantic partner is understanding their partner’s good intentions, limited energy and attention, and not wanting to tire and annoy them with whininess. That sort of understanding is a lot to expect from a child. I don’t know what age one can legitimately expect them to understand that. I think they probably understand enough not to do it with non-parents by the age of seven or eight, but parents are really hard to fully humanize in the child’s mind. If at all, it happens in the teens, usually. You know, I bet it has something to do with the child feeling needed in order to run family affairs. That they have real responsibilities in the family that really help and aren’t just busywork. But my point is that ideally, you’d figure out how to create the genuine, mature understanding that motivates them to refrain from whining as soon as possible. (Hopefully it’s possible before the teen years, though I imagine that would be quite an accomplishment too.) If you used punishment and rewards to prevent the behavior beforehand, it might be better overall than if you didn’t. Or maybe not. It probably depends on the kid.

Now, the issue with videogames, or even TV, is even more complicated. If your child is playing more videogames or watching more television than you’d like them to, what are you to do? If they are able to put the game down when required to, and get the rest of their work done, and otherwise fulfill all of their other obligations, but you’re still uneasy about the time they spend on it, here you have a legitimate conflict of values. You think they should find other things more important than they do. And in an area like this, rewards and punishment are completely inappropriate, I think. Because there’s never going to be an external motivator (social pressure is crushed by the desire for TV or videogames) that keeps them from it. I think in the end, you’ll have to figure out what it is that makes video games seem like “just a game” in a mature adult, and try to grow up those same mental features in your child. And this one is even more complicated than the one for not being whiny.