Parent-Child Negotiations

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 06:38:59 -0700, Doan wrote:


Let me ask you, LaVonne. You were spanked as a child, right? Did
you
learn to hit?

Of course she did. Then she learned not to. Some never do learn not
to.

Using that logic, if you take toys away from your child,
the child will learn to rob and steal??? :-)

Actually, for a logic impaired person you do pretty well at times.

So tell me, are there do people that steal? Where did they actually
learn to?

From whom did you learn to lie to yourself about your motives?

The pretense you are neutral and simply want people to choose for
themselves is patently false to any reader that cares to google a bit
of your posting archives. At some point, as a child, some adult very
likely said one thing to you but did another. Your posts are ripe with
it.

But, by golly, boy genius, in this, you are correct.....that is ONE of
the ways a child IS taught to steal and rob if it is used as a
punishment, rather than simply teaching how to use his toys (without
using them to hit for instance) and how to put them away.

The entire punishment model if fraught with just such risk of teaching
a lesson you don't KNOW you are teaching, that you will blame the chid
for later, and swear that the only way to deal with it is to
punish...and the child will fight that because YOU TAUGHT HIM ONE
THING AND NOW ARE TRYING TO UNTEACH IT....hence, you, and folks with
your faulty logic will have to be more severe..........OR

You can start waking up now and thinking some of this through, and
figuring out that YOU teach your child everything they know, sans
instinct, about how to operate in the world, and ALL of the social
skills.

Assume that when a child "misbehaves" either you have taught them to
do that behavior (and you probably won't even remember doing it) and
patiently explain you have something NEW to teach them.....completely
avoiding the control battles.

Doan, you are always, as a bright intelligent person, just one step
away from the answers, just as you did with this one, but it's old
story...

I bet you I can state one step away from but you cannot touch me.

Of course there is a door between us.

All YOU have to do to touch me, that is learn and wake up, is open the
damn door, instead of playing games that keeps the door shut to you.

If you cracked some books on learning theory and worked to put away
your biases about the need for force to make people do things....you
might begin to understand why so many of us make the claims we do here
that YOU think are impossible, apparently.

Doan

I'm very serious. As for the question to LaVonne. My guess is ALL
those who were spanked as children, and punished much, had to mature
to the point, and often with great pain and struggle, cast off that
early experience and get to REAL logic, and recognize they had been
conditioned, not lovingly taught.

It's not easy. It takes courage. Sometimes it takes risk. It feels
like one has no place to stand at times.

Like, if I can't punish what CAN I do?

Best wishes,

Kane


On Mon, 7 Jun 2004, Carlson LaVonne wrote:

Nathan,

On the other hand, a two-year-old has few bargaining tools. He or
she
is physically tiny, compared to his/her parents. This little child
is
just beginning to understand case/effect, and only in immediate
situations. When this little child begins to understand
cause/effect,
the spanked child learns to hit. The non spanked child learns
other
ways to handle anger.

LaVonne

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

I'd like to expand a little on the issue of parents and children
trying to
negotiate mutually satisfactory solutions to problems. For truly
fair
negotiations to take place, three things must be true. First,
both parties
must be able to negotiate from positions of reasonable strength.
Second, it
must be accepted that there are some absolutes that are not part
of the
negotiation process. And third, the parties negotiating must not
use
extraneous issues to threaten each other.

In regard to the first point, the nature of the parent-child
relationship is
such that the parents get to decide how much negotiating power
their
children will have. At one extreme, if parents say, "Do this or
else," they
give their children no negotiating power. At the other extreme,
if parents
refuse to put their foot down at all, they keep no real
negotiating power
for themselves. So the trick is for parents to find a place in
between that
gives their children enough negotiating power but not too much.

In my view, the best types of negotiations are aimed at dealing
with the
issues the parents consider truly important while providing as
much
flexibility for the children as possible within that context.
For example,
suppose a little girl keeps running late because she can't decide
what to
wear to school and Mom, who is busy getting ready for work
herself, keeps
having to take time out of her own preparations to deal with the
issue. The
important thing for Mom is that the problem of running late be
solved, not
exactly how the problem is solved. Further, the solution doesn't
necessarily have to be 100% foolproof. If Mom has to get
involved and hurry
her daughter up every now and then, it's probably not the end of
the world.

From that understanding of the problem, the mother and daughter
could get
together and try to find a way to solve the problem. It doesn't
matter
which of them proposes the solution that they ultimately decide
together
would work best. What matters is that the problem be solved.
And if Mom
has misgivings about her daughter's preferred solution, she might
accept it
on only a provisional basis, with the understanding that if it
doesn't work,
they'll have to change to something else. With a little luck
that will give
the daughter some extra incentive to make her preferred solution
work.

Regarding the second issue, it would be highly improper for a
child who is
caught shoplifting to be able to demand something from his or her
parents in
negotiations in exchange for not shoplifting anymore. When
something is
wrong, you don't do it, and you don't expect to get any special
reward or
compensation for not doing it. The lesson that some things in
life are
non-negotiable is a vital one for children to learn.

On the other hand, if parents want to label something
non-negotiable, they
need to be able to defend why they view it in non-negotiable in
ways that
have as little as possible to do with "because I said so." And
if they use
reasons rooted in their religion, they would be wise to also
provide the
strongest reasons they can that are not rooted in their religion
as
additional reinforcement. If children understand why their
parents hold a
particular belief, and if the parents' behavior is consistent
with what they
say, children can respect their parents for standing up for what
they
believe is right even if the children disagree. (That is
especially true
when the parents and children have a strong relationship in
general.) But
if parents just say, "That's non-negotiable," without providing
any real
explanation, the risk of anger and resentment is vastly greater.

Finally, if either side brings extraneous matters into a
negotiation as a
way of threatening the other, that upsets the balance in the
negotiations.
Such behavior is a way of trying to bully the other side into
accepting a
win-lose solution, and thus violates the spirit of trying to find
a solution
that both sides truly consider acceptable. That also means
parents who are
looking for win-win solutions need to try to avoid invoking their
parental
authority any more than they feel like they have to.

Now, what does this have to do with the issue of punishment in
general and
of spanking in particular? If win-win solutions can be found
within the
context of these types of negotiations, it is often possible to
avoid the
need for threats and punishment entirely. That is especially
true for
children whose sense of honor is strong enough that just
reminding them of
what they agreed to is enough for them to comply with their part
of an
agreement.

On the other hand, not all children will necessarily comply with
an
agreement just because they agreed to it. In those cases, the
possibility
of punishment may be needed as an enforcement provision in
agreements,
especially if a child wants to be allowed to push to the
outermost limits of
what the parents feel like they can accept. (For example,
parents might
feel safe allowing a child to stretch a 9:00 bedtime a great
deal, but be
unwilling to accept a 9:30 bedtime unless it will be enforced
pretty
strictly.) If all goes well, the child's knowledge that
deliberately
violating the agreement will result in the punishment coupled
with parental
understanding toward accidental violations could still make
actual
punishment unnecessary. But for the possibility of punishment to
mean
something, parents have to be willing to punish if a child pushes
too far.

Note that if a child has made an agreement and agreed to what the
punishment
will be if the agreement is violated, it is much harder for the
child to
resent being punished for violating the agreement as "unfair" and
"arbitrary" than if the rule and punishment were imposed
unilaterally by a
parent, or especially if the child were punished without really
understanding what the rule was (especially in practice) before
the
punishment took place. Those kinds of distinctions are extremely
important
in understanding how punishment affects children.

Also, consider situations where negotiations fail, either because
no common
ground acceptable to both the parents and the child exists or
because the
common ground cannot be found in the amount of time available to
look for
it. If parents refuse to allow the child to proceed with a
solution the
parents view as unacceptable, the need for threats and punishment
might
still be averted if the child is willing to defer to the parents
and live
with a solution that the child does not really consider
acceptable. But if
the child refuses to defer to the parents' authority and judgment
out of
respect, the threat of punishment (and, if necessary, the
actuality of
punishment) are all the parents have left to prevent the child
from doing
something they cannot accept in good conscience. Punishment
might not
provide a long-term solution, but it at least has a chance of
solving the
problem in the short term. And in the longer term, parents can
hope that as
the child gets older, he or she will come to recognize that the
parents were
right after all, at least enough to make a solution that both
sides can
agree on possible. (Or, in some cases, the problem might solve
itself as
the child becomes mature enough to be allowed to do things the
parents did
not consider it safe to allow earlier.) Such situations are not
ideal, but
considering that we live on Earth, not in Heaven, always having
ideal
solutions available would be a bit much to hope for.

As one last interesting point regarding negotiated solutions,
consider the
possibility of negotiating what form of punishment should be used
in
situations where punishment is required. From a parent's
perspective, the
punishment needs to be serious enough to achieve the parent's
goals (which
are often short-term in nature, or "serially short-term" - that
is, solvable
over an extended period of time through a series of short-term
solutions).
In some cases, parents consider it desirable to disrupt the
child's
activities (for example, to keep the child away from "the wrong
crowd"), but
often, such disruption is considered undesirable. Parents may
also feel a
need to consider how punishing one child might impact others.
For example,
how do you ground one child from watching television without
having an
impact on the lives of the child's siblings? After all, the
siblings might
very well want to play with the child who is being punished and
watch
television at the same time.

From a child's perspective, the important points are how
unpleasant the
punishment will be and how much the punishment will interfere
with the
child's doing things he or she enjoys. Some children may view
physical pain
as radically worse than other forms of unpleasantness, but many
do not.
Children may also consider how different forms of punishment
would affect
their friends, and the possible embarrassment if their friends
find out
about their having gotten in trouble.

Of all forms of punishment, corporal punishment can concentrate a
given
amount of unpleasantness into the shortest amount of time.
That's probably
one of the reasons why some people object to it so strongly: the
pain of a
child crying from a spanking is a lot easier to see than the same
total
amount of unpleasantness spread over a week or two of being
grounded. We
can empathize with the pain of the spanking, but it is much
harder to
capture the sense of time needed to empathize with the grounding
-
especially for people who haven't actually experienced being
grounded for an
extended period of time.

Yet ironically, depending on the personalities and the situation
involved,
the same concentration of unpleasantness into a short period of
time that
makes spanking so objectionable to some outside parties can
sometimes make
it a preferred form of punishment for both parents and children.
It's over
with quickly, and they can get on with their lives.

Which raises an interesting problem for those who support win-win
solutions
but oppose spanking. If parents are going to punish a child, and
the child
would rather be spanked than punished in some other way, does
that not make
spanking the child a win-win solution to the problem of how to
punish the
child (or at least the closest thing to a win-win solution
available)?

Nathan