Psychology

It’s not Always Easy, Letting Your Kids do Whatever They Want.

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We had the family bed, and the kids could sleep when they wanted, nurse when they wanted, and they could toilet-train themselves when they wanted.

Most of that was pretty easy – well maybe not the nursing. With the boob always available, the kids would have small meals all night long, they never had to fill up and then do without. Those were some long nights and brutally interrupted sleeps for my wife. The family bed helped, we didn’t have to get up, at least.

Toilet training was a breeze. Human beings will do that as soon as they’re ready, and at a young age, they will see the advantage of not crapping in their pants. Making that a forced thing, making that about the parents, is really stupid, It’s like forcing someone to eat dessert. Who wants to sit in shit?

A few things were a little tough though. As mentioned in a comment recently in someone else’s blog, letting them procrastinate about their homework until the last possible night, and late that night, that made me squirm, freaked me out.

http://wordpress.com/read/post/id/48077210/10777/

It all worked out though. I learned to sleep through that sort of thing, and they’re straight A students.

Another one was swearing. We had no rules about language, and we all watched anything on TV together, raised the girls on South Park – but when your first daughter, at seven years of age is playing video games by herself, getting worked up and yelling “Holy Fucking Shit-Balls!” at the TV, with no worry that you’re there and listening – well that kind of freaks you out.

Then when the second one, at about the same age, stubs her toe and hop-runs around the house screaming “Fuck, fuck, fuck, Fuckley J. McFucklepants!” again, with no worry that you’re there and hearing it, that can be a little shocking.

I mean, I wasn’t raised this way. It all rattled me too.

But it’s all good.

Really, really good.

We never Punished, and nothing Bad Happened.

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I’ve got two teenage girls, 16 and 19. We never punished them for anything.

Well, after the older one lost her iPod by leaving it in a locker with no lock during gym class at school, and then borrowed her sister’s and lost it by leaving it in a classroom in her hoodie, we told her we couldn’t afford to buy her another one, and we didn’t, for a few years.

Technically, we could have, I mean, we’re mortgaged, operating in deficit mode, but we could have charged another one. I think what we said was “we can’t afford to keep buying these things if you keep giving them away” – something like that.

She felt so bad about it, she didn’t argue. That was as close to a punishment as anything we ever did, and it stands alone as a thing that approached punishing.

Our teenagers are lazy and messy, they’re not much help with the house – and that is as bad as it gets.

I have nothing worse to report.

They’re bloody brilliant, the kind of kids some teachers love, because they’re smart and they can talk to the teachers, and other teachers hate because they’re smarter than those teachers.

My oldest one tutors some of her college peers – and she told me this the other day – even in subjects she hasn’t taken. She’s not even in the class, and she can help you with your homework.

The younger one is going through high school, breaking her sister’s records.

I swear, punishment damages your brain.

Selling Harm

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

Addiction is a strange thing.

I used to say, getting high, getting drunk – that I can understand, but gambling? Spending all your money to feel the high from heroin, or from weed, you’re getting something, at least some relief from all those pesky feelings, and with alcohol . . . well, I think with drink what you get is different. I think what alcohol gives you is a chance to vent, a chance to give voice to your worst feelings with no worry that you might remember doing it.

But gambling? That seemed like only half an addiction to me. You lose all your money and . . . nothing. Talk about cutting out the middleman. That is some pure, un-cut self harm right there.

And that is the clue to what’s really going on with addiction.

The addict tends to think that the very thing that is ruining him is the thing that’s saving him – that’s another clue. The addict sees good in the harm, perhaps it’s possible to say that the addict can’t tell good from bad, but probably more accurate to say that for him, the harm looks like good, or feels like good.

Harm from which good is said to come, or good that is derived from harm?

That is what punishment is supposed to be, that is the theory of punishing, good from harm, harm to create good. And this is where the addict learned it. Where we all learned it, at home, from our caregivers.

When a parent punishes, either hits, spanks, grounds or puts us in time-out, confiscates a desired object or simply withdraws his love in order to hurt us and induce us to avoid that hurt by doing what he wants, this is what is shown: good from harm. Worse, the parent explains it, spells it out: this harm is good for you. For many of us, for so many of us, this lesson is applied for nearly every possible hard lesson we get.

It’s no wonder so many of us think harm is good, at least that harm brings good.

Is it?

My Journey into Parenting

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When we finally caught pregnant and made it past the first three months, we decided we were on our way, and we set up a bedroom for the baby. We cleaned a room, painted it, and found a nice crib – but before the baby arrived, we had changed our minds. We’d been thinking and talking a lot about raising children, and it had occurred to us that no animal on earth except Homo Sapiens Sapiens puts their infants away from them like that, out of arms’ reach, especially down the hallway in another room. Just imagine our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees or bonobos having a separate nest for their babies, where they would be easy pickings for predators of all sorts! We had learned to see that idea as counter-intuitive at best, completely unnatural in the mid-range, and a total set-up for even the worst kinds of abuse – privacy for any horrible act by anyone –in the worst case. We placed the crib against our bed, with the bedside wall taken off. We became a ‘family bed’ family, and remained as one for longer than we ever would have imagined, long past what was to be a lengthy nursing period. It was just the most natural, most loving, and the safest thing to do.

I don’t know when it hit me exactly. I know it came out of what I’ve called ‘the many problems’ in the first few chapters, the umpteen sorts of failed childhoods that people spend their lives recovering from and my suspicion that everyone is suffering that sort of pain, even those who can’t claim one of the popular abuse syndromes. There was something else, too. It was the disenchantment of growing up, the feeling of having been lied to – well, that’s too strong, but I never have been free of a certain childish judgement that life was not what it should be. As a young man, I read about Maya, the world of illusion, in “The Glass Bead Game” the Hermann Hesse novel, and some yoga book, and it struck a chord in me. I think I’ve always seen two worlds at once, the world we have and the one we only say we have. I think in the one we say we have, children are loved, the policeman is your friend, the western world is full of functional democracies, and there are good people and bad people. In that world, we can change the bad people by hurting them.

In the world we have, however, hurting people only hurts them.

In the world we really have, punishing people only hurts them. Punishing people has all the negative effects that abusing them has, and that is our state of affairs, that is what has happened to very nearly all of us. This was my epiphany. Punishment is abuse, only legitimate: abuse with an excuse.

Original Sin

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Mass-murderers like Charlie Manson and Andreas Brevik (spelling?) seem to think everyone is a psycho like them. They have it in common that all they thought they needed to do to start a race/faith war was to kill a few people, a few tens of people, and the war would be on, that all the average guy needs is for someone to start the killing and we’d all jump in and go on a mass mass-murder spree, a national, even global, bench-clearing brawl. They think everyone is like them, or at least that we all secretly want to be.
A core belief in people’s intrinsic violence, intrinsic evil, that’s what that is. Or to put it in other words, they hold with the doctrine of Original Sin.
Which is, of course, is a strong predictor for the nearly universal belief in the social tool known as punishment.
(This is what makes Charlie so captivating when he talks. He seems to know this, that he and we are not that far apart.)
It’s no secret that the religious, at least the Christian religious make no bones about this, that Original Sin is a tenet, they think it’s true, hence the need for God. And they mostly all follow the extrapolated idea from it, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But what of the disavowed, the atheists, the lapsed? Also true, for the most part. We can deny the church, we can deny the bible, but it is foolish to deny that the bible is the basis of our entire culture here west of Afghanistan and east of Hawaii, (possibly excluding much of Africa) for the last 2,000 years. You atheists, you church-bashers, know this: use the rod, and you propagate the very thing you hope to extinguish!
This is a key part of the interaction between religion and our faith in punishment as a social tool. When everyone is punished, when we are all raised with punishments that begin long before we have any understanding of the world, then a vengeful god makes sense, the idea of a punishment awaiting us at the end of a mis-lived life seems, reasonable. It has precedent, at least in our minds. Of course, this idea is normally expressed the other way ’round, that God and his punishments are the model for our lives, as written into many faiths’ texts. I don’t hope to change any minds among the religious followers, but the atheist reader will have to admit that the actual function is arranged in the natural timeline of a human life: parents first, God second.
It seems that there is no getting around our cultural heritage, certainly not if we still cling to the most important and influential beliefs of that legacy while only disavowing ourselves of the less reality-based and purely theoretical ones.
Alice Miller:
“Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honour one’s parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.”

Nature VS Nurture

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

The answer to the nature-nurture arguments is very often nature, but I don’t see it’s less nurture because of that. It’s not an either/or thing: we have natures and we have a lot of nurturing to do, it’s not one or the other.
As impressive as some of the ‘nature’ studies and experiments are, still there are some large bodies of knowledge that prove the importance of nurturing as well. The premise upon which all of psychology and psychiatry is founded is the idea that abuse hurts and damages people, – statistically, not every person, every time – impairing our normal functioning. Mountains are the studies and evidence for this factual case of the importance of the nurture side of things.
I don’t know what we plan to do with this information showing how much of what we can excel in, or fail in, is hardwired, our natures from birth. Are we planning to marry and breed in a more scientific manner? Mandatory sterilization of the inferior?
What our function is, what we can do, is nurture, and there is room for improvement. We could work on our nurturing. Any improvement we can make in our nurturing of our young has the potential to bring everyone’s lives up a level. Anything we learn about the hardwired part of ourselves is good to know, but I’m suspicious it may not be a good sort of knowledge to actually use. In terms of the law, and actual nurturing of children, it is the nurturing aspect of life that should concern us.