CHAPTER 6-7 RAISING CHILDREN This chapter is very short because there is not much tested knowledge on the subject of raising children. The most important factor in how children turn out is luck. You should be lucky in the decade your kids happen to be adolescents -- the sixties were terrible for parents. Be lucky in the friends your children have -- drugheads and parachutists will send you to an early grave even if your kids get through it okay. Be lucky in the stray books or television programs or teachers that catch your kids' interests. My horseback guess is that two-thirds of what happens in growing up is influenced by luck, including the child's physical makeup, and one-third is influenced by the choices you make and the actions you take. Can I support that estimate? Plainly not. But negative evidence does support this point of view. There seems to be no scientific research showing a close connection between what the parents or the school do and how the child turns out. If there were a close connection, research would have shown it long ago. The absence of such findings is important evidence, I believe. The implications for you as a parent are: In advance of what happens, don't worry too much about whether what you will do is good enough, because you can't know very much about which course of action is better and which is worse, by any measure. And after the fact, don't preen yourself overly much if you are lucky enough that your kids turn out well by your standards, and don't torture yourself if your kids turn out badly by your standards -- not any more than you should feel pride or shame about how the weather turns out for your picnic. Of course one might guarantee a miserable outcome by scheduling a picnic for the middle of the cold winter, and you can probably foul up a kid's life if you try. But if you avoid seriously abusing your children, and give them a generous ration of love and attention, most of the rest probably is beyond your control. That's my guess. It is interesting to note the perennial failure of social experiments with childraising. We swing back and forth between periods of high discipline and high permissiveness. Neither extreme, nor any particular in-between state, yields results that are generally agreed to be preferable. If one pattern were clearly better, societies would have settled on that model a long time ago. And the radical experiments in childraising -- such as the early Israeli kibbutz pattern of children being housed together separate from the parents -- all eventually revealed themselves as less worthy in parents' eyes than traditional patterns. Doing what seems natural in your society is probably as good as you can do, though without worrying about normal deviations from the normal pattern. An old experiment fits in here. One of each pair in a group of twins were exercised in stair-climbing for months before children would normally begin to climb; the other twins were left to themselves. A month after the untaught twin began by itself to climb, the climbing abilities of the taught and untaught twins were indistinguishable. A related phenomenon: Our dog housebroke herself, and others do, too. This is not an argument against lessons for children in tennis, computer programming, Sanskrit, or thinking well. And the confidence a child acquires from doing well relative to age-mates may be important. Rather, this is an argument for respecting the powers of development that inhere within a child, in conjunction with the outside environment. (A person who never saw stairs until the age of 40 might have trouble learning to climb them with ease, and a person who never threw a ball as a child might have trouble learning the motion as an adult. It would be interesting to learn if this is indeed true.) This view of human development is not congenial to the many people who feel uncomfortable with the notion that they are not in control of their lives, of which their children are a part. They like to think that their energy and cleverness can improve a child's chance of a good life by properly picking for the child, a school, playmates, television fare, and the rest. Several other discussions elsewhere in the book (see Chapters 4-5 and 4- 6) expand on the idea that people vastly overestimate their of capacities to influence events, believing that they can exert control in circumstances where it is clearly impossible -- for example, in a stock-picking game where the outcomes depend upon a random process. But if you believe in your powers anyway, good luck to you -- you can use the luck. So -- try to relax and enjoy the kids growing up. I say "try" because it is not easy to relax about raising your children. It is too important to you, and it seems to you as if there is a never-ending series of crucial choices. If you can't relax and enjoy -- have children anyway. (This advice is not based on evidence; it follows from my personal assessment of the ingredients of a worthwhile life.) The view that children are not extremely malleable in parents' hands fits with the more general viewpoint of this book that people develop inward gyrocompasses which have considerable power to retain their stability in the presence of outside factors that would alter them. This is consistent with the recent finding by research psychotherapists mentioned earlier, that many people are able to return to normal lives even after the most horrible experiences, such as being in a concentration camp. Yes, some people's lives are ruined by such tragedies. But a surprising number are able to live the rest of their lives relatively painfree -- often by forcibly repressing the horrible experiences. Also consistent with the tenor of this chapter is the observation that children's intellectual development does not suffer from being bilingual. Children obviously have considerable power to sort out potentially confusing inputs. Indeed, I speculate that purposely presenting to children some of the confusing aspects of life -- for example, pointing out the ethical and unethical behavior of the same person -- will on balance make an imprint on the child's intellectual development that the child will appreciate when grown. Also consistent is the viewpoint (expressed in Chapter 00 on psychotherapy) that most people have an inner mechanism that tends to restore an equilibrium at the level of good feeling, after somehow dealing with stimuli that would push the level of feeling into the zone of pain. (As noted there, if this were not so, the human species would have died out long ago). POST SCRIPTS P. S. 1. Of course there is some systematic relationship between outside influences while growing up, and the subsequent patterns of behavior. Adolescents and grown children tend to have the same political viewpoint of their parents, even when the viewpoint is as deviant as being a Communist in the United States. Similarly, my children are much more sympathetic toward my economic-demographic ideas than are most other people. P. S. 2. The costs and benefits in a situation sometimes constitute a predictable influence upon children. Ambitious young boys in Israel aspire to be jet pilots in the Air Force, because that role confers so much status there; the situation and the results are very different in the U. S. during peacetime. This is best seen as responding to the opportunity structure, rather than an inculcation of patterns of behavior. One of the best successes in our family was to stop struggling with the kids about dressing warmly enough in winter. Instead we said to them: If you are silly enough to go out in the snow even in your underwear, when you are healthy, you may go right ahead and do so. They were seldom seen under-dressed after that, and an annoying friction disappeared. Much the same policy worked with going to bed in the evening, and with getting to school on time. And to avoid the hassle of kids wanting not to go to school some days, we gave each child a quota of "option" days -- starting with five a year in first grade, and working downwards from there -- that the child could stay home with no argument. We found that the quotas were almost never filled. Perhaps what kids want is argument rather than days at home. Probably these policies would not work as well in many other families. But there certainly is something to be learned from our children's rational responses to the circumstances. P. S. 3. Parents get confused about their children's development because children do obnoxious things at home that they would not do elsewhere. We parents are slow to recognize there will be such a difference in our children's behavior, perhaps because we do not give the children credit for the rational thinking which accounts for these difference in patterns. The children know that they can do these things at home without losing the love of the parents, whereas they know that if they do those things outside the home, people will turn away from them. Parents inevitably criticize children, partly because they do not recognize when the children have already learned better. It seems as if there is no other way to perform one's instructional duties as a parent except to comment upon behavior that needs to be changed. Unfortunately, most children cannot easily distinguish between these instructional remarks and the sort of criticism which says "I don't think much of you". The two phenomena mentioned in this section contribute to the necessity of separation between children and parents at some point in the children's development. They also explain why it is so difficult for children to live at home after they are adolescence. P. S. 4 Many philosophers such as William James, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Einstein turn their minds to the process of education. Dewey and Russell even started schools to carry out their ideas, in the hopes that as the twig is bent, so the branch shall grow. They believed that when people are grown it is too late to improve their behavior. This belief may go along with belief that human nature can be changed by radical changes in the structure of society, such as altering the rules of property, distribution of income, and incentives for work. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 00, at the heart of socialist doctrine is belief in the changeability of human nature. This is quite contrary to the thinking of such philosophers as David Hume, Adam Smith and the other Scottish Moralists (who all began as students of human nature). Hume and the others certainly believed in the changeability of human behavior in response to changes in circumstances and incentives. But they considered variations as dependent upon the situation, rather than permanent improvement built into the fibre of human society independent of present situation. Page # thinking child65@ 3-3-4d