On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 10:41:06 -0500, "Nathan A. Barclay"
wrote:


"Chris" wrote in message
...

How Children Really React to Control

by Thomas Gordon, Ph.D.

snip

The Coping Mechanisms Children Use

Over the years I have compiled a long list of the various
coping
mechanisms youngsters use when adults try to control them. This
list comes
primarily out of our Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) and
Teacher
Effectiveness Training (T.E.T.) classes, where we employ a simple
but
revealing classroom exercise. Participants are asked to recall the
specific ways they themselves coped with power-based discipline
when they
were youngsters. The question yields nearly identical lists in
every
class, which confirms how universal children's coping mechanisms
are. The
complete list is reproduced below, in no particular order. Note how
varied
these recurring themes are. (Can you pick out the particular coping
methods you employed as a youngster?)

The more I think about this exercise, the more it looks like
something
deliberately contrived to generate a particular emotional reaction.

You are correct. That IS the point. To explore the actual experiences
of people, not create, as you seem to be doing below, move away from
the real and into the theoretical.

To teach someone about how others experience things it is useful to
point out their own experiences that may be similar.

An
objective analysis

Again, a jump away from the point of training people to use and
develop their capacity for empathy. PET is based on empathy as ONE of
its principles. There are others of course.

would try to pin down how control by adults is likely to
affect individual children.

You seem to be missing something. The exercise was with a room full of
people, so in fact one would have a rich producting of of just what
you ask for. Usually such exercises result in long lists of wall
posted newsprint display of the group's responses.

And one would then know how individual people in this group were
effected by adult controls.

This exercise, instead, creates an amalgam of
negative effects across all the people in the group, a combination
that will
almost certainly be significantly longer and uglier than a typical
child is
likely to exhibit.

It IS ugly. That IS the point. And of course the many will have more
kinds of experiences and reactions. That isn't a fault, it's an
eye-opener. One finds out rather quickly that not only are there many
effects, but that there are some one an personally identify with.

Worse, a person might add something to the list because
it happened once or twice, but have others end up thinking it
happened on a
much more regular basis.

What would be the problem? It isn't a frequency issue. The purpose is
to identify different effects by adult control over children.

I'm not saying that efforts to control children through force don't
have
negative consequences, or that parents should adopt a dismissive
attitude
toward the risk of such consequences.

I'm not sure then what your point would be. The exercise is a class
room exercise. Classrooms are for learning. Information is needed to
learn.

But it is important not to blow the
risks out of proportion either.

It isn't a listing of risks. It's a listing of effects.

If parents want to do a risk/benefit
analysis regarding whether the risk involved in exerting their
authority in
certain types of situations is likely to be greater or less than the
benefits, they need an accurate appraisal of the risks, not an
exaggerated
one.

Gordon wasn't promoting, in this exercise, a risk analysis of
punishment. Just a review of the fact there is some negative effect.
In fact it IS up to the participant to judge the risk/benefit
themselves and reject or accept.

The problem in this society is that the risk/benefit of punishment is
rarely even looked at, or if done, because of long taught,
conditioned, societal values, the risk will be rated low and the
benefits relatively high for punishment.

The unchallenged belief in punishment as a way of controlling
relationships has consequences we see around us all the time. Divorce
rates, school dropout rates, crime rates, failures in international
diplomacy, job failures.

When human interactions fail to produce wanted results one can pretty
well count on one of the parties at least, coming from a punishment
model.


Nathan

Kane