From Beryl Bainbridge’s 1974 novel, The Bottle Factory Outing:
As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no, unless she didn’t mean it. If she was offered another piece of cake and she wanted it, she was obliged to refuse out of politeness. And if she didn’t want it, she had to say yes, even if it choked her.
It’s easy to foresee the next stop on this train. Parents who believe that children should be seen and not heard are more likely to bring up children who feel that they are–well–not heard. My folks said I was important. But I never had any reason to believe that I was anything other than superfluous. My parents spent my entire childhood figuring out how to be elsewhere. In the office, in the bar, in the company of strangers.
That child is going to have a tough time distinguishing what she actually wants and needs as opposed to what her parents want her to want and need her to need.
Spare the rod and spoil the child–not a Bible verse, btw–has been replaced with “okay, so maybe we don’t actually hit the kid with a belt but a daily dose of emotional abuse and humiliation coupled with a blinding lack of insight into why the kid is “misbehaving” should be equally effective.”
Surely we can do better than that. Kids need us the most when they are fussing, acting out, misbehaving. I get it. Of course you put your kid in “time out” when they are a screaming, out-of-control, exploding mass of anger and fear. But who needs a break–the “bad” child or the overwhelmed parent?
The smart long game is to figure out why your kid has hit DefCon three. Hungry, tired, wet, lonely is what you tried to solve when they were piddles. Why is the kid a pain in the neck? You’re the adult; solve the problem. Nobody behaves randomly. Just as there’s a reason you married Robin rather than Lee, took this job here instead of that gig there, your kid is trying to figure out what’s going on in their head and in the world. I’ll act like the Tasmanian Devil, maybe my parent will give me a cuddle. Words no child ever thought.
Insight talks, reactivity walks. Somebody is out of control. Wouldn’t you agree that the screaming person should be the one who hasn’t been to college?
And don’t we want our kids to grow up believing that they are cared for, understood, and heard and that they can have another piece of cake–or not–based on their own needs rather than ours?
