When you have something important to say, some important lesson to impart – say it nicely.

When you’re giving a lesson, give it nicely.

I mean, if you want someone to listen to you, if you want your pearls of wisdom to be accepted, then you want to be someone to listen to, you want your students, your children, to respect you, and the more subtle, complex, counter-intuitive or difficult the lesson may be, the more you need to be a loved and respected teacher.

This itself may sound either mind-numbingly obvious or counter-intuitive, depending on a number of things, but things can sometimes be made infinitely clearer by turning them over, so lets look at this upside down and backwards:

The more subtle, complex, counter-intuitive or difficult the lesson is, the easier it becomes for your student, or especially your kids, to find a way out of getting it. Threaten them, hurt or belittle them, and they have a reason not to believe you. We should tread lightly; any abuse of our power is all the excuse a person needs to reject what we say, no matter how true, necessary and wise the lesson may have been.

A few kitchen sink sort of examples:

1. I for one, as a child, had heard so much stupid and contradictory crap from the adults in my life that they were no longer credible sources if they said the sky was blue or water wet. I didn’t believe the adults when they told me I would need to complete my school, get some skills, and that I would have to work to support myself. In hindsight, of course this is obvious, and should have been to anyone, even a person as dreamily clueless as me, but at that point – I was 15 – if they said it, it could only be wrong. Of course, in adulthood we learn that there is more to life than the structures of our nuclear family – even I got that, eventually – but that I didn’t see that then, and this blame belongs with the adults in my life. It is they who establish the rules, and the game itself. It was they who made the power structure of the family all that mattered. That was their game, and at 15, that was still the world to me.

So I didn’t get the skills, and I dropped out of school and out of life, because that would teach them.

It was quite a few years later when I picked up where I had left off, and made a very late start on living my adult life.

2. My wife doesn’t always agree with everything I say. I don’t know why, I must have lost a lottery or something. But when I am trying to make a point of some sort with her, sometimes I will try once, twice, three times, and if I’m not getting any traction, and if I deem the point an important one (child-rearing things are the worst of these memories), I may try making my point by talking louder, some times I may shout. I’m human, I’m a man . . . I’m sorry. Most of these incidents are in the past, when the kids were young and life was busy and stressful . . . 

but the point here is, if I got angry, or sometimes if I got loud, even if I was consciously trying to turn up the volume without being angry, if my wife heard anger – then my point would be lost forever. The last thing she would ever do is agree with an angry man, no matter if I may have been correct. I have learned that getting mad only makes it worse, and now I have a formula to follow: what is more important to me here – that I vent my frustration (and that is frustrating, believe me. Just when something is wrong enough to anger me, that is when nothing I say or do will be heard or acted upon. Unimportant stuff, something I don’r care about is fine – but something I’m passionate about – that I can just swallow and hold down forever) or that I retain some small hope of winning my point?

It’s a point of pride for me that I more often choose the second option, but even when I choose to vent, that doesn’t feel as bad as it did in the past, because now I know what’s happening. Being conscious always feels better. Looking back on something and knowing I was unconscious, running on some sort of programmed script, that is what has always felt the worst.

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Now, these examples were subtle, nuanced versions of what I’m really after.

If I’ve made any case there about people taking a moral stance as an excuse or a reason not to hear you, imagine the more blatant scenario of punishing. Do we take life coaching from someone who thinks it’s OK to hurt us when we are children? Do we take a whooping, or a grounding, or the confiscation of a loved object from someone and then open our minds to them? Do we remotely want to share in the wisdom of those who are punishing us?

Not me.

Probably not your kids either.

I know, I know – not cool, not PC. Victims of child abuse have had it very bad, and at the worst possible time in their lives, brutalized and used by the ones who were supposed to be looking after them. I’m not “for” abuse, believe me.

But those people who have suffered extreme abuse, the outright, illegal, everyone-knows-that –is-abuse sort of abuse – those people have at least a chance for clarity. Those people have a chance to say of their abusers that they were wrong, they were the bad ones. Those people have a chance to say “it’s not my fault.”

Taking ‘don’t get me wrong a level deeper,’ I must say, I mean they have a chance, at least some of them. Still, the enemies of clarity are very powerful. Guilt, the mind control that abuse can create, social pressures, religious and cultural biases and injunctions . . . of course victims of abuse are often mired in a fog of uncertainty, which is a big part of their pain. But the cavalry is coming. The support for victims is on the increase, awareness is growing, and many survivors are getting more validation from the enlightened members of our society. If a person living in this kind of pain can find themselves among these elements, around these ideas, they will have a better chance to know that their suffering is not their fault, a much better chance to lay the blame where it belongs.

(Some find this sort of clarity among other victims, some in the roughest neighborhoods and in the poorest demographics find some belonging and solidarity in each other as children and young adults, in times and places where most people get abused. Sad to say, many grow out of it.)

I support this sort of awareness fully, of course.

But what of the rest? What about the people for whom the chance of clarity remains remote? What about the people for whom the abuse is ubiquitous, everywhere, people suffering forms of abuse in times and places where no-one will validate their suffering?

Of course, this has been the case for many, many people, always, suffering the sort of things that we are only now outlawing and beginning to prosecute for, but it must be said: much of what is now thought to be clearly abuse was legal and dare I say, “normal” in the past. Slavery and child slavery, beatings and corporal punishments of the worst sort, all these things have been socially sanctioned in the past and though they are now considered to be immoral and abusive, victims were, uh, unsupported. To say the least.

If our enlightenment is not yet complete, if there is room for improvement still, and if our improved humanity continues to march forward, who will today’s unsupported victims have been, in a better future? Who is suffering today and no-one knows it, so that no-one can care?

Answer?

You and me. The “normally punished” children.

You know it was almost a total experiment, although we were very influenced by a visit just a few hours long once with a family who clearly had no bed-times and whose kids were amazing to us. It really blew our minds. If I were ever to get published, I will dedicate my book to that family. What resulted for us from this experiment was  better than we had ever imagined. We’ve had almost no serious fights with our girls since the younger one’s toddlerhood. We’ve got some laziness, some messiness – but we also have no rebellion, no serious misbehaviours, no drugs, alcohol, pregnancies, and top (really, top, top) grades in school. We had a funeral this weekend, and my teenagers were at the front of the line to give their condolences to the family.

 There is an idea, a good one, I don’t really argue it, that addiction is hereditary, that if the parent is an addict, the child’s chances of being one are increased by something like an order of magnitude. Well – I was quite a pothead when my kids were young. By that theory, I’ve set them up for addiction, but they’re 16 and 19 now, and they are showing no interest in drugs or alcohol. I’m very glad to hear you’re talking to your kids about that stuff, and yes, too many people seem to think that if they don’t talk about it, that the kids will never hear about it. We certainly talk about it here, too, as well as talking about everything else, up to and including sex and death (and we always have).

There’s another idea around addiction, one that gets a little less ink, and that is that smarts has very little correlation with addiction or not, but what does correlate is happiness. That is something that I hope my idea of no punishing at all may address. I feel I’ve proven – to myself at least, I haven’t had anyone else agree that I’ve made the point – that “legitimate” punishment has the same negative effects on us that abuse has been shown to have, and that corporal punishment has been shown to have.

( I spend a lot of time and ink in the book trying to make that case, so I can’t do my reasoning justice in a few lines here . . . )

But a major outcome of all three “levels of abuse” is certainly an impairment in a person’s happiness. This is the secret, I believe, the reason so many seemingly happy, well adjusted people fall prey to addiction and self-destruction – nobody thinks punishing has the damaging effects abuse has, so we all think punished people aren’t damaged and unhappy, or at least if they are, they have no reason to be, no reason the average person can point to. My theory has the potential to explain this mystery, I think. You don’t have to believe to test the idea:

just postulate it, that most people are punished, and that punishing causes the same impairments and damages as abuse – and then see if that might possibly explain the fact that anybody can fall prey to anything, the same sorts of things that abuse victims have a higher incidence of: addiction, self-destructiveness, cognitive impairment, violence . . .

always long on theory, I apologize again.

I am of the opinion that there really can be no punishment or discipline without some sort of violence or at the very least, force. I think many, many of today’s parents feel like you two do, that they want to parent without violence, without hitting, but there’s a trap in that, which you may have felt. It might even be a majority of parents who want that, at least in our part of the world, but I think most are doomed to failure, because of what punishing is, which is, abuse with a reason, and the reason doesn’t change what it is – oh, wait. I’m doing it again, aren’t I?

 I do concentrate on the no punishing thing, my wife’s yelling at me right now, that there’s more to it than just not punishing, she wants me to tell you that we had none of the usual things, no:

–          bedtimes                    – we’d get them up in the morning for daycare/school/work, so they’d naturally get tired and sleep at night. Wifey couldn’t stay awake for them, she sleeps at 9:00 pm, so I’d stay up and wait them out if they weren’t ready to sleep.

–          mealtimes                  – feed them when they’re hungry

–          cribs                         – we had a “family bed,” two queen mattresses on the floor, for years and years

–          toilet training            – they’re human beings. They figured it out at pretty much the normal ages.

–          punishing                 – any way at all. Our kids’ stuff was theirs, and we never took anything away, never confiscated their toys, pacifiers. No timeouts – OK, Wifey took around five timeouts, running away and locking herself in a bedroom out of frustration before she might have a freakout (she says when the kids made her sad). She says they were all during times when both kids were home, that she didn’t leave a kid alone. Of course no hitting. I did allow myself to lose it a little and start yelling at them every now and again after the younger one was at least eight years old. Our house has been a terrible mess all these years, as you can no doubt imagine. It gets frustrating sometimes.

–          forced sharing          – same as confiscation, their stuff is theirs, not ours to take back when we feel like it. No forced friends either. If our kid didn’t like someone’s kid, they could hang with us, they didn’t have to suffer someone they didn’t like alone. That strained some adult relationships.

–          Santa Claus             – and other ’fun lies.’ We told them Santa was a game people played. That strained some inter-family relationships too.

So, I’ll step through your example, step by step:

 –          For example:  Child gets one hour of screen time (ipod) a day

 –          No such rule. I’m embarrassed to say, all the time is screen time in our house. We’re not nearly active enough. It’s all Wifey and I can do to get our one hour walks in three times a week, and almost none of that for far too many years.

–           however said child is caught using the ipod under the covers when he is supposed to be sleeping, in this scenario the child consciously snuck the device into his bedroom without permission when he know that was a no-no.  Not a first offence either. 

–          Again, for us, not applicable. Can’t “hide” in the family bed, there weren’t those sorts of ‘no-nos’ anyway. The kids’ screen time, we were all together for anyway, all in the family/living room or in the family bed. There wasn’t really any unsupervised screen time, we always knew what they were doing. Plus, since there were no punishments to fear, there wasn’t any sneaking or hiding, at all. Of course, no rule to offend, no offence, no first offence, no third strike.

–           Mom and Dad decided to suspend ipod privileges for a period of 2 weeks which by definition is “punishment.”  Curious how you would have handled a similar situation (on the assumption the approached used is not aligned with your blogs).

–          Yes, this is punishment,  and how is it accomplished without force? Do we play “keepaway” all day, or are there more penalties if your kid finds the device and tries to take it? It is my opinion that some things sound like non-hitting punishments, but really, when push comes to shove, it is all eventually dependent upon force. Sorry, it always go to some technical sort of talk around punishing for me.

 I expect that’s maybe long enough for now?

An interesting case,

it looks like one of us.

There is limited functionality

yet it is quite advanced,

perhaps it is in a state of transition.

Clearly, there is a plan for this thing,

a destiny, or failing that,

at least a future. Surely it was created

for a reason.

There appear to be

developmental issues . . .

what is it you are asking me?

There is potential, yes,

the possibility of great evil

or of great benefit.

We could use this thing.

Certainly, we could find a way

to influence it,

And questions of whether we should

are a luxury to be pondered

only after we settle the question of need.

In our calling, however,

There is an imperative

above all others

regardless that it immobilizes,

despite that our plans

come to a halt,

and we are sworn to uphold this:

first, do no harm.