Goodnight Moon

Here’s what’s wrong with all those “tough love,” “timeout,” “logical consequences,” “spare the rod and spoil the child” versions of parenting. The problem is that, if properly applied, they work as advertised. Be careful what you wish for.

Skinnerian, punitive, behavioral ideas about how to bully your child into submission will indeed force your child to comply. In the short term anyway you are likely to get what you say you want. But what do you want? Do you want behaviors, sleeping through the night, agreement with your point of view? Or do you want a connection with your offspring? As I can not be the first to point out: your child is not a pigeon.

When your kid is tantruming, that’s when she needs you the most. The last thing you want to do is ignore her, push her away, or put her in time out. You think she wants to be out of control, flooded, and screaming? You think she’s manipulative and evil? She’s not old enough to understand operant conditioning. She needs you to help her get back in control of her emotions. Don’t throw her to the wolves. She’s a child for goodness sake. If she knew how to master herself she would.

Think about it. You’re bigger; you’re stronger; chances are you are more educated than your two year old and you likely talk faster. So you can enforce your will. If you want your child to sleep through the night for example, you can ignore her when she cries. Ferberization is a system of insisting that your child not get out of her bed and come hang out with you in yours.

The problem is that youwant to comfort your screaming child. Relieving the distress of your toddler is deeply encoded in your DNA. The sound of a baby crying is more disturbing than any other comparable horrible noise. The blare of a jet engine doesn’t compare. Even your cousin’s kid practicing his new violin doesn’t engender as deep a visceral response as does an infant’s cry.

In my view, ignoring your infant or toddler when she’s screaming at night is closer to child abuse than allowing your kid a cuddle is close to spoiling. And to be fair, the Ferber folks do suggest comforting the child before ignoring her for successively lengthy periods.

But to get back to the point, you want the child to soothe herself, to go back to sleep, to get some rest. Tomorrow is a busy day after all. And some of us have to work in the morning. But you can’t have it both ways. You want her to sleep without trauma; you want her to sleep without needing you; you want her to sleep without making you feel guilty. I remember an expression about how a person can either look forward to having a piece of cake or, alternatively, go ahead and devour said piece of cake but that both possibilities are mutually exclusive and can not exist simultaneously. The saying may have been expressed more succinctly, but you get the idea. The kid can leave you alone through the night, sobbing quietly, terrified, feeling abandoned. Or you can cuddle your kid, letting her know that you are there for her. And what is the harm in readingGoodnight Moon one more time? For many kids, staying alone in bed in the dark disconnected from the adults on whom she has come to rely isn’t happening. You can make her do it, sure. But you can’t make her like it.

And nothing much changes throughout development.

When your feckless 22-year-old son gets fired from his first job for basically being a complete and utter idiot-showing up late, complaining about how his responsibilities are both beneath him and unfair, refusing to suck up to his boss-you can tell him the truth. You can point out that his bosses don’t have to equitable, communicative, and pleasant; they just have to sign his checks on Friday. You can rub his nose in the fact that OF COURSE THEY FIRED YOU, YOU NIMROD, YOU SHOWED UP LATE FOR WORK, WHAT DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?

How did he get his sense that life has to be fair? How did he get to be so opinionated and argumentative? How could he not know that sometime you have to go along to get along? How could he get so darn stuck in his intractable judgments?

I’ll take a guess, Alex. Maybe this is the worldview that he absorbed from watching the way you have explained and coerced and forced him to do things for his entire blessed life. Here’s another guess. Your son needed understanding and comfort when he got fired. He didn’t need advice.

“Yeah, I didn’t agree with that guy to start with but he kept howling at me day after day, never letting me get a word in edgewise, endlessly bellowing his opinions in my face, so I finally came around to see the logic and good sense in his point of view and now I completely agree.”

Words spoken by no one ever.

If you focus on the relationship, compliance will follow. If, on the other hand, you focus on compliance, the relationship may be irrevocably compromised.

Without irony or humor, here is my advice on how increase your odds of bringing up contented children: err on the side of nurture. Understanding, compassion, and conversation are more likely to engender the kind of relationship in which your kids do what you want because they actually like you and want to be with you. And as I often remark, “the days are long, but the years fly.” Don’t you want to look back on more loving cuddles and fewer interminable arguments?

Speaking of books that are helpful to families, my third volume, Kids Learn What They Live. Kids Live What They Learn, is now available. For gentle insights rather than definitive answers, click here to order your copy.

I am proud of my new book and I hope it will be enjoyable and beneficial to you. If it is half as much fun for you to read as it was for me to write, I will feel that I have made a contribution. I would be pleased if you would continue to be part of our ongoing conversation about parenting, kids who learn differently, college admissions, substance abuse, and how to raise healthy kids in this unhealthy culture. So much to talk about! Order a copy today and let’s keep the conversation going.