How To Live With Children

A good, stable adult with love and tolerance in his heart is about the best therapy a child can have.

Children are not dogs. They can’t be trained like dogs are trained. They are not controllable items. They are, and let’s not overlook the point, men and women. A child is not a special species of animal distinct from Man. A child is a man or a woman who has not attained full growth.

Any law which applies to the behavior of men and women applies to children.

How would you like to be pulled and hauled and ordered about and restrained from doing whatever you wanted to do? You’d resent it. The only reason a child ‘doesn’t’ resent it is because he’s small. You’d half murder somebody who treated you, an adult, with the orders, contradiction and disrespect give to the average child. Your child doesn’t strike back because he isn’t big enough. He gets your floor muddy, interrupts your nap, destroy the peace of the home instead. If he had equality with you in the matter of rights, he’d not ask for this “revenge”. This “revenge” is standard child behavior.

It may be that another family factor is in the scene. This may be in the person of a relative, such as the mother-in-law. How does one solve this factor without using a shotgun? This, again, is simple. The mother-in-law, if there is trouble in the family, is responsible for cutting communication lines or diverting communication. One or the other of the partners, then, is cut off the communication channel on which he belongs. He sense this and objects strenuously to it.

A child has a right to his self-determinism. You say that if he is not restrained from pulling things down on him, running into the road, etc., etc., he’ll be hurt. What are you, as an adult, doing to make that child live in rooms or an environment where he can be hurt? The fault is yours, not his, if he breaks things.

The sweetness and love of a child is preserved only so long as he can exert his own self-determinism. You interrupt that and, to a degree, you interrupt his life.

There are only two reasons why a child’s right to decide for himself has to be interrupted—the fragility and danger of his environment and you. For you work out on him the things that were done to you, regardless of what you think.

There are two courses you can take. Give the child the leeway in an environment he can’t hurt, which can’t badly hurt him and which doesn’t greatly restrict his space and time. And you can clean up your own aberrations* to a point where your tolerance equals or surpasses his lack of education in how to please you.

When you give a child something, it’s his. It’s not still yours. Clothes, toys, quarters, what he has been given must remain under his exclusive control. So he tears up his shirt, wrecks his bed, breaks his fire engine. It’s none of your business. How would you like to have somebody give you a Christmas present and then tell you, day after day thereafter, what you are to do with it and even punish you if you failed to take are for it the way the donor thinks? You’d wreck that donor and ruin that present. You know you would. The child wrecks your nerves when you do it to him. That’s revenge. He cries. He pesters you. He breaks your things. He “accidently” spills his milk. And he wrecks the possession on purpose about which he is so often cautioned. Why? Because he is fighting for his own self-determinism, his own right to own and make his weight felt on his environment. This “possession” is another channel by which he can be controlled. So he has to fight the possession and the controller.

* aberrtion: a departure from rational thought or behavior. It means basically to err, to make mistakes, or more specifically to have fixed ideas which are not true. The word is also used in its scientific sense. It means departure from a straight line. If a line should go from A to B, then if it is aberrated it would go from A to some other point, to some other point, to some other point, to some other point, to some other point, and finally arrive at B. Taken in this sense, it would also mean the lack of straightness or to see crookedly as, for example, a man sees a horse but thinks he sees an elephant. Aberrated conduct would be wrong conduct, or conduct not supported by reason. When a person has engrams, these tend to deflect what would be his normal ability to perceive truth and bring about an aberrated view of situations which then would cause an aberrated reaction to them. Aberration is opposed to sanity, which would be its opposite. From the Latin, aberrare, to wander from; Latin, ab, away, errare, to wander.