Bad Behavior Ought To Have Consequences
Before mental health professionals built the Tower of Parent-Babble, when common sense ruled the rearing of children, parents held children accountable for their behavior. To that end, they taught children the Universal Accountability Principle: For every choice, there is a consequence. Good choices being good consequences and bad choices, bad ones.
Parents also understood, however, that life in the Real World wasn’t exactly that simple. In the Real World, whereas a person must make a lot of good choices over a relatively long period of time in order to reap the rewards of his or her efforts, a bad choice is usually punished immediately.
Therefore, parents (and teachers) were apt to make no big deals over the good choices a child made. They simply encouraged him to make more of the same. But when the child made a bad choice, LOOK OUT!!
Today’s parents, by contrast, have been told by the Keepers of the Tower of Parent-Babble that they are fundamentally responsible for making their children feel good about themselves. This is accomplished by making big deals over the good things - nay, even mediocre things - children do, as in, “Oh, Bubba! I like it so much when you flush the toilet after using it!! You’re such a special little fella!! Yes, you are!!!”
Because you can’t make children feel good by making them feel bad, parents are not, under any circumstances, to make them feel bad about anything. And when they do (by mistake, of course, probably because they themselves had a bad day), they are to make up for it by performing extraordinary acts of compensation.
I keep seeing a certain poster in schools around the country. It reads: For every time you say something negative to your child, praise him/her 10 times. The word CRITICISM is printed once in Big Black Letters, followed by the word PRAISE printed 10 times in Big White Letters. I thought, “Babble.”
What, pray tell, is wrong with telling a child who’s wronged someone else that he ought to be ashamed of himself, or that you won’t accept a piece of second-rate work, or that he’s in need of an emergency attitude adjustment (which is promptly provided)?
In the Real World, of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. Every Real World Parent knows that there are times when it’s absolutely necessary to make statements of this sort to children, sometimes followed by punishment even.
“But, John, don’t statements along those lines hurt a child’s feelings?”
Well, yes, that’s right, they do. But inflicting temporary hurt to a child’s feelings and destroying the child psychologically are horses of two entirely different colors.
In fact, a fully operational social conscience cannot develop without causing a child occasionally psychic pain, as in, shame, embarrassment, and remorse.
This is part and parcel of helping children recognize their faulted (a.k.a., sinful) natures and want to bear themselves. (“Boy, this Rosemond guy is getting pretty psychologically incorrect, isn’t he?!”)
Please don’t exaggerate what I’m saying. I’m not talking about causing children to loathe themselves, but rather to view themselves with humility.
To develop humility, a child must come to grips with penance and atonement. The spiritually mature adult, when he does something wrong, will impose penance upon himself and prescribe for himself appropriate means of atonement.
But a child is not spiritually mature; therefore, it is rare that a child, after doing something wrong, will voluntarily impose and prescribe these things upon himself.
They must be imposed on him and prescribed for him by adults, and the only adults capable of carrying out this obligation to the child and society are those who live in the Real World.
Unfortunately, and largely because the Keepers of the Tower have confused the realities of child rearing and replaced them with the mythology of “progressive parenting,” there is today a dearth of parents who fully accept this responsibility.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Rosemond The Charlotte Observer