Parenting

Obedience: The Temptation to Control Children

We may be tempted to focus our energies on overcoming children’s resistance to our requests and getting them to do what we tell them. If we’re not careful, this can become our primary goal. We may find ourselves joining all those people around us who prize docility in children and value short-term obedience above all. I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved. A “good” child–from infancy to adolescence–is one who isn’t too much trouble to us grown-ups.

Over the last couple of generations, the strategies for trying to produce that result may well have changed. Where kids were once routinely subjected to harsh corporal punishment, they may now be sentenced to time-outs or, perhaps, offered rewards when they obey us. But don’t mistake new means for new ends. The goal continues to be control, even if we secure it with more modern methods.

Long-term Objectives of Parenting

In my workshops for parents I like to start off asking, “What are your long-term objectives for your children? What word or phrase comes to mind to describe how you’d like them to turn out, what you want them to be like once they’ve grown?”

Take a moment to think about how you would answer that question. When I invite groups of parents to come up with the most important long-term goals they have for their kids, I hear remarkably similar responses across the country. The list produced by one audience was typical:
These parents said they wanted their children to be happy, balanced, independent, fulfilled, productive, self-reliant, responsible, functioning, kind, thoughtful, loving, inquisitive, and confident.
Is what we’re doing consistent with what we really want? Are my everyday practices likely to help my children grow into the kind of people I’d like them to be? Will the things I just said to my child at the supermarket contribute in some small way to her becoming happy and balanced and independent and fulfilled and so on–or is it possible (gulp) that the way I tend to handle such situations makes those outcomes less likely? If so, what should I be doing instead?

Today’s Parenting Books Aim at Control

More than a hundred parenting books are published in the United States every year, along with countless articles in parenting magazines, and most of them are filled with advice about how to get children to comply with our expectations, how to make them behave, how to train them as though they were pets. Many such guides also offer a pep talk about the need to stand up to kids and assert our power. This slant is reflected even in the titles of recently published books: Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline; Parents in Charge; Parent in Control; Taking Charge; Back in Control; Disciplining Your Preschooler–and Feeling Good About it; ‘Cause I’m the Mommy, That’s Why; Laying Down the Law; Guilt-Free Parenting; “The Answer Is No”; and on and on.

Some of these books defensively stand up for old-fashioned values and methods (“Your rear end is going to be mighty sore when your father gets home”), while others make the case for newfangled techniques (“Good job! You peed in the pot, honey! Now you can have your sticker!”). But in neither case do they press us to be sure that what we’re asking of children is reasonable–or in their best interests.

It’s also true, as you may have noticed, that many of these books offer suggestions that turn out to be ineffective, it’s much more dangerous when books never even bother to ask, “What do we mean by effective parenting techniques?” When we fail to examine our objectives, we’re left by default with practices that are intended solely to get kids to do what they’re told. That means we’re focusing only on what’s most convenient for us, not on what they need. Many experts define a successful strategy as anything that gets kids to follow directions. The focus, in other words, is limited to how children behave, regardless of how they feel about complying with a given request, or for that matter, how they come to regard the person who succeeded in getting them to do so. The evidence suggests that even disciplinary techniques that seem to “work” often turn out be much less successful when judged by more meaningful criteria. The child’s commitment to a given behavior is often shallow and the behavior is therefore short-lived.

We might say that discipline doesn’t always help kids to become self-disciplined. But even that second objective isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not necessarily better to get children to internalize our wishes and values so they’ll do what we want even when we’re not around. Trying to foster internalization–or self-discipline–may amount to an attempt to direct children’s behavior by remote control. It’s just a more powerful version of obedience. There’s a big difference, after all, between a child who does something because he or she believes it’s the right thing to do and one who does it out of a sense of compulsion.

Raising Kids to Think for Themselves

Most of us, I’m convinced, do indeed want our children to think for themselves, to be assertive and morally courageous...when they’re with their friends. We hope they’ll stand up to bullies and resist peer pressure, particularly when sex and drugs are involved. But if it’s important to us that kids not be “victims of others’ ideas,” we have to educate them “to think for themselves about all ideas, including those of adults.” Or, to put it the other way around, if we place a premium on obedience at home, we may end up producing kids who go along with what they’re told to do by people outside the home, too. Author Barbara Coloroso remarks that she’s often heard parents of teenagers complain, “He was such a good kid, so well behaved, so well mannered, so well dressed. Now look at him!” To this, she replies:
From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things you told him to say. He’s been listening to somebody else tell him what to do...He hasn’t changed. He is still listening to somebody else tell him what to do. The problem is, it isn’t you anymore; it’s his peers.
Indeed, there are pragmatic as well as moral reasons to focus on long-term goals rather than on immediate compliance, to consider what our children need rather than just what we’re demanding, and to see the whole child rather than just the behavior.

Excerpts from the Introduction of "Unconditional Parenting", a book written by Alfie Kohn.
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