Go Deeper

One by one, pieces of parenting advice fell apart under examination. Time outs, firm boundaries, consistency, validating feelings, logical consequences...

It wasn't because they never worked. Many of them did... sometimes.

The question that wouldn't leave me alone was different:

Why did they work sometimes, fail other times, and so often leave good parents blaming themselves?

And recently I've realized why, in three pieces:

1. Those techniques blame children in ways that are inappropriate to their developmental capacities, and inherently disrespectful,
2. They blame parents for, essentially, not perfectly following the advice, and
3. They're all based on BF Skinner's discredited, erroneous and short-sighted behaviourism, which fails for one clear and striking reason: behaviour is evidence, not cause.

Behaviour is Evidence, Not Cause

Within the framework I've discovered is a recursive adaptive process. Big fancy words... Let me show you:

Reality right now is where we all are, where everything is.

Memories are here, worries are here, emotions are here, perceptions of reality are here, beliefs are here, old echoes of thoughts, even new ideas, are here ... both caused by reality and an internal reflection of reality --sometimes accurately and sometimes not accurately (for a lot of reasons.)

Interacting between our perception of reality and what we need (in the broadest sense of the word) we try things --what we call behaviour. To get what we need. To get away from what is unpleasant, and to move toward what is pleasant. To figure out ourselves and our place in the world. To succeed, in whatever 'success' means to us in the moment.

We try things, get feedback from reality (including other people) and then we compile that feedback (throughout our lives) to recreate the 'map of reality' that we carry in our minds, and walk around in, out in the real world. Using the new map, we either make creative new attempts to succeed, or we repeat used attempts that 'worked' --for varying degrees of the meaning of the word 'worked.' The behaviors may become predictable patterns, or even core beliefs about ourselves and reality, or they may become less coherent and less aligned with our sense of self and reality. Whichever way it goes, it's a complex dance across many realms (imagination, learning, emotions, worries, interpretations of meaning and perceptions...) that is ever-changing, ever-compiling in a process of becoming.

Children are not separate from this recursive, adaptive process. They're also compiling a map of reality in their minds. They're also trying to move away from pain and toward pleasure --to succeed.

What we see... behaviour... is too far away from where the needs, emotions, even the 'map of reality' is formed, to make any meaningful difference to the outcome.

When interventions (punishments, even rewards designed to control) focus on behaviour, or the outcome of behaviour, it can't do anything meaningful to the chain of factors that led to it, now or in the future.

When we, instead, come alongside kids and discover how they're perceiving reality and what it means, we have the ability to influence them, match their map up a little more accurately with reality, and alter the future evidence of how their map is compiled.