All this discussion of physical punishment has brought back memories from the long ago, and I want to recount one just to show how complicated these things really are.
Years and years and years ago, my older son was about three years old. I decided that it would be nice for him to have a blackboard in his room, because he always liked to write on the board if he came to class with me. I got some blackboard paint and painted a section of wall, got colored chalk, even fixed up a little chalk tray with a piece of quarter-round, and painted the rest of the wall a nice clean white. [Parents who are more experienced than I was at the time will see what’s coming.] I did all that, then left the room for half an hour-- and when I came back my firstborn had climbed up on some shelves, studiously avoiding the blackboard, and chalked all over the nice white wall. I was infuriated, which was really quite unreasonable because I hadn’t thought to tell him not to do this. I told him off thoroughly and delivered a couple of swats on the bottom.
A few hours later, this conversation took place.
CHILD: (firmly) Mom! I don’t like all that screaming and spanking.
ME: Well… what do you think I should do when you’re naughty?
CHILD: (thinks a minute) Tell me quietly, and clean it up.
ME: Oh. Well, if I did that, would you stop doing it?
CHILD: No.
It just goes to show-- as the saying goes, the camel driver he has his opinion; the camel he has his. But the family caravan still needs to keep lumbering along and usually manages to do so to the best of everyone’s imperfect ability.
Showing posts with label preschoolers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preschoolers. Show all posts
Monday, January 9, 2012
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Young Children and Prison Visits
On a listserv that deals with psychology and the law, the following question was recently asked: “how can the impact on a preschool child be softened when he is taken to visit his father who is in prison after being convicted of murder?”. Some contributors asked why he should be taken at all, given that there would be little relationship in the future. Others pointed out that the father might be exonerated, or even if not exonerated might be released on parole before the child was an adult, and it would be to the benefit of both of them to have some sort of connection. (It happens that in this particular case they had not spent much time together, but that might be considered even more reason to foster the relationship.)
It’s sad that the question needs to be asked at all, but it may be useful to think about it in a general way. Similar questions might be asked about taking a young child to visit the mother in prison, or a parent or grandparent in a hospital, or about paying a visit to a parent or grandparent who lives in another country and for financial or political reasons can’t live near the child. There are even similar concerns when a parent has supervised visitation with a child. All of those are situations where emotional tightropes are being walked. We don’t want the child to be terrified and traumatized by the visit, but neither do we want the visited adult to be so distressed or disappointed or angry that they prefer to break off the relationship rather than suffer that way. Unfortunately, while young children want to be with people they care about, no matter what, adults sometimes feel that unless the contact is very enjoyable and can be counted on for the future, there is no point going on with it. Adults can prefer an abrupt, permanent break to making an effort to preserve a weak or problematic relationship. (Think divorce…)
So, what can we do to make something like a prison visit good enough so a two- or three-year-old is not upset and frightened, and also so the prisoner finds it gratifying enough to be motivated to try to be a parent or grandparent? Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the child will be safe and nothing scary or bad will happen in the prison situation.
A first step is to give the child the social support he or she needs to help tolerate this strange experience. It’s clear that young children in unfamiliar surroundings benefit from having familiar people with them. Ideally, the child will be accompanied by an attachment figure-- that means someone to whom he can turn as a secure base when frightened, someone whose presence gives him the security and confidence to explore new places and people. That familiar adult should be with the child throughout the trip, and that means from the time he or she is picked up at home, in the car, going into the prison, in the visiting area, and going home. There should be no handing off to an unfamiliar CPS driver or a corrections official, however kind those people may be.
The presence of a familiar adult buffers or “immunizes” young children against the effects of their natural fear of the unknown. A jail is a sad and scary place to adults who know about crimes and their punishments, and a hospital can also feel like a place of terrible unknown dangers. Young children don’t know from prisons or hospitals, but are no more-- and no less— scared in those institutions than they would be in any other strange place. In all these cases, a familiar, protective adult does a vast amount to make the experience good enough for the child’s comfort.
A second step is to help the child know what is going to happen. There are a lot of things in a prison that are different from the outside world. There will be security procedures, lots of policeman or guards (let’s hope nobody has used threats of these people to discipline the child), people crying or looking sad or angry, and probably a visiting area in which no touching is allowed, but where a more-or-less familiar person is sitting behind a barrier.
You can’t tell a young child about these things-- or rather, you can tell, but it’s not going to sink in. How, then, to prepare? A good possibility is to use dolls or handpuppets to enact what’s going to occur. The child can have a puppet representing himself and talk or move it to practice how to respond to security procedures and so on.
Third, it would be very wise to prepare both the adult visitor and the prisoner for their roles in the meeting. The imprisoned father (in the listserv’s example)may have no idea how to talk to a child who is unfamiliar and whom he can’t touch or kiss. But he might be able to talk about how the child can handle a child puppet and a father puppet-- for instance, he might suggest that the father puppet pick up or hug the child, then ask what the child puppet wants to do.
One more caution about the meeting: this is not the time for the adult visitor and the prisoner to quarrel or cast blame on each other, or even pay much attention to each other. The goal should be to create the maximum pleasant interaction between father and child during the short time available for the meeting. Ideally, each will go away with the sense that they would like to do that again. That outcome will minimize any ill effect on the child, and will help the father feel it’s worthwhile to work toward a genuine relationship with the child.
It’s sad that the question needs to be asked at all, but it may be useful to think about it in a general way. Similar questions might be asked about taking a young child to visit the mother in prison, or a parent or grandparent in a hospital, or about paying a visit to a parent or grandparent who lives in another country and for financial or political reasons can’t live near the child. There are even similar concerns when a parent has supervised visitation with a child. All of those are situations where emotional tightropes are being walked. We don’t want the child to be terrified and traumatized by the visit, but neither do we want the visited adult to be so distressed or disappointed or angry that they prefer to break off the relationship rather than suffer that way. Unfortunately, while young children want to be with people they care about, no matter what, adults sometimes feel that unless the contact is very enjoyable and can be counted on for the future, there is no point going on with it. Adults can prefer an abrupt, permanent break to making an effort to preserve a weak or problematic relationship. (Think divorce…)
So, what can we do to make something like a prison visit good enough so a two- or three-year-old is not upset and frightened, and also so the prisoner finds it gratifying enough to be motivated to try to be a parent or grandparent? Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the child will be safe and nothing scary or bad will happen in the prison situation.
A first step is to give the child the social support he or she needs to help tolerate this strange experience. It’s clear that young children in unfamiliar surroundings benefit from having familiar people with them. Ideally, the child will be accompanied by an attachment figure-- that means someone to whom he can turn as a secure base when frightened, someone whose presence gives him the security and confidence to explore new places and people. That familiar adult should be with the child throughout the trip, and that means from the time he or she is picked up at home, in the car, going into the prison, in the visiting area, and going home. There should be no handing off to an unfamiliar CPS driver or a corrections official, however kind those people may be.
The presence of a familiar adult buffers or “immunizes” young children against the effects of their natural fear of the unknown. A jail is a sad and scary place to adults who know about crimes and their punishments, and a hospital can also feel like a place of terrible unknown dangers. Young children don’t know from prisons or hospitals, but are no more-- and no less— scared in those institutions than they would be in any other strange place. In all these cases, a familiar, protective adult does a vast amount to make the experience good enough for the child’s comfort.
A second step is to help the child know what is going to happen. There are a lot of things in a prison that are different from the outside world. There will be security procedures, lots of policeman or guards (let’s hope nobody has used threats of these people to discipline the child), people crying or looking sad or angry, and probably a visiting area in which no touching is allowed, but where a more-or-less familiar person is sitting behind a barrier.
You can’t tell a young child about these things-- or rather, you can tell, but it’s not going to sink in. How, then, to prepare? A good possibility is to use dolls or handpuppets to enact what’s going to occur. The child can have a puppet representing himself and talk or move it to practice how to respond to security procedures and so on.
Third, it would be very wise to prepare both the adult visitor and the prisoner for their roles in the meeting. The imprisoned father (in the listserv’s example)may have no idea how to talk to a child who is unfamiliar and whom he can’t touch or kiss. But he might be able to talk about how the child can handle a child puppet and a father puppet-- for instance, he might suggest that the father puppet pick up or hug the child, then ask what the child puppet wants to do.
One more caution about the meeting: this is not the time for the adult visitor and the prisoner to quarrel or cast blame on each other, or even pay much attention to each other. The goal should be to create the maximum pleasant interaction between father and child during the short time available for the meeting. Ideally, each will go away with the sense that they would like to do that again. That outcome will minimize any ill effect on the child, and will help the father feel it’s worthwhile to work toward a genuine relationship with the child.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Fearlessness, Empathy, and Preschoolers: That Report
The Internet is currently full of references to a doctoral dissertation done at the University of Haifa by Inbal Kivenson Bar-On, a student of the well-known child development researcher Ofra Mayseless. Bar-On reported that when she investigated the abilities and behavior of 80 preschool children, the “fearless” ones showed differences from the “fearful” (for example, at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101108140524.htm).
.
Whether the children were relatively fearful or fearless was ascertained by looking at their reactions to common events like separation from parents or the sound of a vacuum cleaner, or surprising objects like a jack-in-the-box. The operative word here is “relatively”-- it does not appear that Bar-On sought out children who were unusually fearful or fearless.( I ought to note that I have not seen the dissertation, and it looks as if everyone commenting has drawn their information from the University of Haifa press release which is on their web site; what we all say about it is very much subject to revision when we see the details.)
Pamela Paul, writing in the New York Times Sunday style section of all things, implied that the fearfulness-fearfulness dimension measured by Bar-On is equivalent to the aspect of temperament often called approach-withdrawal. Temperament is an aspect of personality that is thought to be “constitutional”, or biologically determined, and which stays basically the same from infancy through adulthood (although it naturally is expressed through different behaviors at different ages). There are half a dozen or more factors in temperament, but approach-withdrawal is a pretty obvious one, especially for children at the extremes. The approaching child tries new foods easily, goes up to the strange dog, behaves in a friendly way to strangers, and so on; the withdrawing child needs a long time to adapt to new things and avoids them as much as possible. It probably makes sense to think of approach and withdrawal as substantially related to fearlessness and fearfulness. Bar-On’s report that the fearless children were friendly also supports this view.
According to Bar-On’s study, the children who were evaluated as fearless were quite good at recognizing when other children had facial expressions of anger, surprise, happiness, or sadness, but they did not readily recognize an expression of fear. The fearful children did a better job at recognizing fear. The fearless children were also more likely to take advantage of other children, and less likely to be remorseful when they had done wrong. Bar-On reported that these differences were like constitutional differences in temperament-- they resulted from genetic variations, not from parenting effects.
However, it’s difficult to determine that normal behaviors in 3- and 4-year-olds are purely constitutional in nature. Much behavioral development is transactional in nature; whatever the basic characteristics of parent and child, they influence each other and each shapes the behavior of the other. As a relevant example, let’s look at how infants make use of fearful facial expressions shown by other people. From 8 or 9 months, babies are able to avoid a lot of trial-and-error involvement with potentially dangerous things. When they encounter a new or unusual person or thing, infants try “social referencing”-- they look at the face of a nearby familiar adult. If that person looks (or sounds) frightened, the baby backs off and avoids the strange event. If the adult looks happy, the baby gradually moves to explore. This is why well-cared-for babies don’t have nearly as many accidents as they might. The mother’s frightened face as the baby crawls toward the unguarded stairs or starts to reach for the candle flame warns most babies very effectively.
But what would happen if a particular baby were not very good at recognizing a fear-face? He or she would not back off in response to the parent’s fear. The caregiver would have to move to keep the baby safe, perhaps swooping down and grabbing the baby away from danger, or even smacking his hands in an effort to get the lesson across. The baby might then associate another person’s expression of fear with the baby’s experience of aggression. Rather than an empathic response to the other’s fear, the baby might be angered by seeing another person look fearful, and by preschool age this could be shown in instrumental aggression toward other kids and a sense that this is justified.
Of course, this is all complete speculation on my part-- I have no idea how this would really happen-- but when we put together the transactional aspect of development, the infant use of “social referencing”, and the vigorous efforts made by attentive caregivers to find ways to keep babies safe, the scenario I’ve given is not an impossible one. In addition, it’s a scenario that would be complete by the preschool period, and would not necessarily be detectable unless longitudinal research followed each child from infancy. These events would be a mechanism that combined the child’s constitutional characteristics with the effects of experience, and would suggest that it’s possible for the child to learn to behave differently. Interestingly, this possibility shows that acceptable, appropriate, even admirable parent behavior might have an effect on some children that would increase undesirable child behaviors like aggressiveness. In this, there is a resemblance to the work of Graziela Kochanska on more fearful children, showing that very ordinary levels of punishment may be so overwhelming for some children that little learning about behavior is produced.
In Pamela Paul’s Times piece, she quotes the comments of the SUNY at Buffalo developmental psychologist Jamie Ostrov on the Bar-On report (www.nytimes.com.2010/11/21/fashion/21Studied.html). I must say that these comments were the first thing to catch my eye in Paul’s column, and they raised my eyebrows instantly. Ostrov was quoted as saying that the fearless children “may be charming, but they’re also highly manipulative and skilled at getting their way-- even at age 3 or 4”. I must question what Ostrov was talking about, and the extent to which this view (so characteristic of some unconventional child psychotherapies with which I would not expect Ostrov to be involved ) is actually supported by empirical work. None of Bar-On’s material which is available to me says the fearless children were charming, although it does say they were friendly; the idea of “psychopathic charm” is one which has been pushed hard by “attachment therapists”. Ostrov’s statement that fearless preschoolers are highly manipulative and skilled at getting their way (also a tenet of “attachment therapy”) is at odds with what is known about the development of Theory of Mind, a set of abilities by which we understand what other people know, think, and want. Three-year-olds may want very much to manipulate people, but they do a poor job because they do not understand how deception works. Four-year-olds are much better and can sometimes tell a convincing lie, but they have nothing like adult skills (very fortunately for all of us parents and teachers). Why did Ostrov take this opportunity to pass on some poorly-substantiated ideas about personality and mental health in childhood? Was he simply misquoted, or was a longer explanation omitted? I really don’t know, but I’d like to have an explanation from someone.
.
Whether the children were relatively fearful or fearless was ascertained by looking at their reactions to common events like separation from parents or the sound of a vacuum cleaner, or surprising objects like a jack-in-the-box. The operative word here is “relatively”-- it does not appear that Bar-On sought out children who were unusually fearful or fearless.( I ought to note that I have not seen the dissertation, and it looks as if everyone commenting has drawn their information from the University of Haifa press release which is on their web site; what we all say about it is very much subject to revision when we see the details.)
Pamela Paul, writing in the New York Times Sunday style section of all things, implied that the fearfulness-fearfulness dimension measured by Bar-On is equivalent to the aspect of temperament often called approach-withdrawal. Temperament is an aspect of personality that is thought to be “constitutional”, or biologically determined, and which stays basically the same from infancy through adulthood (although it naturally is expressed through different behaviors at different ages). There are half a dozen or more factors in temperament, but approach-withdrawal is a pretty obvious one, especially for children at the extremes. The approaching child tries new foods easily, goes up to the strange dog, behaves in a friendly way to strangers, and so on; the withdrawing child needs a long time to adapt to new things and avoids them as much as possible. It probably makes sense to think of approach and withdrawal as substantially related to fearlessness and fearfulness. Bar-On’s report that the fearless children were friendly also supports this view.
According to Bar-On’s study, the children who were evaluated as fearless were quite good at recognizing when other children had facial expressions of anger, surprise, happiness, or sadness, but they did not readily recognize an expression of fear. The fearful children did a better job at recognizing fear. The fearless children were also more likely to take advantage of other children, and less likely to be remorseful when they had done wrong. Bar-On reported that these differences were like constitutional differences in temperament-- they resulted from genetic variations, not from parenting effects.
However, it’s difficult to determine that normal behaviors in 3- and 4-year-olds are purely constitutional in nature. Much behavioral development is transactional in nature; whatever the basic characteristics of parent and child, they influence each other and each shapes the behavior of the other. As a relevant example, let’s look at how infants make use of fearful facial expressions shown by other people. From 8 or 9 months, babies are able to avoid a lot of trial-and-error involvement with potentially dangerous things. When they encounter a new or unusual person or thing, infants try “social referencing”-- they look at the face of a nearby familiar adult. If that person looks (or sounds) frightened, the baby backs off and avoids the strange event. If the adult looks happy, the baby gradually moves to explore. This is why well-cared-for babies don’t have nearly as many accidents as they might. The mother’s frightened face as the baby crawls toward the unguarded stairs or starts to reach for the candle flame warns most babies very effectively.
But what would happen if a particular baby were not very good at recognizing a fear-face? He or she would not back off in response to the parent’s fear. The caregiver would have to move to keep the baby safe, perhaps swooping down and grabbing the baby away from danger, or even smacking his hands in an effort to get the lesson across. The baby might then associate another person’s expression of fear with the baby’s experience of aggression. Rather than an empathic response to the other’s fear, the baby might be angered by seeing another person look fearful, and by preschool age this could be shown in instrumental aggression toward other kids and a sense that this is justified.
Of course, this is all complete speculation on my part-- I have no idea how this would really happen-- but when we put together the transactional aspect of development, the infant use of “social referencing”, and the vigorous efforts made by attentive caregivers to find ways to keep babies safe, the scenario I’ve given is not an impossible one. In addition, it’s a scenario that would be complete by the preschool period, and would not necessarily be detectable unless longitudinal research followed each child from infancy. These events would be a mechanism that combined the child’s constitutional characteristics with the effects of experience, and would suggest that it’s possible for the child to learn to behave differently. Interestingly, this possibility shows that acceptable, appropriate, even admirable parent behavior might have an effect on some children that would increase undesirable child behaviors like aggressiveness. In this, there is a resemblance to the work of Graziela Kochanska on more fearful children, showing that very ordinary levels of punishment may be so overwhelming for some children that little learning about behavior is produced.
In Pamela Paul’s Times piece, she quotes the comments of the SUNY at Buffalo developmental psychologist Jamie Ostrov on the Bar-On report (www.nytimes.com.2010/11/21/fashion/21Studied.html). I must say that these comments were the first thing to catch my eye in Paul’s column, and they raised my eyebrows instantly. Ostrov was quoted as saying that the fearless children “may be charming, but they’re also highly manipulative and skilled at getting their way-- even at age 3 or 4”. I must question what Ostrov was talking about, and the extent to which this view (so characteristic of some unconventional child psychotherapies with which I would not expect Ostrov to be involved ) is actually supported by empirical work. None of Bar-On’s material which is available to me says the fearless children were charming, although it does say they were friendly; the idea of “psychopathic charm” is one which has been pushed hard by “attachment therapists”. Ostrov’s statement that fearless preschoolers are highly manipulative and skilled at getting their way (also a tenet of “attachment therapy”) is at odds with what is known about the development of Theory of Mind, a set of abilities by which we understand what other people know, think, and want. Three-year-olds may want very much to manipulate people, but they do a poor job because they do not understand how deception works. Four-year-olds are much better and can sometimes tell a convincing lie, but they have nothing like adult skills (very fortunately for all of us parents and teachers). Why did Ostrov take this opportunity to pass on some poorly-substantiated ideas about personality and mental health in childhood? Was he simply misquoted, or was a longer explanation omitted? I really don’t know, but I’d like to have an explanation from someone.
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