[From Bill Powers (920906.0900)]
Ed Ford (920905.2335) --
Ed, we all appreciate your wise words about raising children. Where
were you 35 years ago when I needed you to explain to me what control
theory means in the real world?
RE: responsible thinking.
Let me register a complaint. I think that the "asking questions"
approach can easily be overdone. It would be very strange, I should
think, when everything an adult says to you ends on a rising note.
"Would you like to eat your cereal? Do you think it's nap-time now? Am
I going to get your milk and cookies now? Do you think it's all right
to stick your finger in Baby's eye?" It shouldn't take much of this
before the child will start mentally erasing the question mark and
treating the communication like any sentence telling you what to do
and not do: "Eat your cereal. Take a nap. Get the hell away from
Baby."
I think you should ask questions when you really want to know the
answer, not as a way of disguising an order. Don't you?
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I'm also disturbed by the content of some of the questions. One is
"What's the rule?"
Children, according to my uninformed but cheerfully confident
thinking, start out mastering low levels of control and progress to
higher levels. At any given time, there's a level where they're
experimenting with reproducing perceptions, but have no higher-level
reason for doing so. The adult who is alert to these levels can easily
guide the child at the newly-forming level just by engaging in the
pertinent activities with the child, and when communication is
established, suggesting various things to try at that level. There's
no conflict, because you're not controlling anything that the child is
also controlling for. So if you can stay just ahead of the child's
progress through the levels, you can provide many more possibilities
than the child could discover unaided. Of course you can't tell which
ones will be taken up, but generally kids are willing to try anything
for a while. If it happens to be at the level where they're still
exploring.
When you get to the rule level -- logic, level 9 it says here --
children at the right stage will simply accept rules because you say
that is what the rule is. They're still trying to learn to perceive
and control in terms of rules. It's fun; they slavishly learn the
rules of countless games, and talk to each other like lawyers when
some little proviso is violated or interpreted differently by another
kid. They'll rush to the rule-book to settle arguments. As far as
they're concerned, rules are a natural feature of the universe. So
when you tell them about the family's rules or society's rules, they
just say "Oh. That's how it is." And then they conscientiously go
around saying please and thank you and hello sir or madame as the case
may be, until they get bored with that and go on to another game.
Rules are just the way things work.
So you can remind children of a certain age of the rules (by
questioning, perhaps, or simply by reminding them), and they won't
object.
There comes that age, however, when the next level begins to develop,
whatever it is. You sing out as you've done for a few years "Nine
o'clock, time for bed," and the kid says "Who says so? Why can't I
stay up until 10?" A little later, you say "You're grounded for
staying out past 11," and the kid says "Like hell I am." Then you
start spouting principles: "I'm trying to do what's best for you; I
know you'd rather stay out but don't you think I would let you if I
thought it was safe?" And to your surprise, the kid says, "Well, OK."
But if you say "Listen, smart-ass, the rule is that you get in by 11,
and if you don't, you don't go out at all if you want to live in this
family." Now you can express this any way you like -- you can ask
"What's the rule?" if that's the way you frame statements? But however
you say it, you're doing the same thing: you're entering into a
conflict at the level where the kid has begun choosing his own
reference levels for higher reasons, and you're referring to your
greater coercive power to make it stick. In effect you're saying "Obey
the rule or get out," knowing full well that the kid would be
terrified and grief-stricken at being thrown out on his own.
So the point I'm raising is that "What's the rule?" is probably the
wrong question, or statement, when the person has passed beyond the
stage where rules are taken as natural phenomena, and have realized
that somebody, some mere person, makes the rules and enforces them.
That's when people start wanting to make their own rules, and start
questioning the rules that others want to impose on them.
That's the stage when kids start turning into philosophers. They ask,
in the rhetorical way, "A person ought to be loyal to her friends,
shouldn't they?" That's not a rule; it's a principle. This principle
may work out that you should defend your friend by driving by the
house of someone who looked crosseyed at the friend and shooting
through the windows. But it's still a principle, and if you want the
kid to reconsider how to behave, you can't do it by saying "Isn't the
rule No Shooting Into People's Houses?" The kid now knows that that's
not HIS rule. It's somebody else's.
The only place where you can argue with this kid and have a hope of an
effect is now at the principle level. You can even ask questions: "Is
this how you've like to be living when you're 40? Would you like your
own kids to be shot at? Can you imagine what this neighborhood would
be like if the adults believed the same way you do?" And so on.
I don't have any particularly brilliant ideas about how you would
actually do this: play it by ear out of long experience, I suppose, if
you have the experience. But I think it's kind of a sham to ask
"What's the Rule?" of a teenaged hellion in a detention center, when
all you're doing is reminding the person of who has the power to slap
them in solitary and take away their privileges. You can control
people that way, but it won't stick. If you don't care about
recidivism, you can keep everyone in line by asking what's the rule,
but you won't have addressed their real problem, which is utter
confusion about principles and probably system concepts too.
So if you want to ask questions of people who already pick their own
rules, you should ask "What's the Principle," at the very least.
You've left rules behind. No matter what you wish, the person is going
to do the rule-picking from now on, unless credibly threatened with
physical force. If you want to persuade, you have to back up to the
principle level and talk philosophy, generalizations, morals, will-
this-work-if-everyone-does-it? Basically you ask the same things you
always do: what are you doing? Is it working? But now you're talking
about principles, like sticking up for your friends. Or you're talking
about system concepts, like being a cool dude or whatever it is now.
You're not going to alter any attitudes toward rules by this time; you
can only hope to persuade the person to try some new principles or
even selves.
I don't know if any of this can actually be done with an 18-year-old
offender. Maybe it's too late. On the other hand, you seem to suggest
that it's not too late in as many cases as people are willing to
think.
And by the way, Greg, as you can see I do believe that one can
strongly affect growing children. But not for long, and you can't make
them choose from your smorgasbord just the items you consider most
tasty.
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Best?
Bill?