Things we don’t say to our child

Yesterday I realized that there are many typical parenting phrases that we don’t use with our child, and we started listing down the ones we remembered — there’s probably more and I’ll update this article as and when we remember them.

Two of the items, #2 (rejecting obedience/coercion) and #10 (rejecting rewards/punishments as a means of coercion), were especially significant choices because they not only birthed Parenting with Metta (Facebook / Instagram) and influenced our parenting philosophy as well as all the other items in the list, it also laid the foundation of what we’re doing with Schools 4.0 Lanka (links) — honouring children’s agency and consent by removing coercion and rejecting the tricks employed by conventional schooling to achieve compliance.

1. Don’t cry

I remember saying this once, reflexively — but once I thought about it I realised that while we would like the crying to stop, what we really want is for the pain to end. And saying “Don’t Cry” doesn’t help that — it just teaches a child that you are uncomfortable with their crying and they will learn to suppress it or hide it from you. It’s better to just be there with them (and go easy on the “it’s going to be all right”) — our mantra was “I love you and I am here to help you”. Sometimes that help is to leave them alone for a bit and that’s totally fine — they’ll come to you when they are ready, and you can check back after a while

2. Because I say so

We consciously decided we don’t want an ‘obedient’ child — obedience means to do what the authority says, without making use of your faculties for reason. An example of this is traffic lights — we don’t just explain that we should obey the traffic light — the junction is shared by vehicles from multiple roads, and unless they have a way to share it, we will have accidents, and traffic lights (or at other times, traffic cops) help us regulate the sharing. On the other hand, there are many patently unjust rules in society — some enforced by formal legislation and some by tradition. They need to be tackled and reformed rather than just accepted — so change-makers will be disobedient. And can we be confident that we have not, and never will, unconsciously impose unfair rules? We can’t — we’ve used most of the items in this list ourselves, and we’re sure there are more things that we’ll add to the list as time goes on. But at least we can limit the harm caused by them if we listen to his objections rather than bulldoze our way through.

BTW “Why won’t you listen?” is often an euphemism for “Why won’t you obey”

3. That’s for boys / girls

Our society’s toys are gendered according to what roles we expect each sex to play as adults. That hurts both women and men. Why shouldn’t boys grow up to be caring and affectionate men? Isn’t that what people are afraid of when they don’t want boys to play with dolls? Our son has ‘girly’ clothes (including dresses), and is sometimes inspired to use nail polish and lip stick. We haven’t forced any of those on him — just that when he’s requested them (inspired by what he sees happening around him) we don’t let gender-norms influence our acquiescence.

4. Give a kiss

I remember feeling intensely uncomfortable when I was kissed by (mostly female) relatives when I was young. If we, as parents, don’t respect a child’s wishes about their body, how will they learn that those wishes are worthy of respect from everyone?

This anecdote wasn’t about kissing, but still illustrates the problem of consent.

5. Be a good boy/girl

The dualistic division of the world into good and evil is quite problematic (see my writing on The Mercury Rule for a philosophical exploration), but more generally it’s the distinction between applying adjectives to actions (“that was a kind thing to do”) vs to people (“you are a kind child”) — especially when it’s negative (“that was a mean thing to do” vs “you are mean”). This is actually quite challenging because many children’s stories (e.g. Snow White, Red Riding Hood) are framed in dualistic terms — we postponed some of those stories until we were better able to have conversations about why this black or white framing is simplistic and unrealistic (we sometimes are able to have the ‘Evil Queen’ in Snow White repent and reinvent herself (a la angulimala), but at other times our son insists that she remains evil — without a villain to defeat, what role is there for a hero?)

Moreover, often “good boy” is an euphemism for “obedient boy”.

6. Say “Sorry”

Too many adults make insincere apologies. I can’t help but think this is a manifestation of how they were forced to “say ‘sorry’” in a way that robs the phrase of it’s intent — what we really need to inculcate is the habit of caring about people. If someone is hurt, we should do what we can to alleviate the pain. There’s a greater response-ability to do so if the hurt arose from something we did, but remember that we can (and often do) say “I’m Sorry [to hear that]” and look for ways to help in response to calamities that have nothing to do with us.

And there’s no harm in stepping in to support someone who can’t yet able to respond that way — like children often are.

We also don’t push the ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ — if there’s something we think should be appreciated, we ask our son if he’d like to say ‘thank you’. If he doesn’t want to, we give thanks. Contrary to what some people might expect, this doesn’t make him dependent on us to always say ‘thank you’ on his behalf… when he’s moved to give genuine thanks, he gives it. And if he’s not moved, it’s OK — sometimes children are so excited that they just don’t have mindspace to give thanks (and that can happen to adults as well), and sometimes they want to play a power-game to see how we will respond.

7. It’s your mess, you are responsible to clean it / Look after your things

But what about the times when it wasn’t their responsibility? Because it was due to our mistake? Wouldn’t we like for them to take response-ability to clean it up? The attitude we cultivate is that all property in the house belongs to us as a family. We all have a joint response-ability to care for it.
And that is the attitude we role model when we clean up after our son makes a mess— and role-modelling is the best way to teach a child anything.

8. Sharing is Caring

We wouldn’t expect an adult guest to be allowed access to our mobile phones without our permission. We wouldn’t look kindly on anyone reminding us that “sharing is caring”. Any toys or treats given to a child belong to that child — in the sense that we’ve given them custodial rights over it (although we retain some overriding rights… and would intervene e.g. if the toy is going to be broken or the ice cream is melting all over the floor). We do ask our son “would you like to play with X with your Y toy?”, because guidance on socially appropriate behaviour is necessary (like this incident when he wanted to take his new scooter to preschool); if we are inviting guests we ask our son what toys he would like to make available as a host (just like other children host him with some of their toys).

9. You’ve outgrown this (and therefore we can do with it as we please)

Just because a child has outgrown a toy or a garment, it does not revoke the custodial rights we’ve given the child (see above). If adults can keep things for sentimental value, why can’t children? Of course, many items do just pile up and even if they all have sentimental value maybe we just don’t have the space to keep them all. Or maybe we need the money we can get from selling it. Or maybe we want to help someone who is in need.

But in all of those cases, we should involve the child in those decisions — “would you like to give this toy to that child and help make them happy?”.

When it comes to ‘charity’, there’s another caveat here. Giving away something we no longer need is a dubious way of role-modelling charity — a little experiment to explore this is to compare how you feel with actually selling the item for its fair market value and donating the proceeds.

10. I’ll give you This if you do That (or not allow This if you don’t do that)

Neither my wife nor I were physically punished as kids — so things like spanking, slapping, rubbing chilli on the mouth etc were never even on our radar. But, already during pregnancy, we were of the view that any kind of punishment — any act committed with the intention of causing pain even if it was supposedly for a higher purpose — just didn’t make sense if we loved our child. Yes, there are behaviours we wish to discourage, but using punishments to discourage them is more likely to just push children to concealing them. It’s interesting that a common Sinhalese warning is “අහුවෙන්න එපා” (literally, “don’t get caught”), so we’re actually telling children that what they should avoid isn’t the act (and the harm it causes), but getting caught in the act!

So we embarked on an experiment to parent without any punishments or rewards. We didn’t want rewards because they are just the other side of the punishment coin. Saying you can play with the iPad if you clean your room is the same as saying you don’t get the iPad if you don’t clean the room. We sometimes find ourselves slipping into habits ingrained from our childhood and find ourselves issuing ultimatums, but eventually we apologise (sincerely) for it. Often, when one of us loses control and issues the ultimatum, the other notices and is able to intervene quickly.

We also don’t invoke bogeymen (ගෝනිබිල්ල) — that’s a form of psychological abuse, just as time-outs are.

We also used to say that “මිනිස්සු හූ කියයි” (“people will jeer at you”) to coerce him into wearing clothes but we realized that’s also based on fear and shame (although there’s nothing inherently shameful in nudity). So instead we talk about how wearing clothes is a way of respecting others.

I don’t know if we would’ve been tempted to invoke the protecting-your-body-from-sexual-predators argument if we’d had a daughter, but what we’d like our son (actually everyone) to learn is that if anyone (this is mainly a problem for women, but the point is applicable universally) dresses in a way that exposes some part of their body, all they are consenting to is for that part of their body to be seen, and even then only by the audience they intended.

11. Use your words

When a child is having a tantrum (we actually prefer the word overwhelmed because a child doesn’t choose to have a tantrum… although they can learn to act like it, but that’s different) their brains are not able to form words. The part of the brain responsible for it isn’t in control. We need to support them (“1. I love you, 2. I’m here to help you” worked for this too) to come out of the meltdown — which means for the higher order brain regions to re-assert control over the limbic system.

12. Finish the food on your plate

That would be teaching them to obey the plate rather than listen to their stomach. It’s worrying because our son is under-weight (about 2 standard deviations below the median), but what we’ve also realised is that a stressful mealtime doesn’t promote a healthy appetite — our son eats much better when he feels connected to us during meal times, and he feels connected when he doesn’t feel we are coercing him.
It’s also a bad idea to force a child to eat something they don’t like — e.g. because they don’t like the flavour, texture, etc. Just keep offering it from time to time and when they are ready they will eat it. And sometimes a child refuse to eat something as a power-game, so the more we push, the stronger they push back.

13. Don’t ask unnecessary questions

This is a literal translation from the Sinhalese “අනවෂ්‍ය ප්‍රශ්ණ අහන්න එපා”. In English we might say “curiosity killed the cat” — but fortunately, children are not cats. Curiosity is the driver of learning, and rather that discourage it, we encourage it — especially questions that make us think before answering (about what we believe and why we believe it, not just because we’re trying to figure out the vocabulary or find a suitable analogy).

14. That’s not a toy

To a child, everything is a toy. That’s why they are sometimes more excited about the box the toy came in rather than the toy itself. And why they will re-purpose household items as toys if that aspect of their imagination is denied opportunities to blossom by inundating them with toys.

The partitioning of the items in their world as ‘Toys’ and ‘Not Toys’ is a purely adult construction that is unfortunately enforced upon children (that’s why the “that’s not a toy” admonishment needs to be repeated so often — it’s a lesson that is completely antithetical to how a child plays)

“That’s not a toy” is often employed in situations where we are afraid that object will be damaged. It would be reasonable to communicate that: i.e. when you do This with That object, it is not safe (or at least, not safe yet). And actually there are ways that even items intended to be toys can be used in unsafe ways, so the safety imperative need not depend on the toy:not-toy dichotomy.

So, why do adults differentiate between toys and not-toys? It’s because there is an intended purpose: this is a frying pan for real cooking (and not anything else), this is a plastic frying-pan toy for pretend cooking (and not anything else). But, as adults, re-purposing something — using it for something it was not designed nor intended for — is a joyful experience: there are many examples for that, but this particular one serendipitously appeared on my timeline as I was drafting this. I’m sure that children, with their as-yet unconstrained imaginations, are more likely to experience such joy… as long as we don’t, well, constrain them by telling them what is and isn’t a toy.

You may also be interested in my other writing on Education, Politics/Power, Ethics/Philosophy/Humanism, Parenting and “Lost in Translation”