While writing to a friend in california about her son Jimmie, who resembles John in many ways, I had an Epiphany, which I will relay to you below.
I have said before, in this ongoing blog, that society has changed. Kids today are not the kids of yesteryear. The ADHD epidemic didn't exist 50 years ago; and certainly not 100 years ago. Oh we had other problems, plenty of them, polio, slavery, child labor, etc, but children were able to behave and focus. And the old parenting styles, heavy on discipline and corporal punishment, worked, because the kids were able to control their actions. In fact this approach has worked, on average, for the past thousand generations. Back up 4,000 years and see what the Bible has to say (just for historical perspective).
Deuteronomy 21:18-22
"If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, 'This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.' Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear."
Just 30 years ago, Dan Fogelberg wrote about his father's "thundering velvet hand". Everyone my age and older knows what that means. Jeff Foxworhty recalls, with just a slight exaggeration, "A time-out?? My father would take a time-out from his busy day to beat us." We all laugh nervously, because we know it's true. Bill Cosby has devoted hours of stand-up to this topic as well. "The belt will wail tonight!" It's funny because everything has changed. We are now enlightened. We know that harsh punishments are counterproductive. Well at least we think we know … don't we? But sometimes we wonder.
If a child can't control his actions, and operant conditioning is applied - even a gentle version thereof - then the child quickly falls into learned helplessness. He fails, again and again, and is punished, again and again, for things beyond his control. He gets depressed, angry, antisocial, and even psychotic. Hence the belt has been replaced with a time-out. We have adjusted our parenting style, and I suppose we must. but it dodges the underlying question. What is wrong with the brains of our generation? Why are 7 million kids on ritalin, with plenty more who should be? Why are policemen stationed in the halls of our local high school, in an affluent suburb, while my high school, 30 years ago, never saw a policeman, even once? What is going on? Something has changed, something that evolution could not anticipate.
I've heard a lot of theories. I've entertained a lot of theories (as you know). Some have even implicated Sesame Street. Not that show specifically, but fast paced tv viewed before the age of 2. Look it up - you'll see the articles. And video games, and synthetics and artificials like red#40, and both parents working (or the single parent working), and not breastfeeding, and the hygiene hypothesis, and on and on. Much has changed, and that only confounds the problem. too many variables.
My personal favorite has always been the diet, and it still is. That's what this blog is all about. Well whatever the reason, the kids are different, and that may have forced a change in parenting styles across the country and around the world. We don't even realize that it is happening. We see that our inflexible and harsh punishments damage the children, and we publish articles in psychology journals and parenting magazines, and the dogma shifts. We assume the parenting style is to blame, and was always at fault, just as slavery was always wrong. But maybe the parents of old weren't wrong, at least not from an evolutionary point of view. Maybe our parenting was honed by evolution over a thousand generations to be what it is, and now we are forced to change it in one generation, because the children have changed. I can tell you that friends and relatives, almost without exception, see my son's behavior and quickly drag out the time-tested techniques. "You don't have to put up with that! You're way to permissive. Lay down the law. Give him consequences and make them stick; he'll shape up." The reaction is almost instinctive, as though it were hard-wired in our parental brains. I have the same reaction, and I still have to fight it, even after ten years. This approach may have been correct in the past, but now it's wrong, and it will probably be wrong forever more.
I'm just speculating of course. I don't know; nobody really knows. Maybe corporal punishment was always wrong - always harmful. But it seems to be part of us, as though evolution had put it there; as though that was the best way to raise kids 10,000 years ago. All I know for sure is that it is failing us now - that it destroys the kids who are emotionally impaired, and that's a lot of kids, a larger percentage than we would care to admit. We are, all of us, being moved in this direction by an invisible force - by a generation of children who cannot behave, even if they want to. Our new approach to parenting, along with ritalin and IEPs, is just another bandage, just another desperate attempt to treat the symptoms, because we have no idea how to manage the underlying disease.