Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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I'm back after a break. Someone askedme to expand on this...
It is a bad idea to believe something because people have believed it for some time. They might all have been wrong. The abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women are the two classic examples of things that were embraced despite long traditions to the contrary. I hope the emancipation of children will someday join that list.
It is a bad idea to believe something because other people tell you to believe it, however expert they may be. They could be wrong. If they can convince you, by using their own grounds for believing the thing, then well and good, but then it is their argument rather than their authority that was persuasive.
It is a bad idea to believe something because you suddenly have a blinding flash of revelation. The connection of the mind to the outside world through the senses is not perfect. We mishear things; we supply unconsciously a lot of what we think we are seeing. Moments of revelation are marvellous - it may be that our minds have been unconsciously churning around something and a solution has popped up. But the results of that revelation should be subjected to the same critical scrutiny as everything else we encounter. What possible rational explanations are there for what we experienced? (the importance of hunger, tiredness, controlled breathing, pain, ritual, semi-consciouness, repetition in stimulating moments of apparent revelation should not be underestimated).
Sadly, angry frustrated violent behaviour in children is not limited to two-year-olds.
Anyone can become angry and frustrated at any age, and it's not always appropriate or moral for parents just to demand that their children express those feelings in non-violent ways. Of course, objectively speaking, bashing someone tends to be one of the least useful ways of getting a problem solved. But in the context of the family, one cannot assume that rational discussion is working for the child.
People do not use violence where peaceful means of communication are available to them.
That means, they are capable of adequate verbal communication, they have seen it done and understand the tools for it, and they have enough faith that it's going to be taken seriously.
Children don't get born wanting to hurt people. Uncivilised children are the responsibility of the adults responsible for them. If your kids routinely kick and punch you or each other, it's up to you to sort that out. And the first step is to stop blaming them, and start taking responsibility for the problem. You're the parent. Sort it out.
Rules for peaceable family life:
1. Happily occupied children don't beat each other up. Find them things they want to do, help them pursue their interests, don't accept boredom as a way of life. If their interest is fighting, take them to karate classes and help them enjoy those.
2. If they've got a problem they're angry about, find out what that is and address it. Don't accept things at face value: get to the bottom of what's really going on.
Don't make excuse for doing nothing. Don't act like it's their fault and not yours. Be the parent.
A tantrum: when a person loses all ability to express their intentions directly through language or signs, instead using a variety of tantrum-characteristic behaviours, such as uncontrollable weeping, screaming, shaking, drumming of heels on floor (varies according to the person).
A tantrum is a horrible thing to experience. It makes one's eyes sore, gives one a headache, makes one tired, dehydrates one, and does not solve whatever the problem was in the first place.
Helping one's children avoid tantrums and minimise their effects seems to me to be the natural aim of any parent, not only because tantrums are horrible for the person having them, but also because they are horrible for the person on the receiving end - there is great temptation either to give in to all demands of the hysterical person or to remove them from sight and earshot until they have stopped. The one end of the scale is self-sacrifice, the other is neglect. I would recommend neither as a parenting strategy.
I think that having tantrums is an inevitable part of childhood. Some children have them because their parents seem to set out to ignore their intentions. Others have them because their parents - being fallible - sometimes miss the cues of their children until the children have reached a point where intelligible communication is no longer possible. Mine were concentrated at an age where I had very strong desires but lacked the language to communicate them. However patient and willing to help my mother was, she was never going to succeed every time.
1. staving off tantrums
is eminently possible. It requires the tantrum-catcher to know the tantrum-thrower very well indeed, in order to pick up on their cues. Horses for courses: here's what I mean.
Many pre-menstrual women display tantrum characteristics - a boiling up of frustration is eventually vented, either through aggression or through weeping. It can often be side-stepped by those who love the women. Some like to be cosseted, and tucked up on the sofa with a cup of tea; others need to be told to "buck up, old girl"; yet others merely need reminding that their hormones go funny at certain times of month. Choose the wrong response and the tantrum follows in minutes :)
Helping one's children requires exactly the same attention to the cues of the child. Sometimes people have gone beyond being able to express how tired or hungry or thirsty or cross they are; this is where trusted adults can gently help them to change their mental state through a snack or a drink or a quiet activity or whatever.
2. Helping to end a tantrum when it has begun
Some of the same techniques would apply as in the tantrum-avoidance stage. Trying to identify the problem and a way to solve it (food, drink) or providing comfort until the child has calmed down enough to solve their problem themselves. NB it strikes me that this is a big argument in favour of extended breastfeeding, which can provide food, drink AND comfort in one fell swoop to an unhappy child.
Sending someone away to weep it out alone is a cruel act. No-one should wish weeping-oneself-into-exhaustion on another person. Sending one's own child away, denying them the love and reassurance that will help them to start problem solving again quickly, is also counterproductive in the long run. If one's role as a parent is to be a trusted advisor to the small people one lives with, then excluding them from one's presence when their problems have got too large for them to handle rationally is the act of a fool. If my parents did not help me solve problems as a child, I would be highly unlikely to communicate my problems to them and ask for help as I grew more independent. Welcome to teenage hell.
Acceding to demands that are in conflict with one's own intentions is also counterproductive (= self-sacrifice). I hope that helping one's child no longer be hungry or thirsty wouldn't clash with anyone's own intentions (and remember the urgency with which such physical needs need to be met when one is not in control of the provision of food and drink - there's nothing like a blood sugar low). But buying a toy that a child just saw and won't use for more than ten minutes?? It is much better to calm down the tantrum with love and respect, and then creatively find alternative solutions with the child (do we know anyone who owns this toy? Might it be for sale on Ebay or in a charity shop? Are there any better toys it would be worth buying instead? If we spend money on this toy, will it have implications for the rest of the family finances? Can we sell it on Ebay if it's rubbish?). There is a good post about finding solutions to problems with one's children at http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/node/view/30.html (sorry, can't make the link work at the moment)
One should never assume that someone is throwing a tantrum 'for no good reason'. Even when it's 'just hormones', the emotions are real enough, and problem solving (however small the problem seems to anyone outside the sufferer's head) goes on hold until the emotions have been assuaged.
Are we at the beck and call of our 'manipulative' children here? No more than we are at the beck and call of anyone we love who needs help to see beyond the perceived enormity of a problem to its solution.
UPDATE: Jo posted about tantrums a while ago... this has been simmering in my mind ever since, but I couldn't remember where I'd been inspired (*blush*). It's the second post down on this link (sorry - I still can't make the link look nice) http://surfmom.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_surfmom_archive.html#107652091972206211
If we force our wishes on someone else in an interaction, there are a limited number of possibilities in play:
1. The interaction is not with another human being. You can attempt to reason with a labrador till doomsday, but it won't be productive. In the end, the only way to get a labrador to behave in a way that avoids mess and injury is to be the dog's pack-leader.
2. There is no time to explain. If there had been time to explain, the person would have accepted your ideas. They trust you, so they do what you say on the assumption that you won't be exploiting their trust. (e.g. "leave the house right now" "why?" "because I've been doing an experiment with wiring and it's gone horribly wrong and any minute now the house is going to expl-aaagh")
3. We are using some advantage over the person to coerce them into following our orders. Advantages include: being bigger, and therefore able to hit the person; having control over the other person's finances; having a long history of forcing that person to do what we tell them, which began when they were smaller/financially dependent. Exploiting such discrepancies is immoral.
When we "make rules" or "establish boundaries" for our children but without their consent, it's worth thinking about which of the above is in play. None of them are particularly savoury (please tell me which possibilities I have left off this slightly rushed list).
More from your friendly local anti-Ferber activist.
Someone told me recently that children have to learn to go to sleep on their own, and if they are always held when they are going to sleep, or always co-sleep, then they will never learn. And then western civilisation will come crashing down around our ears (or the mother will end up spending a year sleeping next to the cot on car cushions - history doesn't relate why the mother in such stories never buys a nice mattress to sleep on).
This is what I said in the parallel universe where I always think of the right thing to say at the time, rather than 48 hours later:
People like to have various things around them to help them go to sleep. These might include darkness/light, a comfort blanket like Linus, a thumb to shove firmly in mouth, sheets that smell of home, a boring or familiar book to read, a last visit to the bathroom, a hot water bottle, a friend to talk to until the conversation fragments into snoring, a parent to hug.
Most parents are complete hypocrites. They would be outraged if people took away the things that help them sleep; they would be equally horrified if someone expected their preferred routines to remain the same for ever (a good friend of mine told me how se had finally cracked hir insomnia problem at the age of 35+... se tried closing hir eyes. Noone had EVER suggested to hir before that closing one's eyes helps one drop off. I kid you not). But their child Must Learn For Their Own Good that falling asleep in someone's arms is Not The Done Thing.
I don't get it. Is it supposed to promote independence? I would guess that when a child is ready to move to hir own bed/ own room, se will do so (you've got to have one available, obviously). Instead of wailing and gnashing of teeth as the child is treated as Pavlov's dog and taught to sleep despite being alone and afraid, sleeping alone becomes the most tremendous adventure which can be postponed and re-embarked upon at any time.
I would also guess that sleeping away from home, or in a room with children of a different family on holiday or something, would be the sort of adventure that children would embark upon with great gusto, as long as the safety valve of climbing in with parent(s) was still available.
The children in most families suffer, at least sometimes, from having to sleep alone whether they want to or not. And it all seems so unnecessary.
Is it because most people have notions of personal privacy during sleep that don't include their children? Or is it because they are afraid that their children's sleep patterns might (horror!) impinge upon their own?
Stephen commented below on the importance of religious training to bringing up children.
I agree that religions are repositories of moral knowledge, and that it is important to pass that moral knowledge on (if anyone is interested, I had a long conversation about this with Elliot here. It's knowledge growth in action!). I also agree that knowing the stories of a religion can help us understand the culture in which we live, and many of the ways people behave towards each other. These are important things to pass on to our children.
The spiritual side of life - the appreciation of beauty, or of the wonder of the world, or learning to recognise moral goodness when we see it, or a sense of community with other people striving for the same goals, or a moment of meditation and appreciation of one's place in creation - these are all vitally important. But they needn't be passed on through religion. To catch them all in one go, I think you'd need to be in a symphony orchestra playing Beethoven's Eroica on top of a mountain on a clear day where you can see wilderness for miles and miles... no, that didn't include quite all of the aspects I mentioned. But you get my drift - Richard Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow was inspirational for me - there is so much wonder involved in understanding the natural world that one needn't assign it to supernatural causes in order to be properly appreciative.
But I wouldn't want to immerse my child in Christianity, or any other religion, because of the funadmentally bad aspects of them. In short: tradition, authority and revelation are bad reasons to believe in something. I'll expand on that if anyone wants me to.
My hope is that parents can pass on good moral knowledge to their children, and also the cultural background of their society (and that might entail attending church occasionally, to enjoy the ritual and make connections with other musical, visual, linguistic etc aspects of the culture) but no, I do not think that children need religious training or indoctrination. Having introduced them to the stories of the judaeo-christian tradition, to the good moral knowledge of the tradition, and to the cultural norms of the tradition, a child can make hir own decision about the extent to which se wishes to immerse hirself (I say judaeo-christian because that is where the roots of the culture in which I live are).
Yankee Vulture left a comment about boundaries on the post two below this one, which made me think some more about the implications of parentally-imposed boundaries to behaviour.
One of the big things we learn as humans is how to interact with other people in productive ways – so that we get the information we want, so that we can negotiate easily, so that we can learn from them and have them learn from us. Any parent who does not help their child to develop the techniques of doing this is neglectful. On the importance of “civilized discourse”, we entirely agree.
But we disagree about the means of helping our children, I think. Rather than ordering my child to ‘be polite’, and punishing them if they are not (an artificial boundary - I don't know whether this is one that Yankee Vulture would impose, it's just one I picked at random), I would explore with my child the beneficial results of being polite (people like being treated nicely, and you are more likely to achieve whatever your intention was). Children are not stupid; they will appreciate practical help, hints and tips. Trying to make people be polite to each other as some sort of arbitrary convention is going to lead to all sorts of problems when the child decides to reject arbitrary conventions (and why shouldn’t they?).
I think it is important to look at the moments in our interactions with other people – with our children, our spouses, our friends, our own parents and siblings, complete strangers – and notice the points where we completely disregard the wishes and intentions of others. How do we justify our actions to ourselves? Because I’m the parent? Because I’m bigger? Because I have financial power over this person? Because they would rather obey me, despite it being contrary to what they want to do, because the alternative might jeopardise my love for them?
Are there not ways of interacting where both people get what they want? What this takes (Common preferences) is creativity, imagination, a gradual build up of trust, and the determination to build a relationship with children/parents/ whoever which acknowledges the autonomy and humanity of all parties involved.
The bit that really struck me in the comment was this: “If they want to scream and have a tantrum, fine, go for it, but not around me (in your room with the door closed)”. If someone is crying, there is probably a good reason. How does sending the child away and shutting the door help to solve whatever problem it is that the child does not have enough words to express? The one thing they’ll surely learn is that when something upsets them, or when they cannot solve a problem, parents are the last people who are likely to help.
Similarly, “When I come home at night… for at least 30 minutes, it's my wife and me in the living room and no kid allowed past the threshold”. Mightn’t it be rewarding to invite the 8-year-old in to start with, and have hir chill out quietly with a drink and snack, and hear about/tell about the day, and as the mood of that moment gets better established, to invite more of the children in to participate until after a few weeks, everyone can be happily and quietly sharing that special moment at the end of the working day? That’s if they want to. Maybe the little ones would rather be playing elsewhere sometimes. If parents talk with their children about what everyone has been doing and thinking, then both parents and children have a chance of learning together, and of ending up friends.
