No matter what sphere of life we take – family, work, creativity – it is impossible to achieve success in them without mastering the skill of understanding yourself and others. People live among people, and our natural desire to love and be loved essentially forms the foundation of human happiness.
Why is it so difficult to lay this foundation? Even with the best of intentions? Because initially, it is laid NOT BY US!..
At some stage, we all have to rebuild much of what we received in childhood. Every child, coming into this world, naturally absorbs the relationship model from their parents, just as those parents received it from their own. And often this model is far from perfect.
In life, there are no guilty parties – only the wounded; no one causes another pain from an excess of happiness. Rather, this process is more like a painful relay race: once-experienced fears, resentments, and traumas are pushed into the subconscious and from within they govern people, causing anger, irritation, despondency (and so on) in moments when they are disagreed with or simply not understood. This is most vividly manifested in the family.
How can we change this hereditary mechanism of transmitting mutual misunderstanding – in Ivan Pirog’s material “An Obedient Child – Mission Possible”.
An Obedient Child – Mission Possible!
“Obedient Children – Is It Even Possible?”
“The best way to make children good is
to make them happy”
Oscar Wilde
Do you know any parents who wouldn’t want to have obedient children? Maybe they exist somewhere, but I haven’t met any.
A parent’s desire for their children to be obedient is quite natural. There’s nothing criminal about it. Who doesn’t want their children to love, respect, and listen to their parents? Few people want a rude son or a sassy daughter. And the pleasure from regular scandals is rather dubious.
So, we want to raise a kind, obedient, cheerful, and purposeful child who values their parents’ opinion and lives in harmony with them. If a child is raised correctly, that’s exactly how it will be. At least, the probability is high.
Accordingly, if raised incorrectly, potential good traits can turn into their negative counterparts: the child will talk back, be rude, make snide remarks, be insolent, run away from home, throw tantrums and hysterics. All of this points to disharmony in upbringing.
The formula is simple. Wrong upbringing = Bad result. Right upbringing = Good result.
There’s no smoke without fire. Children won’t just, for no reason, talk back and be rude to their parents. It’s simply not in their interest. So, there is a reason for this behavior!
And now we need to find out exactly what it is. Don’t change the channel – there will be no commercials 🙂
“Upbringing Under the Banner of Violence – The Plague of the 21st Century”
“By scolding a child, we want to turn them into
a small, insensitive, and manageable thing”
Luule Viilma, “To Stay or To Go”
Let’s define our terms. In this article, I’ll use the word “parent” (father or mother) and the word “child” (son or daughter). I’m deliberately not specifying gender so you can feel free to choose the gender of any character. Just know that the word “child,” as well as the pronouns “he” and “his,” refer not only to a boy but also to a girl 🙂
Now let’s define the term “violence.” Usually, this word implies physical violence causing pain. I will use it in a broader sense.
Violence is any action aimed at suppressing another person’s will. It is the deprivation of freedom of choice, prohibitions, coercion, and ignoring an individual’s desires and opinions.
Does that definition work? I hope so.
So, there is emotional violence, physical violence, and a mix of the two. Emotional violence is psychological pressure through words and actions: intimidation, blackmail, scolding, yelling, harsh looks, and appeals to guilt and shame. Physical violence is the same, but with the infliction of bodily pain: a belt, twisting an ear, a cuff on the head, a spoon hit on the forehead, and so on.
In other words, violence is when a stronger person applies pressure or psychological tricks so that a weaker person acts the way the stronger one wants.
The foundation of the outdated parenting model, which is widespread across the post-Soviet space, is the “stick” method, used as a cure for “bad” behavior.
The basis of the method is simple. Negative emotions directed at elders are forcibly suppressed through punishment. A child’s opinion that goes against the parent’s is either ignored or suppressed. If the child doesn’t obey orders, they also face emotional or physical violence.
What for? To raise a good person!
That is, a person who is afraid to refuse elders (read “bosses”), afraid to express a personal opinion that goes against those in charge (you’re still a snot-nosed kid to have an opinion!). A person who is afraid to make decisions for fear of being wrong (you did badly!), afraid to stand out from the crowd (don’t stick your neck out!), and so on. In other words, this is raising a person who won’t dare to oppose management and authority.
To put it even more simply, this is the preparation and upbringing of a future slave.
That’s exactly it! What we get in the end is an obedient and submissive slave, who is beneficial to the state. Welcome to the system, son: upbringing — school — institute — work — pension — death. And don’t forget to do the right thing — just as we told you. Pension not enough? Nothing can be done…
Dear parents, do you really have such plans for your child’s future?
In short, it’s a pretty unpleasant picture. Let’s figure out how the “stick” method affects a child’s psyche. Grab some tea or coffee, it’s about to begin!
“The Maturation of the Child’s Mind”
“A person’s education begins at birth; he
does not yet speak, does not yet listen, but is already learning.
Experience precedes learning.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
What do little children do when they are learning to speak? They listen to their parents and try to repeat unfamiliar words. Right? Gradually, their vocabulary builds up, their brain develops, and then the child begins to memorize whole phrases and speech patterns.
The main principle of mastering speech is observation and repetition. A child observes HOW and WHAT people around them say, and then memorizes it to repeat later. Tone, volume, and pace of speech are the HOW, while WHAT are the words.
But speech skills are far from everything a child needs. In the first years of life, their mind is in dire need of new behavior patterns. How to behave in society? What to do in certain situations? How to react to people’s words? What to do to get what they want? And so on, and so on, and so on.
For now, the mind doesn’t have this data. It needs to get it from somewhere.
And who has the highest authority for a three-year-old child? Their parents, of course. Right now, they are the only closest people in this huge and unfamiliar world. They take care of them, feed them, and dress them. There are exceptions, but we’re not talking about those now. Let’s take a classic family.
So, parents have great authority for a child. They are the very first and most important role model. The child tries to copy their manner of speaking, gestures, and reactions from their parents.
Can you guess where I’m going with this?
While parents are raising with violence and words, explaining how to behave, 72% of verbal information is not absorbed by a small child. But they absorb other information perfectly — the parents’ behavior. The child remembers the volume of the voice, timbre, intonation, gestures, and so on.
The child observes all of this carefully in order to later reproduce the same intonation, posture, voice volume, gestures, and words. Remember the first main principle of learning: observe — memorize — repeat?
I call this principle the mirror rule. You probably already know about it: sometimes in the behavior of others, you can notice your own behavior 🙂
Mirror neurons are responsible for reflecting the behavior of those around us. They exist in primates, birds, and humans. The logic of a child’s mirror neurons is this: if parents act this way, then I can act this way too, which means this is how it’s accepted to behave in this society.
“Do as I say, not as I do!”
“Children need examples, not lectures”
Joseph Joubert
What behavior do parents teach their children? Oh, all sorts of things…
The child observes how the father reacts when the mother asks him to bring something. They remember what feelings their parents have when they clean the house or go to work. Do they say “thank you” to each other? Do they hug? Does the mother show respect for the father, and the father for the mother?
The child’s fresh mind absorbs the parents’ behavior like blotting paper soaks up ink. But the child won’t repeat all of the parents’ behavior. The child is, in themselves, a unique personality with their own distinctive character. Therefore, two children in the same family will take different patterns from the adults, since each perceives the world through their own unique lens.
In the context of all this, let’s look at the carrot-and-stick method of upbringing.
When a child doesn’t listen, meaning they do something contrary to the parent’s wishes, it’s customary to punish them. Why? So they learn the lesson and don’t do it again. The child is first scolded, then punished. Or first punished, then scolded. There are plenty of variations here 🙂
What is happening in this moment? The child is observing how the parents (authorities) behave. Mirror neurons photograph the behavioral information and store it in memory. Imagine the child’s brain is thinking at this moment: “Aha. Got it. If you disagree with someone’s opinion, you need to yell and threaten. That’s what my parents do, so that’s the right way. Learned.”
Some time passes. A few days, if you will. A situation arises where the child disagrees with the parents’ opinion. Their mind immediately recalls how the parents acted when they disagreed with the child’s opinion. They got upset and argued. And so the child starts to get upset, yell, and stomp their feet. After all, isn’t that how it’s done in this world?
“No. Not like that!” — the parents think at this moment.
Wow! The child is yelling at them! This cannot be allowed. This is disobedience. They will have to be punished for this. And then it all repeats again: scolding, yelling, spanking on the bottom, and so on. The child becomes even more convinced that if you disagree with someone, you need to yell loudly and hit.
They understand it like this: “to defend my opinion and my desires, I need to suppress other people.”
Too bad, though, the parents turned out to be stronger. I was against it and, as expected, started yelling and getting upset at them, but they yelled louder than me. They are older and stronger. Now I feel hurt and in pain. My opinion doesn’t matter. It’s unfair. But I’ll grow up and become stronger!
So, the child’s desires and actions that the parents don’t like must be forcibly suppressed. Isn’t that right? Isn’t this what proper upbringing is called?
You will be told “NO” in many developed countries. For example, in the USA, Japan, Italy, England, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and many others. Their psychologists have long understood how powerfully violence traumatizes a child. And only we still use barbaric parenting approaches that have been hopelessly outdated for about 200 years.
You can see the difference with the naked eye: how inhibited and angry people are in our country, and how liberated and friendly they are in countries that do not use violence against children. Think about it.
“A cat gives birth to kittens, a mouse gives birth to mice”
“Share your smile, and it will come back to you
again and again” cartoon “The Little Raccoon”
From the observation that shows us how children copy parental behavior, we can draw several rules. They are easy to follow to determine what we are teaching children when we act one way or another.
Here are these rules:
- Disrespect breeds disrespect in return, respect breeds reciprocal respect;
- Violence breeds violence in return, goodwill breeds peace;
- Selfishness breeds selfishness. Attentiveness to another will be met with attentiveness in return;
- If you don’t listen to children’s opinions, they learn not to hear your opinion;
- Coercion breeds unfreedom. A captive will run to freedom at the first opportunity.
The formula is simple. Behavior A teaches a child behavior A, and behavior B teaches behavior B. Disrespecting a child’s opinions and desires (selfishness) teaches them disrespect towards parents and other people (selfishness). Educational violence teaches violence towards other children (don’t agree — get hit on the head). Coercion teaches a child to forcibly coerce others.
In the following parts of this article, we will dive quite deeply into all these topics. But for now, a little more theory about the human brain, before we start examining specific life situations.
“A Bit of Tediousness for Understanding the Psychology of Behavior”
When analyzing generally accepted parenting approaches, we will rely on one of the basic laws of the psyche — the model of the triune mind. The model states: three minds work in parallel inside the human brain. That is, the brain consists of three main sections:
- The R-complex [reptilian mind] — the evolutionarily oldest part of the brain. It is responsible for the body’s survival in the environment: for instincts, intuition, the immune system, and reflexes. It regulates internal bodily processes such as: heat exchange, breathing, digestion, adrenaline production, and so on.
- The Limbic System [mammalian mind] unites people into groups, families, clans, and collectives. It is responsible for emotions, using them to influence our behavior and words. It predicts the future based on the emotional experience of the past.
- The Neocortex [new cortex] — consciousness. The neocortex forms all our thoughts. Our beliefs and stereotypes are stored here. The neocortex makes plans for the future, contemplates life, reads books, and, of course, engages in creativity. It is located in the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
Each mind is a complex neural computer, consisting of several blocks (parts of the brain). The neural computers work quickly and in parallel, exchanging information with each other via neural networks.
All information collected by the body from the internal and external world enters the R-complex (reptilian mind). This mind performs a quick analysis of the data and, if necessary, triggers an instinct into action.
This could be one of the survival instincts: attack, flee, freeze, hide, shut down. This could be one of the everyday reflexes: the urge to sneeze, scratch, go to the bathroom, drink water, eat, and so on.
Next, the R-complex “chews over” the received information and passes it to the limbic system (mammalian mind). This is the very mind responsible for managing our behavior by turning emotions on and off.
Here are a few animal emotions: fear, panic, anger, rage, hopelessness. Here are higher-level emotions: curiosity, resentment, inspiration, boredom, joy, infatuation.
Having reacted with emotions to the received information, the mammalian mind passes it to our consciousness — to the neocortex. And only then do we become aware of the information that the previous neural computers have already processed. Now, verbal thoughts arise in the head about what just happened.
A thought is the final stage of realizing the received experience. First, an instinct kicks in. It triggers an emotion. The emotion triggers thoughts and actions. Thoughts give rise to beliefs and life rules.
Thoughts influence emotions to a much lesser degree than emotions influence thoughts. 95% of our waking hours, our emotions determine our thoughts: in apathy we think about how bad everything is, and in joy we think about how good everything is. And only 5% are moments when we consciously influence our emotions, for example, through visualization.
When it comes to children, first and foremost, an emotion arises in them, then an action, and only then a thought about it. Remember this important point! First emotion, then awareness and thought. Later on, this knowledge will help us clarify the destructive consequences of conventional upbringing.
“Emotions control behavior, not learned rules”
“Any dog is nothing more than a transmitter of emotions
in a language that people easily understand”
Ann Pregosin
Let’s assume that dogs don’t have thoughts. Why assume? Because we can’t know this for sure. In any case, dogs definitely don’t have human thoughts in verbal form.
But who would argue that dogs don’t have emotions?
You don’t need to be a scientist to know that dogs are very emotional beings. We understand dogs’ emotions, and they understand ours. We don’t need words to understand each other; it’s enough to simply demonstrate our feelings.
Scientists will confirm that the emotional mind of dogs is highly developed. As you remember, the limbic system is responsible for emotions, its second name being the mammalian mind. Interestingly, a dog’s emotional mind is very similar to a human’s!
Emotions control a dog, just as they control us. When it sees its owner, it feels joy (the pack leader has arrived!). Joy makes the dog’s body wiggle with pleasure and its tail wag energetically from side to side. Fear, on the other hand, makes the dog tuck its tail and run away.
I hope you’ll agree that a dog cannot give itself a conscious command to evoke a particular emotion. Quite the opposite. Emotions are a reaction to external events or the behavior of other beings.
But first and foremost, an emotion is a reaction to an instinct triggered by the reptilian mind. For example, the instinct to “flee” triggers fear, and the instinct to “attack” triggers anger and rage.
The exact same thing applies to humans. But let’s return to children.
“Children do not consciously choose emotions”
“I have observed only one effect of the rod — it
either dulls or embitters the soul”
Michel de Montaigne
Our children do not consciously choose emotions. They react to events with emotions. For example, parental injustice can trigger the emotion of resentment, which then leads to self-pity, and self-pity causes tears and loud crying.
Children express emotions freely, unlike adults. At the very least, this is why they are happier and more cheerful. But I digress.
So, an emotional wave engulfs a child completely, and they cannot resist it. It is a new and unknown feeling that has filled them up from the inside. The child does not control their emotion. They cannot consciously give themselves a command to “turn off” this feeling.
Even adults don’t know how to do this. Many simply pretend they can turn emotions on and off at will, but in reality, they just shove them deeper, thereby creating a whole bouquet of chronic diseases.
If parents scold and punish a child for expressing negative emotions, two unpleasant things happen:
1. It triggers even more negative emotions in the child, which are a natural reaction to violence. This can cause even more resentment, even more anger, feelings of being unwanted, injustice, and shame;
2. Even if the parents explained to the child how to behave and they understood everything, the next time an emotional wave will overwhelm them just the same. Contrary to conscious desires and learned rules. This will happen regardless of whether the child remembers the parents’ instructions or not. The child does not consciously choose emotions.
“It’s All Pavlov’s Dog’s Fault”
“If a child misbehaves, it’s their parents who should be
put in the corner”
Baurzhan Toyshibekov
Parents punish children because they believe in the old “good” myth that if you punish, the child will remember the pain, learn the lesson, and, fearing repeated punishment, will behave well. But the bitter truth is that punishment only makes a child more insecure, not more obedient.
Do a little research. Ask your acquaintances who have raised children using punishment methods for at least five years (which, in itself, is already funny!), whether the child actually becomes obedient after two or three punishments? Or do they have to apply this method again and again in the future? I think you can already guess what the answer will be 😉
Think about this. Let’s say a person has a fear of heights. When they look down, they are filled with panic, their legs buckle and feel like jelly. Now let’s try applying the Soviet upbringing method to them. We will hit them for feeling a fear of heights. And we will hit them every time their legs buckle.
Question: how many times would the punishment need to be applied for them to stop feeling fear and panic? How many years would we use violence so that they behave well at great heights?
Yes, you’re right — this is complete absurdity!
But punishing a child for expressing negative emotions — for tantrums, resentment, and stomping feet — is no less absurd. Judge for yourself: a child expresses negative emotions, which are a reaction to events, and for this, for educational purposes, the parents punish them.
But do parents punish a child for positive emotions? Hardly. Rather, they feel anger, rage, and irritation. Isn’t that why they yell at the child?
Wait a minute. So it turns out the parents also need to be punished, because they too are showing negative emotions! But weren’t they raised in childhood not to yell and swear at others? That means they were raised poorly. And how exactly? In the same way: they were punished and scolded.
What does this tell us? That the desired result of upbringing was never achieved. Aggression gave birth to even more aggression. Received aggression from parents — passed it on to their children. Who will stop this vicious cycle if not us?
“Conclusion”
Well. I think that’s enough information for the first part. You and I have done a wonderful investigation that shed light on the dark areas of destructive parenting. But that’s not all!
In the second part, we will examine under a microscope specific life situations with children and those destructive parenting methods that are approved and encouraged by our society.
In the second part, you will find simple and practical recommendations, the application of which will turn your children into sweet and gentle beings you can be proud of with a clear conscience, and also show off to other parents 🙂
And finally, let’s sum up the results:
- Forced parenting traumatizes a child, making them angry and insecure, rather than kind, brave, and responsive;
- A child remembers their parents’ behavior, not what they teach them. Whatever treatment parents demonstrate toward the child, that is the treatment of people the child learns;
- Like parent, like child: disrespect toward a child will turn into disrespect toward parents, violence breeds violence, selfishness breeds selfishness;
- First, an instinct arises, then an emotion, which manifests in behavior and words. Even adults often cannot stop a storm of emotions, but this is exactly what they demand from their children;
- Using violence to stop children’s tantrums is destructive. A child does not control the emergence of emotions, but with the help of parents, they can learn to suppress them. Suppressing emotions leads to illnesses that parents will have to treat;
- Hitting a child for tantrums is as pointless as hitting a person for a fear of heights. Over time, the child will grow up and stop throwing tantrums, but more on that in the second part of the article 🙂
Thank you for reading to the end. Until next time!
Ivan Pirog