In the Neolithic Village environment protecting children is tough to do. The world is a mysterious, dangerous place, and there are harsh limits on how much time, attention, and resources adults can spend on watching and intervening in children's lives. In the Neolithic Village environment a strong instinct to protect children is needed for their survival.
Fast forward to modern times and the balance has shifted dramatically. Prosperous people with a lot of accessible technology have a lot more time, resources, and attention available to protect young ones. And the world is a much safer place. This means that instinctive thinking is not going to provide the right balance - parents in the 21st century need to moderate their instinctive thinking by applying lots of analytic thinking as well.
This 26 Jul 14 Economist article, “Choose Your Parents Wisely”, goes into great detail about how much heart-thinking controls child raising these days. From the article, “Shana, a bright and chirpy 12-year-old, goes to ballet classes four nights a week, plus Hebrew school on Wednesday night and Sunday morning. Her mother Susan, a high-flying civil servant, played her Baby Einstein videos as an infant, read to her constantly, sent her to excellent schools and was scrupulous about hand-washing. Susan is, in short, a very conscientious mother. But she worries that she is not. She says she thinks about parenting “all the time”. But, asked how many hours she spends with Shana, she says: “Probably not enough”. Then she looks tearful, and describes the guilt she feels whenever she is not nurturing her daughter.”
This chapter is about some of those places where the balance is not good, places where we are using too much instinctive thinking. As a result, we are goat sacrificing: overprotecting our children which is wasteful in many ways. Explaining the waste is the topic of this chapter.
Here are some anachronistic instincts that are still quite powerful in parent thinking in the 2010's child raising environment. These instincts, if not balanced with analytical thinking, produce poor results and great expense. I will list the instincts here, then talk about the bad consequences in the following sections.
Assisted childbirth and child raising are distinctively human traits. These go back to the beginning of the species. And for most of human existence having child number one was a teenage experience for a female - a first time mother was not a mature adult.
One consequence of this is that community members readily give advice to young mothers, and the young mothers accept it (in rebellious teenage ways). Fast forward to civilized times and this instinctive thinking shows up as numerous government rules and regulations that communities support, imposing on parents how a child should be raised. It also shows up in the tons of “good advice” offered through many media channels. All well and good... if it's carefully thought out... which it usually is not. The popular advice is from-the-heart-advice, not cool-headed- analytic-advice. The instinct is to be protective, more and more protective, and the recommendations with teeth for protecting children have greatly increased over the past twenty years. How a child can sit in an automobile is one example. How they can play on a playground is another.
Above everything else, a child is a learning machine. Every day a child learns and grows. One of the important lessons is limits - what can a child do and not do? This kind of learning goes on continually and learning limits is just as vital as learning socializing, arithmetic, violin playing, and all the other skills parents, adults, and peers think are important. Like all other learning, the results of the actions taken change as the child grows and matures, so there is nothing fixed about the limits learned yesterday. They must be checked again and again. A child swings at a baseball and misses. He or she swings again, and misses again. But at some point they hit! Then they miss again. <sigh> They are learning their limits. But as they keep trying, and learning, they learn that the results of their actions can change. They get better. Their limits are changing. The important part is the change. They are learning limits, and they are learning that the limits can change.
Learning limits is something that must be done first hand. And it's the kind of lesson that is learned in part by repetition - try, try again. It is also learned by trying things that surprise and sometimes may even hurt. For example, interrupt a dog while it is eating its dinner and suddenly discover what a dog’s sharp teeth feel like. Then perhaps later learn how to interrupt the dog slowly and avoid the bite.
Learning limits is what makes children different from delicate snowflakes. Children are tough, they are durable, and they are magnificently repairable. If this way of learning is not recognized, not encouraged, this is goat sacrificing.
Children learn and children must be taught. But because the civilized environment is so different from the Neolithic Village environment, instinctive lessons, from-the-heart lessons, are not going to work well without being balanced by analytical thinking.
Teaching and learning is something that humans must spend a lot of time and cleverness working through - grandma's teaching style is not going to work well in today's smart phone environment. But treating kids like precious snowflakes isn't going to work out well either.
Teaching children takes a lot of careful thought. The next three sections are about aspects of child raising that require careful thought.