How Children Bring up Their Parents
It's fashionable for parents to say that they treat their children as young adults, that is they treat them as responsible and reasoning people rather than using 'old-fashioned' methods such as discipline. The buzz phrase is that children have rights and one aspect of bringing up children involves negotiation. Here's how it works:
A mother is taking her child to the supermarket with her. He has a history of misbehaving so the mother 'negotiates': 'If you behave I'll buy you a chocolate bar when we get to the checkout'. Sometimes this is said as a throwaway comment, sometimes as a negotiating strategy, in which case the mother may ask the child if this is a deal.
What happens in action, as often as not, is something like this. Whilst shopping the mother leaves the child with the trolley whilst she goes off for something. The child has an idea to jump on the trolley and go for a ride. The possibility of a chocolate bar sometime in the future doesn't necessarily offset the pleasure to be gained now. Children don't have the same concept of future as adults do. So let's say the child misbehaves - he goes for ride, crashes the trolley and causes an upset. The mother comes back extremely annoyed and says: "I thought I told you to behave yourself?" or even "I thought we agreed you'd behave yourself?" In fact, what happened was that a deal was negotiated (which the child probably agreed to begrudgingly, even assuming he understood what he was agreeing to), and now the child decided to not keep his side of the bargain.
So when they get the checkout what happens? Well, amazingly enough, in probably the majority of cases the mother buys the chocolate bar anyway. This may be simply because she's not prepared to argue or may convince herself that although he misbehaved by crashing the trolley he behaved the rest of the time. In other cases the mother refuses to buy the chocolate, even under protest (and, after all, modern textbooks emphasise that parents have to be consistent).
So what happens the next time they go shopping? If this strategy didn't work last time why should it work the next? One method is to raise the stakes: "If you behave I'll buy you a really big chocolate bar". This is rewarding bad behaviour and the child may think "She'll buy it whether I behave or not", or "If I misbehave enough I may get that new bike". Generally the same people who say kids aren't this ingenious are the same ones who say they treat their kids as adults.
I saw recently a reference to how 'thinking people' bring up children (that is, by reasoning with them), but I have to ask myself - How much thinking did they actually do? They obviously didn't think through the consequences of their actions.
Negotiating has its place, but there are some things that are not negotiable and bad behaviour is one of them. If all else fails the fallback used to be a short slap but not only does the political correct movement complain, it is actually illegal in some countries.
