Archbold on parenting

Matthew Archbold made me cry today. I'm going to excerpt but please read the whole thing.

At some point, the computer froze and I had to shut it down and then it hit me. I realized what a jerk I was. Well, that's not true. I know what a jerk I am. But I realized what a jerk I was today. My seven year old wasn't upset because she got five wrong. She was scared of telling me she got five wrong. I hadn't even taken the time to notice that my seven year old had been circling me the entire afternoon and early evening. Looking to me...for something. And then quickly looking away. Even while cleaning the dishes I noticed her looking at me out of the corner of her eye. I noticed it but I didn't see it, if you know what I mean. She'd been waiting for me to say what I should've said the moment she walked out of school. That no matter what happened I love her. That no matter what happened I'm proud of her. And no matter what happened I think she's the most special seven year old in the world.

This little girl. My little girl. She was waiting for her dopey father to tell her he loved her all day and that it was just a math test. Instead he told her to circle subtraction signs.

I had to face it. I did a lot worse on my test than she did on hers. Sometimes you just think that children know how much we love them. But the harsh words we say I think somehow stick with them longer than many of our kindnesses. Our little cruelties are like splinters. They go in easily, cause pain, and they're very difficult to get out. [emphasis added]

We know we love our kids, and they most likely know it on an intellectual level. But they need to feel that love and unconditional acceptance, especially when they fear they've displeased us.

Segue to the NYT article from last week, For Some Parents, Shouting Is the New Spanking, the thesis of which is that, unwilling to resort to spanking, parents now resort more to yelling and screaming. We're all fallible and lose out tempers with our kids from time to time, and most of the mothers quoted in the article feel remorse after doing so. But one set of parents is tempted to elevate it to a parenting tool:

Still, Ms. Merrill, a travel consultant in Rutherford, N.J., finds that the threat of yelling can be a convenient stick, much the way the threat of a spanking was in her childhood. Even her husband has taken to using it to encourage good behavior, she said, issuing the warning:

“Don’t make mommy mad.”

Take a moment and imagine the feelings of that four year-old child. I don't think an expert opinion is really needed here, but the article provides a couple:

“We are so accustomed to this that we just think parents get carried away and that it’s not harmful,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Murray A. Straus, a sociologist who is a director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. “But it affects a child. If someone yelled at you at work, you’d find that pretty jarring. We don’t apply that standard to children.”

Psychologists and psychiatrists generally say yelling should be avoided. It’s at best ineffective (the more you do it the more the child tunes it out) and at worse damaging to a child’s sense of well-being and self-esteem.

“It isn’t the yelling per se that’s going to make a difference, it’s how the yelling is interpreted,” said Ronald P. Rohner, director of the Ronald and Nancy Rohner Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection at the University of Connecticut. If a parent is simply loud, he says, the effect is minimal. But if the tone connotes anger, insult or sarcasm, it can be perceived as a sign of rejection.

In other words, berating your child isn't good for him, and too much of it may cause him to question your unconditional love for him. Not exactly counter-intuitive. The choice between shouting and spanking is a false one, anyway; there are alternatives.

For the record, I don't care for the current parenting norm of carrot-and-stick behaviorism, nor for the approach described in the NYT article which might be based on hydraulics -- parents put up with their kids as long as they can and then blow off steam when the pressure exceeds the parent's self-control.

I don't know whether Matthew spanks his kids and I imagine he loses his temper with them occasionally. But he clearly understands a supremely important truth about parenthood:

If children could know how much their parents loved them, I believe it would make them feel so much safer than they probably do. But maybe that's our main job as parents. We need to let them know they're loved. Tell them how special they are. Because we are their introduction to God. Can you believe it? I know. But we are.

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