Don’T Let Kids Off The Hook

One of the mantras oft recited by the psychologists of my generation is “criticize the behavior, not the child.” For example, instead of telling a misbehaving child, “You were wrong to hit Billy,” the child’s parents are advised to say, “Hitting is wrong.”

This prevents the child from “feeling bad about himself,” which is to say it prevents the child from losing self-esteem.

In the late 20th century, by some strange turn, helping children develop good feelings about themselves became more important than helping them develop respect for others. Toward this end, if a child did poorly on a homework assignment, his teacher was to find some way of making him feel he’d done just fine. If he lost a contest, adults were to make him feel he’d won. If he misbehaved, his parents were to react not with anger, but understanding.

Their mission became that of locating and eradicating the supposed psychological cause of his misbehavior. Thus, the child was accorded an upbringing free of guilt, shame, and, most significantly, the truth.

Contrast this with the attitude of adults in previous generations who felt that every child, being human, was capable of monstrous things. Containing this potential required confronting a child with his misbehavior such that sufficient guilt was indeed produced.

Not surprisingly, veteran teachers consistently report that getting today’s child to take full responsibility for a misdeed, much less evoking from him feelings of penitence, is like pulling teeth from a chicken. Perhaps, just perhaps, he can be arm-twisted into admitting he did something wrong, but there’s always an excuse, an “if,” “and” or “but” to which the child adamantly clings.

My own parenting experience, now over, led me slowly but surely to the conviction that by criticizing behavior but not children themselves, we were letting children off the hook, allowing them to place comfortable distance between themselves and their misdeeds. We were producing crops of children who were blind to the truth about themselves, thus incapable of admitting the truth to others. In fact, we Baby Boomers were the first such crop.

So it came as no surprise that a man who is supposed to serve as First Role Model could not initially say, “I was wrong, and I feel ashamed.” Rather, Bill Clinton first said that “it” was wrong.

Our duty, of course, is to be outraged. Nonetheless, we owe a measure of thanks to the First Role Model for so graphically demonstrating the rot at the core of the self-esteem movement and, more specifically, the corruption of child-rearing malpractices it engendered.

This is more than a national scandal, it’s a cultural lesson. Bill Clinton had a problem getting past “it” to “I.” Most of the rabble, I fear, will have an equal problem getting past “he” to “we.”