Change of Mind

There is an experiment they do with young children*. The experimenter shows a closed Sweeties** box to the child and asks what is in it. The child answers, "Sweeties." Then the experimenter shows the child that the box is full of paper clips and asks the child, "Before we opened the box, what did you think was in it?" And the young child answers, "Paper clips." People used to think that answers like this meant the child was lying. However, that is not the case. Up to about three or four (I wish I could remember this more exactly), a child is not able to think about thinking. Which means the child can't think about having been wrong about what she thought. So, she honestly can't remember thinking that there were Sweeties in that box, since now she knows that there are paper clips. You get the same answer for the same reason if you ask the child what someone else will think is in the box. Again, if the child still thinks it is Sweeties, that's the answer you get. If the child knows it is paper clips, that is the answer you get.

When the child knows that she used to think there were Sweeties in that box and now she knows better, she has made a major leap in type of thought.

A similar change in thinking ability happens when the child "looked me right in the face and defied me!" We've all been there. Dad is out weeding the garden and the toddler decides to help. Everything is fine until the toddler reaches for a tulip and Dad says, "No! That's a flower. Don't pull the flowers!" And the toddler looks right in his face and pulls it. Again, what is happening is not what people think is happening. To understand this, we need to put it in sequence.

Step one, the baby is eating candy and offers some to Mama, who says she would rather have a carrot, and Baby gives her candy. Because Baby doesn't understand that people can want different things, and Baby wants candy, so Mama must want candy. Step three is, Baby offers candy, Mama says she'd rather have a carrot, and Baby gives her a carrot. Now Baby knows people can want different things. That "defiant" moment where he looks right in your face and does the thing you told him not to? That's the moment he figured it out. He is watching your face to see if his hypothesis is right and you really don't want him to pull that tulip (pick up the cat by the tail, bite his brother). This is a major developmental milestone. Baby should have a party to celebrate this incredible step he has taken. And, usually, he gets punished for defiance.

* I was going to give you the exact age, but I looked for it on the Internet for 45 minutes and couldn't find it.
** A brand of candy in the UK.
Picture copyright Notcot Inc.

Unlikely Friends

If this is possible, what is not? I just can not imagine.

Birth Mothers

Bitch, Ph.D has posted Adoption: Birth Mothers Are People, Too concerning the book The Girls Who Went Away, about birth mothers who gave their children up for adoption in the days before Roe v. Wade. It's a perspective that most of us don't think about very deeply. The argument is there for women who are considering an abortion, that they can choose to give birth and adopt the baby out. But what we don't really think about is what it is like to have adopted a baby out.

For two years one of my parenting clients was a young woman who had given her younger child up for adoption because she was afraid of his father. The police were unable to offer her help. She believed that the only thing she could do to get this man completely out of her life and keep her children safe was to hide the existence of the baby from him. To give him up for adoption.

She first came to me after she had given the child up and returned to town. She came to see me once a week for two years, and she never came once that she didn't cry. She ached for her child. It was supposed to be an open adoption, but Alaska doesn't enforce the open adoption agreement if the adoptive parents decide they don't want the birth mother involved.* She gave her child to this couple. She was supposed to get pictures and letters and be able to see him at least once a year. She never got a single picture or letter. All of her letters and the letters of her lawyer were returned unopened.

I have never worked with a parent I was less able to help. I have never known a young woman who I wanted to fight for more. I will never know if she could have trusted her baby's father. But I do know that I have never known a woman to regret an abortion the way that young woman regretted that adoption. It left her wounded to the soul.

Adoption is not a choice normally made by the Tlingits in this area. The tribes do not give up children, and if the mother or parents can't raise the child, extended family members will take it in until circumstances change. I worked with many grandmothers who were raising their grandkids, and even two great-grandmothers.

In those cases where there is no extended family to step in, pregnant teens and their children may end up in the foster care system. There is a woman who fosters young, pregnant, Tlingit girls and their babies. She continues to foster both mother and child while the mother finishes school. The foster mom wants the young mother to have a good start as a mother and as near a normal life as a teen as possible. The young mother goes to the prom and football games as well as learning about child development. She grows as a maturing teen and as a mother. If she "ages out**" of the foster system, the foster mom keeps her without money from the state for her care and works with her until she is ready to take her child and go out on her own. And the foster mom is there to support her in many ways for years. Many of the young mothers she has helped still drop in and visit on a weekly basis. Like any daughter would.

I know that the circumstances between my young client and these young mothers are different, and this superb foster mother would not have been there for my client in any case. But I also know that if there were more women like this foster mom, there would be fewer young women who would have to make either choice about a baby. More intact families. And what a blessing that would be.

* To the best of my knowledge, no state does.
** Becomes 18, when the state stops paying for her care and expects her to go out on her own.

Photo: Ashes to Blessing

Richard Picks Up His Toys

When Richard was almost four, I happened to be reading Logical Consequences by Rudolf Dreikurs and Loren Grey one evening as it was getting on time for the kids to get ready for bed and I decided to try the approach. So, as we were getting ready to get ready, I asked Richard, as per instructions, "It's time to put your toys away. Would you like to put them on the shelf or would you rather I put them in the closet?"

Being perfectly willing to let me do the work, he answered, "You put them away." And so, I got out a box, picked up all the toys on the floor, and put them on the closet shelf. The next day he still had lots of toys to play with, but he did ask for one or two of the ones on the shelf. I explained that they were on the shelf for a week, showed him how to count that off on the calendar, and went about my business. That evening, again I asked what he wanted to do, and again he wanted me to put them on the shelf.

However, now he had not only his very favorite toys, but also his next to the favorite toys in the closet. So on the next day, he asked for a number of toys. Again, we worked it out on the calendar. Again, he accepted it easily.

That evening, when I asked him, I got as far as, "Would you like to " and he broke in with "I'll put them on the shelf." I don't think he ever had me put his toys away again. And, the wonderful thing about it was that he never complained about the toys in the closet.*

Having discovered this miracle answer to discipline, I used it often. And because my children always got to choose*** they did not resist or resent. They could see the logical connection between the choice they made and the consequence, whether that was what they wanted or not. And, because I always asked if they wanted this or that, and never said, "If you don't put them away, I'll put them in the closet (or whatever the choice was)", and always had a logical connection between the choices, we had very few problems.

As they grew older, I stopped offering choices and simply delivered the consequence. When Richard**** was 12, his Uncle Forrest, attempting to be helpful, told him that he was the man of the family. And Richard observed that his grandfather and his uncle didn't pick up their own dinner dishes and put them in the dish washer, like we did. So, having picked up his dishes without fail for ten years, one night he left them on the table. A simple, "Richard, your dishes are still on the table." took care of it that night. But, three nights later, he did it again. This time I didn't say anything. I picked up his dishes and put them in the frig (didn't want the little bugger to get salmonella, after all) and the next morning served his French toast on his dirty dishes. I never had to say anything. It is obvious -- if you don't pick up your dishes, they don't get washed. I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything. But, to this day, you almost have to constrain him to keep him from taking his dirty dishes out to restaurant kitchens.

* It helps with keeping a child's room clean if you use a little Montessori as well as a little Dreikurs. So, my kids never had toy boxes. ** They had shelves at their height. Toys with parts were in containers, and since the box the toys came in would fall apart rather quickly, they had baskets and other containers that wouldn't. And we rotated toys in and out of the room so they had a manageable number. They got to choose what they wanted out at any time, we rotated right after finals when they were little and I was going to school. Every time we would rotate, there were all of those toys they hadn't played with for an entire college semester -- it was like Christmas.

** Toy boxes worked when children had many fewer toys than they do these days, or servants. To get a feel for how unwieldy a toy box is for a child, think about what life would be like if you had no cupboards or drawers or canisters or shelves in the kitchen. If everything had to go in a the box your refrigerator came in. Loose. Once you opened the flour or the rice, the rest of the bag was just dumped in. Everything in your kitchen. In one box. Want to fry an egg? Not only do you have to take out everything you are going to use, but all of the things you aren't going to use between the top and where it has filtered down. Then put it all back, repeat when you need to do something else, put it all back. How long would your kitchen stay tidy?

*** If they had no choice of whether they were going to do it, such as brushing teeth, they got a choice of where or when -- would you rather brush your teeth in the bathroom or the kitchen, before or after your bath?

**** I used to tell lots of these stories to my parenting classes, since concrete examples help teach the concept. Once I noticed that they were almost all about Richard. I mentioned it to Julie, who answered, "I always watched what happened when Richard did something new to find out if it was allowed or not." So, almost all of my Julie discipline stories are about things Richard never did or which were not an issue with him.

Chores

As a parent, getting the chore thing right was vitally important to me. There was so much tension as I was growing up around chores, as mentioned in Melmac Dishes and In A Nutshell II and IV-a and Binocular Vision that I had no intention of reliving that from the other perspective. It had been bad enough that I had left home at 16 to live with my great-aunt and Forrest had left home at 17 and worked his way through his senior year of high school. So, when Richard was still crawling around the floor I started researching this subject. I majored in child development and later went on to get my masters in Montessori education, and I read everything I could get my hands on, observed parents and children I knew, and thought about it a lot. The result was a coherent theory that I then continued to test, refine, and build on.

Children are motivated by two positive needs. They need to be loved and appreciated for who they are, even when they are naughty. And they need to contribute to the family. Children who don’t contribute, who have no chores, who aren’t allowed to help, feel insecure. This lack can lead to bad behavior, as children try to get undeserved attention to compensate for their fear that they don’t actually deserve any.

There are a number of goals to having a child do chores. One is the need to contribute. Another is the need that parents have for help a family is a unit that relies on its members -- Julie and Richard knew that our family could not get along without their help. What they did was important to me.

Another goal is teaching children skills for when they are grown. Whereas I learned a limited number of "girl" chores, we started with a list of things that have to be done around the house, from making beds and putting clean clothes away to planning meals, shopping, cooking, and occasional maintenance items. Over the years both kids had the opportunity to learn and be responsible for each skill on the list. When I was growing up, once you got a chore it was yours until you left home. My kids moved on to more complex and interesting things.

Children try to help at a very young age. When Richard was about nine months old, Daddy asked him to bring his empty bottle to the kitchen, and Richard walked around three walls of the room, holding on, got the bottle, and walked it back the same path. He was so proud to be able to help. When Maya was 15 months, she regularly helped Julie unload the silverware from the dish washer. If we don’t let children help us at this age, we are setting our lives up to fight about chores in later years. If you think about it, there is almost always some part of the task your child can help you with. (I have a friend who let her border collie carry in the meat, and he never pierced the shrink wrap. If a dog can do it, so can a child.) And if you tell him he is too little or too young, you undercut his self-confidence.

Just because a little one helps, it doesn’t mean he is ready to have that task assigned. Until the child is about five, it should always be voluntary. You can certainly ask, but you mustn’t be disappointed if your child has something more important right now.

It is also important to recognize that little people can’t meet adult standards. Richard decided at three that he wanted to make his own bed. And he did it himself from then on. I would have insulted him no end had I stepped in and corrected it. Every week when I changed the sheets, we would do it together, which gave him ample instruction in how to do it. For a long time, he slept in a pretty messy little nest, but he was proud of it.

One thing I remember resenting about my chores when I was a kid (among a myriad of things I resented about them) was coming home from school and being expected to do chores while everyone else was enjoying themselves. I didn’t like being off on my own working. And I well remember visiting my Aunt Marvel in the summer and how she and her two daughters and I would clean the house together and absolutely love it. Seeing how fast we could get done to go out and play – all of us, Aunt Marvel included. Children enjoy helping their parents. And when my kids came along, that is what we did for a long time. Clean up common areas before we went to bed, dishes after eating, and the main chores on Saturday morning, followed by a family outing.

I would never pay a child to do their regular chores. No one pays me to cook dinner or clean the bathroom or change the cat box. And keeping their own bedroom clean is self care, like brushing their teeth and taking a bath. It doesn’t count as a contribution to the family. Chores benefit everyone.

Since I didn’t pay my kids to do their chores, I couldn’t’ take their allowance away if they didn’t. So, I had to fall back on logical consequences. When they didn’t put their clothes in the hamper, I didn’t wash them. When Richard didn’t put his dishes in the dishwasher, I put them in the refrigerator overnight* and fed him off them for breakfast.**

I always tried to let the kids have a say in which chores and/or when they did them***. The more input the child has, the more likely he is to go along with the program.

* He had to learn, but I didn’t want him to die of salmonella.

** One reason I have more Richard discipline stories is that Julie would watch and see what happened when he did something. If there was a negative consequence, she didn’t repeat it. This was true with natural consequences as well as logical ones. What good, she asked, is an older brother if you can’t learn from his pain1

*** That was, of course, ahead of time. Deciding when we were waiting for the chore to be done that tomorrow would be good enough was not an option.

Children and Money

I was visiting Disgusted Beyond Belief and encountered the excellent post Educating one's child on economics and it started me thinking about allowances.

When I grew up, money was a taboo subject. It was not talked of in any but the most general terms. In “genteel” families it was almost not discussed at all. You didn’t discuss how much you had, how much you earned, how much you needed, or how much something cost. I have no idea how any of us learned to deal with it. Indeed, as I remember it, my early excursions into money were not unlike my early excursions into that other taboo subject, sex. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and some of the results, although funny in retrospect, were horrid at the time. And, it’s not something that you can grow up without understanding; this is a culture that runs on money and if you can’t manage it you are in real trouble.

So, when I had kids, I did some research on the subject. I knew some general principles from being a Montessori teacher. I knew that to teach a skill you break it down into component parts and set up practice with each one. I also read Haim Ginott’s “Between Parent and Child” and agreed with his statements about money. In the first place, in a family everyone gets a share of the resources. There is a roof; we all stay dry. There is food; we all eat. There is love; we all are loved. There is respect; we all are respected. There is money; we all get some of that as well. Secondly, the purpose of an allowance is to develop proficiency with money. As adults, we will need to earn money and then manage it. As children, we need to learn these skills separately.

I began giving Richard and Julie an allowance when they were six. Since then I’ve been really impressed with the idea of giving an allowance as soon as your child, when offered her choice between a nickel and a dime, chooses the dime. Allowances grow with age. They start out small, to be used for fun, given weekly. Later, when the child can get through the week on the allowance given, she is ready to have money doled out further apart. The ideal of learning to budget month-to-month is high school level; and if your teen can’t do it at first, going back to weekly and then semi-weekly is a good idea.*

How much allowance to give depends on what you can afford, which does not mean that if you are extremely rich your child should get a huge allowance, but rather that you should not give more than you can comfortably manage. What do you expect the child to do with this money? If it is only for pleasure it will be less than if it is to include school lunches. What is customary in your child’s peer group? Make certain that there is understanding between you and your child about all of this.I don’t believe in advances; children shouldn’t learn to live on credit. They shouldn’t get extra “just this once” and they shouldn’t get their allowance taken away as a punishment for anything.** They can’t learn to manage it if they can’t predict when and how much they will get. It is certainly alright, if a child needs extra money, to allow the child to earn it. Richard and Julie sometimes earned extra by doing each other’s chores and being paid for it. Sometimes I would pay them to do something I normally did. They got odd jobs in the neighborhood, with their grandparents, at the local pizzeria and horse stable.

When Julie was 12 I was going crazy going from store to store with her to try on clothes. When I mentioned this to my secretary she told me about her daughter’s clothing allowance. Wonderful. I started giving my kids a clothing allowance. Julie learned the most important things. She learned not to save forever for one pair of fashionable jeans.; not to buy things that weren’t well made; to check and make sure they covered what they were supposed to cover; that if a blouse didn’t go with anything she owned she wasn’t going to wear it. She is, to this day, a wise shopper.

Richard bought a belt with his clothing allowance the first month, and after that he couldn’t figure out what clothes he needed. Finally he asked if he could spend his on books instead of clothes, and since that fits my values, I agreed.

At 16 their allowances ended. They knew when they began that would be the case. At 16 the law said they could work. Julie got a paying job at 14, just so to be ready. Richard learned to live on minimum money, and did Julie’s chores so she could work. Both were fine outcomes as far as I was concerned. Eventually he wanted computers and games and speakers and things that required a real job, and eventually he got one.

I would suggest, that since when kids get jobs their grades tend to drop, you consider that. If either of my two had been poor students, I would have continued allowances.

* Remember, it is important for a child to experience success in the acquisition of skills. In a Montessori classroom, all lessons that don’t end in success are ended by going back to a previous successful level. This is not to give a false sense of self-esteem, but to prevent reviewing the incorrect solution between lessons.

** I’ll talk about what to do about chores soon. For now, don’t pay them to do them and don’t not pay them if they don’t. If you are already paying them for chores, wait a couple of days for my chores post and if you agree with me, you can change what you are doing. Tell the child why and she will learn what people do when they learn new things.