Act Natural by Jennifer Traig

Author:Jennifer Traig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

8

Kids Today

On Discipline

Because I was a bossy child who appreciated rules, I would not have predicted that I would be as lax a parent as I am, though I probably should have seen it coming. My previous experience being in charge involved stuffed animals, and these were far more compliant than my children turned out to be. When put in a time-out, a plush hippo tends to sit quietly. A four-year-old, however, will kick holes in the drywall, and discipline quickly starts to feel like more trouble than it’s worth.

It also seems like something you shouldn’t have to do. I understand that this is not how DNA works, but I still can’t help but wonder why my children didn’t genetically download some basic manners and self-control along with my eczema and short stature. It seems equally unfair that these traits didn’t transfer automatically from child to child, like pinkeye or pinworms. It was bad enough that we had to go through the sleep training, the time-outs, the swim lessons, and the learning to read once, but expecting us to go through it all over again for every single child seems like asking a bit much.

The problem, of course, is that you’re always starting from zero. Children have not been given a copy of the social contract. They don’t know that we’ve all agreed that a sock is not a Kleenex, and more dangerously, that the phone charger is not a current-conducting bendy straw. Keeping them from killing themselves or anyone else is an endless chore, and to add manners, literacy, a modicum of self-control, and basic human decency to the mix seems like an impossible task. Press-ganging your children into civility and discipline is a yeoman’s job.

There’s just so much to learn. And although children have an amazing capacity for creating taxonomies (Foods to Eat/Foods to Throw; People Who Give Presents/Other People; Shirt I’m Willing to Wear/All Other Shirts), they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things they need to absorb and distinctions that seem completely arbitrary. We expect them to know, for instance, that the hot dog is the main dish, and not the ketchup, though these are served side by side. Water receptacles turn out to be remarkably complicated when you can’t distinguish the ones you drink out of from the ones you urinate in. Tubes of diaper cream and toothpaste are nearly identical but are applied to very different body parts (once necessitating, in our home, a call to poison control). And it takes a bit to learn that while their mother may use the F-word, they themselves may not. It’s understandable that they’d be confused; and that their parents, cat-herding them through socialization that seems endless, would be exhausted and irritable and prone to use the F-word far more than they should.

All of which slightly undermines the main thing we’re trying to teach them, which is how to behave like a decent person in the world. And this, too, turns out to be a complicated and mutable concept.

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