Driving through stop signs, and more on obedience

The dialogue on obedience still hasn't stopped! It's flying round and round the blogosphere in ever-diminishing circles, and nobody is changing anybody's mind. Children are too disobedient these days, says one; children are too regimented, says another. They're out of control. Or, They're expressing real needs. 

And never the twain shall meet.

Somehow, in the midst of reading all this, I had cause to remember the day some nine years ago when my learner-driver son drove straight through a stop sign, while I rode shotgun with my mouth hanging open in shock. It wasn't just any stop sign, mind you; it was one of the most notoriously dangerous intersections on the whole Central Coast. People got killed there with monotonous regularity.

Children are out of control...

Oh, he heard about it from me, don't you worry. I screamed at him to pull over, and then I blew a gasket. As you do, when your life's just flashed before your eyes. I mean, it's not like he didn't know that stop sign was there. He just thought he had the situation under control; he made a judgment call.

And I guess that's why the incident came to mind this morning when I was reading, yet again, about obedience. I think that's the sort of thing that some parents fear, when they choose a parenting path that requires complete obedience from their child. They want to make sure their child doesn't drive through the metaphorical stop signs of life. They fear that they'll raise a sub-standard citizen, unless they force their child to comply with every demand. And they blame every tableau they see of strangers' children 'misbehaving' in public on the parents' failure to cultivate unquestioning obedience.

If only they could time-travel a little, and stand where I stand for a moment- with a grown child, looking back.

Sexualising our children isn't funny

Recently on Facebook, someone from the US posted an outraged reaction to a children's clothing store that was selling g-strings and crotchless undies in children's sizes.  Today in Australia, we have K Mart pulling a range of children's undies with sexualised messages ("Call me!"  "I love rich boys!") off their shelves, after similar outrage from responsible parents.

WHAT are people THINKING when they design and make this garbage and then try to sell it to children?

The US incident was rationalised (if, indeed, you CAN rationalise something that tacky and poorly judged) as an attempt by pedophiles to infiltrate the children's clothing market- something of an extreme view without evidence.  I thought that was drawing a little bit of a long bow.

I think it's bigger, more worrying and less overtly criminal than that.  I think that this is a creeping malaise that's got under our radar, through

(1) our failure to deal with our own personal insecurity, and

(2) our acceptance of other people's 'expert' bad decisions about what's appropriate for children.

Let me explain that.

Breaking the nagging cycle

Most of us have had the experience of telling a child to stop doing something over and over and OVER again.  It can be maddening when we KNOW the child knows that their behaviour is outside the boundaries, but they still keep testing us.

Now, remember that very young children- toddlers and younger- generally haven't developed a sense of right and wrong yet. I'm not talking about them; I'm talking about children who are old enough to have realised that certain behaviours are outside the rules. (This seems to develop somewhere in the 2- to 4-year-old bracket, but it depends quite heavily on individual environmental and developmental factors.)

The most common approach to repeated misbehaviour in this preschooler-and-beyond age group is to keep repeating the boundary message, in the hope that the child will respond. We hope against hope that we won't have to go further- give that threatened punishment, administer a smack, withdraw a privilege, shout- whatever our standard disciplinary approach might be. So we descend to nagging, even though we know from experience that it doesn't work.

My standard line on this is 'if it's not working, stop doing it'.  Let's face it, even adults do stupid/wrong things now and then for fun, whether it's inviting an instant coronary by eating a whole pack of Tim Tams or base-jumping off Mount Rushmore, and having someone tell you repeatedly that it's wrong just makes you irritated and rebellious.

So what else can we do?

The other day some boys in the preschool yard were playing superhero games with sticks. Now, the centre rules demand that sticks be thrown over the fence. These boys have been reminded of the 'no sticks' rule till the teachers are blue in the face. They simply throw the sticks over the fence while you're looking at them, and then find another stick the moment your back is turned.

How did I solve the problem?