Unseen children (cont’d)

Yesterday I wrote about how unseen children fight to be seen and how my absent father has made me a perfectionist (in some areas; and now I’m more of a recovering perfectionist). Since becoming a parent myself, I think a lot about how to best raise my daughter. Although depriving her of attention has a chance of her becoming a creative and thinking adult, it’s definitely not an option. But the question is what kind of attention to give.

There’s a balance here. I’ve already talked about what can happen with too little attention, but with too much attention, such as rewarding and praising what she does, I fear that she can get “addicted” to attention, doing things to seek attention instead of the satisfaction and stimulation the things themselves can bring. And rewards seem to call for being balanced with punishments, which is an ingredient I want to use as little as possible.

Seeing other parents with children I have noted that it is very usual for parents to either use threats, such as “Do X or Y will happen” (if Y is a punishment) or “Do X or Y won’t happen” (if Y is a reward). Often these threats aren’t executed, which render them useless, if not damaging. As for rewards, you hear parents say “Do X and Y will happen”. I have seen parents switch between rewards and threats in a way that must be very confusing for the child. For example: “Do X or Y will happen” (punishment), repeated a few times and when the child doesn’t do X, the parent switch strategy to “Do X and Y will happen” (reward).

What I don’t like with this is that it takes away the focus from X, and why the child has to do X. I want my daughter to understand the “why” and not doing things out of fear of punishment or desire for reward. The book Your Competent Child by Jesper Juul suggests that you use the phrasing “I want you to do X because…” which not only explains the “why”, but also emphasizes that it is the parent’s will, not a universal law that says that the child should do X. This in turn means that it’s negotiable.

I think it is important to pay close attention to how much “parental intervention” is needed in each situation, neither overdoing nor underdoing. I remember when I was a child and did something that I afterwards knew was wrong, that the time it took for my mother to find out about it was agonizing, and in addition I had to face her correcting me. In such situations, I want to detect to what extent my daughter has realized what she has done, and not punish as if children were robots that has to be programmed.

Duty calls again. I will probably return to this topic again sometime.