Parenting Philosophy Toolbox, Part 9

(This is part 9 of a series. To see the the first part, click here.)

9. What lesson is my child learning from this? This question should continually play in the background of your mind with everything you do. Ultimately the decisions that you make in life regarding your behavior (as perceived by your child) should be guided by the answers you derive from this constant line of questioning.

When you do something and then tell your child that it is forbidden for him to do the same, you send a mixed message. When you allow the television to be the child's best friend and babysitter and then complain that he or she is poorly behaved or having nightmares from watching scary images or has limited or vulgarity-filled speech, it's time to take a step back and wonder how those behaviors came about.

When you cave into a demand that your child makes after crying and begging for that demand for several minutes, what lesson has the child learned? "Hey, I may have to whine for 5 minutes and listen to Daddy say 'no cookie' over and over again, but eventually I always get a cookie anyway!" "Hmm, Mommy wants me to do this, but I know that she gives me chocolate chips if I hold out for them, so I'll wait and see if I can get some candy!"

I've heard all kinds of stories where parents neglected to consider the lesson(s) the child would learn by certain behaviors. I know of more than one father who has had a toddler girl awaken and have difficulty falling back asleep during the night and has plopped down in front of her favorite movie at 2AM. Guess what happened the next night? And the next? The daughter learned that she could get up for 2AM movies every night, and so the negative behavior was reinforced, rather than extinguished. The inconsistent behavior by these fathers led the children to ignore the notion that when they awaken during the night they should return to sleep.

A few months ago I was faced with a dilemma: the sprinklers were still spraying the lawn when I took my son to our neighborhood playground one morning, and some tempting puddles had formed on the sidewalk. Another mom was there with her two children who kept trying to convince her that it wasn't a problem for them to get wet. I had to consider the issue: would it be acceptable for my son to play in puddles in the future? How much of a problem would it be for him to jump now and expect the same opportunity down the road? In the end all 3 children had a soggy morning romp in the water and enjoyed themselves thoroughly. Jackson got soaking wet, with pruned skin, and while he has had some puddle exploration opportunities since, we haven't had any problematic issues as a result. (Of course, having typed this now, that is sure to change!)

In the above situation, I analyzed the issue before acting. I recognized that puddle jumping was something I was willing to allow to become a consistent game for Jackson. However sometimes I forget to ask myself what lesson my son is learning, and much corrective action later becomes necessary. One issue I have struggled with adjusting is table standing. Traditionally, I have disallowed standing on tables indoors. However in my own mind, I found that outdoor tables are distinct in many ways and generally less of a threat of danger for standing. My son, on the other hand, merely became confused by this distinction which was not as clear to him as it was to me. Sometimes standing on tables was okay, perhaps even encouraged; sometimes he got yelled at for doing it. How confusing! Who is to blame for him standing on indoor tables then? Certainly not Jackson. He was merely applying his preferred of two states of table standing rules: the one in which he got to be on the table!

Unfortunately, there are other situations of a sadder nature that need to be addressed here. Some parents have been raised under the impression that hitting a child (or even an adult) will be educational. I'm no neuroscientist, but to me it makes little sense to spank a child for peeing on the floor or for hitting another child, etc. The part of the brain that reacts to violence would be our more primitive side, our hindbrain, which has very little capacity for reasoning. Expecting that a child will learn the correct lesson from hitting is very strange indeed, particularly in the example of a child being violent. "Wait, Mommy says 'no hitting, hitting is bad', but then she hit me!" It's a very confusing statement to make to a child. It also does not correct the behavior, as with peeing on the floor. Children instead learn to hide the unwanted behavior (or lie about it) if they perceive they will receive punishment, rather than to learn the lesson not to perform the unwanted behavior in the first place. Kids whose parents have often resorted to physical punishment are prone to lying, hiding evidence of soiled underpants, blaming others for knocking over plants, and in one particularly memorable case I experienced recently, a child was unable to locate the garbage can in my bathroom and hid poopy paper behind my toilet so she would not get "in trouble" for making a mess.

The above instances are all ones I have pulled from personal experiences I have had with children, and it takes considerable time and retraining to correct for the behavior of children who learned the wrong lessons from their errors. Rather than trying to help kids gain an understanding of the reason to do or not to do something, many parents and caregivers resort to authoritarian commands that dictate rather than guide or suggest. As a result, these children may behave better, but they are not developing their own reasoning skills. Some recent articles explain this phenomenon in more detail, demonstrating that slightly wilder, less well-behaved children may actually have a scholastic advantage if their parents are prone more to reasoning with kids than to issuing a series of mandates.

After all, if a child runs out into the street without looking, and he is struck by and yelled at by his father, what lesson is he learning from that experience? "I run into the street, and Daddy hits me and yells at me! Ouch! I thought Daddy liked me?" However, if a child is consistently helped with reasoning skills, he can (like my 21 month old son) learn that crossing the street is something to be done with care. Jackson understands that cars are dangerous because they are big, fast, and heavy. When he comes to a street, even if he's been running ahead of me, he waits, holds my hand, looks both ways, and crosses the street when no cars are coming. Since he could walk, street-crossing skills have been practiced and discussed, so that he knows how to be safe. Of course, on occasion he will get distracted by an airplane flying overhead and need a reminder not to stop in the street. That's part of being a kid. But being abused by the people you love and trust more than anyone, being taught that making mistakes is worthy of being hit, the only lesson that is learned is that mistakes and problems must be kept a secret from parents--which is hardly what I think these parents are hoping their children will learn.

So, while keeping the notion in your mind, "What is my child learning from this experience?" you should also consider the correlate question: "What lesson should I be learning from this experience?" It is largely through asking ourselves these two questions that Andrew and I have developed the ideas I've been presenting in this Parenting Philosophy Toolbox. If you take nothing else away from reading this series of concepts, please take this one! When we make time to consider the effects of our behavior on our children and ourselves, our self-reflection helps us to become better parents and more thoughtful people.

Please come back for the next installment in this series in 2 weeks!

Parenting Philosophy Toolbox, Part 8

(This is part 8 of a series. To see the the first part, click here.)

8. Be creative. This is often a challenge for parents. We spend so much time becoming "grown-ups" and giving up on childish pleasures. We work hard to get organized and maintain regular schedules. We emphasize intellectualism and crave reason.

Then we have children--and we are totally at a loss for how to deal with them! We wonder why they do things that make no sense. We simply get to a point, somewhere along the line, in which we can no longer sympathize with the joy of riding a merry-go-round. Seriously, I used to love those things, but since my son started enjoying them, I have discovered that my adoration of the merry-go-round has been replaced by discomfort when I feel the loss of control and head-spinning craziness that whirling about in circles induces. Kids LOVE that stuff. Adults...not so much.

In order to get in tune with how children experience the world, we have to go back and try to remember what it was like being young. With more and more people waiting longer to have children, this only becomes more challenging. The boring adult rut is tough to bust out of, but to truly relate to a child, we have to walk a mile in shoes that are way too small for us now. Which just looks ridiculous--yet that's actually part of what we need to do. We need to embrace a level of silly that helps us connect with our children.

I didn't know I had lost my touch. I had retained it for a long time, even up until about halfway through my 20s. But by the time my son Jackson became a toddler, something was very different in me, and I felt I had to relearn old ways of relating to children. Thankfully he has developed some small level of patience and understanding that sometimes Mommy and Daddy are a little dense about certain "obvious" concepts.

For example, when Jackson was 12 months old, he began behaving very strangely in relation to food. He would be quite clearly hungry, but lacking verbal skills, he simply could not articulate to us why it was that he was refusing to eat food that he obviously wanted to ingest. Out of desperation, we began to try to discover what would appease him. Andrew and I learned a LOT about toddlers from this sort of behavior. Why didn't Jackson eat his food? He was learning about lids. He wanted to take the lid off his baby food and put it back on. Between EVERY bite. EVERY time. For MONTHS.

Sure, we could have argued. We could have tried to tell him he was being ridiculous. But truly, had we forced him to get upset over something so trivial and easily accommodated as covering and uncovering his food between bites, who is the more ridiculous? He was asserting power in his largely powerless life. He was developing fine motor skills. He was learning about his environment. And more than that, he was eating without a fight.

Being creative with your interactions with your child can help in numerous ways. Say your child is hungry. You're on your way home to get food but have run out of food with you in the car. She's upset because she wants food and keeps asking for it, but no matter how much sense you try to use to reassure her that you understand she is hungry and that you are making strides toward acquiring sustenance, all she can focus on is the sensation in her belly. Crack the window. Talk about the wind. Sing a silly song. Point out words that she's been learning: "Look! Trees! Bicycle! Running! Ambulance! School bus!" The important part of this, of course, is that you first acknowledge the desires expressed by your child and reassure her that you are actively working to resolve the sensations in her belly--then you can try a distractionary technique.

Kid won't eat something you call broccoli? Call it a little tree. Want your child to learn about road safety as a pedestrian? Teach him about the Road Fairy/Ferry who has to be with him to help make sure there aren't any cars coming. He asks for a banana and refuses to eat it? Get him into a silly place and call it the Banana Zone.

It's okay for kids to splash in puddles once in a while. It's okay for them to treat curbs as balance beams. It's okay for them to do silly things and for you to join them. But remember: if you do it once, they will expect you to do it again. And again. And again. Begging may be involved. Whining as well, if you do not bend sufficiently to allow the game to happen again. So whatever you allow, whatever silliness or creative game you decide to play, consider whether or not it's one you'd be willing to do with any sort of regularity. If it's any kind of success, your child will want to repeat the fun time with Mommy and/or Daddy.

Also if your child has some issues that need resolving, be they significant (traumatic event) or minor (afraid of monsters under the bed), you may want to consider flipping through a copy of Dr. Lawrence Cohen's book Playful Parenting. I acknowledge that his writing could be better organized than it is, but for those looking for some ideas on where to start, it's a place to go. Dr. Cohen is a child psychologist who uses play as a form of therapy to help children recover from incidents ranging from violent behaviors to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to a fear of riding on swings. He describes play as many researchers today do, which is the main form of learning for children, particularly through about age 7. Play is how they study the world around them, how they make sense of what they perceive, and therefore play is the most critical aspect of childhood as well as the most educational.

The main thing for you as a parent is that you connect with your child. So you have to get down on the child's level. Get on the floor and roll around. Pretend to be a train or an elephant. Make silly noises and encourage your child to copy them or make up his own for you to repeat. Discuss ridiculous hypothetical situations with your older child (e.g. What would happen if you launched a water balloon into space? Whose house would it land on?). Life can be fun if we allow it to be so. Be creative, and enjoy more of life as a parent.