Reading NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (Thanks Jacquie!) and as usual I am dragging my own particular interest du jour with me through each essay. (Well then, today’s blue plate interest.) As curious as it all is, sometime of the essays seem a bit cursory (though thanks fellas for the fat list of references at the end of the book) and some are stronger than others; and I notice the authors don’t always make connections between them.

For example, the essay on lying doesn’t quite work—I don’t buy for a second that the particularly sophisticated manifestation of empathy designed to avoid causing harm to another person (kindness), and here described as a “white lie,” is a gateway drug to sociopathic, entitled, cocaine, Jayson Blair kinda lies. (Huh. Did you know he is a life coach now? Well, well.) To equate that kind of empathy with deceptions that deliberately harm others, or even lies to avoid punishment is simplistic.⁰¹ Everywhere else the authors emphasize that children are extraordinarily sensitive to nuance. And I bet they’re right. I bet children are capable of discerning the difference and making a judgment. (Assuming they have the ability to think morally. See? I can make everything circle back to blue plate intrinsic motivation with a large helping of salted morality and hopefully gravy.⁰² Anyhow, I was with them through when they pointed out that children learn to lie by watching us. Skip ahead though to the essay, Plays Well With Others, the short part about whuppin, and I have to say you can’t have it both ways. Either seeing us lie and witnessing or experiencing the violence of corporal punishment sets an example for one’s children or it doesn’t. I don’t buy that lying’s bad but spanking’s fine if the kid’s used to it. I know I’m not a statistically significant cohort, but there’s no way the sheer rage and blind hatred I felt as a daily spankee is good for any child anywhere, African American, Conservative Protestant regularly James Dobsonized, or anything else. The mere frequency did not render it part of a cheery familial wallpaper. Why did the authors accept this astonishing pronouncement so meekly? All I can imagine is that this is an instance of misplaced liberal niceness and a bit of exoticizing of these particular “foreign” American cultures. (Ha! You know I’d be complaining that they missed the point if they’d criticized said Conservative Protestant James Dobson culture.) It’s tricky to be both respectful and critical while still aware of your own ignorance, but they actually opened the can of worms with their excellent essay on how white parents don’t talk about race. Besides my more personal objections borne of a heavily spanked childhood, the larger logic just doesn’t hold up, especially when you consider spanking as part of a focus on punishment as an effort to teach submission and the rightness of working by an external set of motivations. Unless, of course, the parent is actively trying to create unquestioning dependence and squish an instinct to critique. (Raising a soldier or a prophet?)

I can’t stop thinking about the idea of intrinsic motivation and how it’s not so far from whatever it means to be moral or to possess ones own morality. The Tools of the Mind method was really exciting to me. I read a bit about this maybe in the Times and heard something on the radio, but I didn’t quite put it all together with this other thing I was chewing on until I read about it here. The idea is that a way of playing and teaching can allow (not prevent?) children to develop an intrinsic motivation—a powerful patience that allows a person to continue to hold a specific goal in mind under a variety of circumstances. It’s a matter of concentration and conviction. It allows people to work toward a goal in the face of failure, lack of positive reinforcement or external direction, and to put aside the nagging internal dialogue to concentrate on the matter at hand for a long time. I can’t imagine how valuable it is to have this plugged securely into place as a kid. It’s when I start thinking about what the opposite of this looks like that I realize that to lack that thing inside is really something monstrous. An adult who daily and energetically trains to live in unquestioning obedience is essentially amoral. The doctrine of submission becomes a chilling in a new way. If you constantly work at utter dependence on your authority figures (e.g. husband, pastor, Heavenly Father) you are striving to be utterly vacant inside. Utterly amoral. This is a dizzyingly awful thought as it morphs this image from some blurry soldier in a far away war crimes trial to a crisp portrait of people I know, going about their ordinary business, and all I can do is hope that the one of these dread scenarios never overtakes them…

Hmm, what else? The essay on language acquisition in babies was thrilling to me, especially since that stage is so recent for my own kid. (I was thrown back and forth between the parent and the child roles as I read this book. I still feel something like a cranky teen, but I bet I won’t by the time Aure arrives there.) It clarified for me how Aure’s precocious speech was so much a circular matter of him responding to my most obvious characteristic and me responding to and reinforcing the overtures from him that were most easily recognizable to me, and on and on. I think this is why his early use of language feels more personal than prodigy, more like a quirk of our family. I can’t imagine early speech is particularly valuable in itself except to charm the pants off speech obsessed parents. (Me—I like being speeched at!) Which is actually pretty damn adaptive, come to think of it.

You know, I got to the end of the meandering screed and I realized it’s unreadable as is, and must go back and make paragraphs. But where? The paragraph breaks above are pretty haphazard. Did they offend thee? Pluck them out!