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====== Nature and Nurture — How activists could teach parents to better succeed in parenting ======

Some well known psychologist or psychiatrist once observed that before sometime around 1950 nobody had any scientific knowledge on what was helpful and what was harmful from among the various strategies for childrearing.

There are at least four main ways that parents have learned to achieve the familial and social goal of getting some control over their children.

All groups that I know of will resort to corporal punishment. The Japanese view doing so as highly immoral. Americans were long led to believe that "spare the rod and spoil the child" was a monition taken from the //Bible//. Chinese parents I have known have beaten their children severely while shouting, "You dare cry! You dare cry!" and have later explained to me that being beaten as a child makes the individual stronger later in life. I have been unable to learn much about child beating under Islam, but extreme corporal punishment for crimes is the rule for groups such as the Taliban.

The preferred method of control for the Japanese is to inculcate shame. Ruth Benedict's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysanthemum_and_the_Sword]] gives the extreme example of parents who will turn their young child out of the house and let him or her take over-night refuge in whatever outhouse or other shelter can be found nearby, after which time the child is permitted to beg his or her way back into the home. I confirmed existence of this practice in more recent years.

The preferred method of control for those of European extraction is to inculcate guilt. You don't even have to do anything to be guilty by some Christian standards because of original sin. But American kids can grow up with threats that the police will arrest them for all sorts of parentally concocted crimes

Activists operating in someplace like Afghanistan do not need to know about these other alien forms of child control. They will already be familiar with local methodologies of coercive control.

The ways of coercive child control that look like they must surely succeed can indeed force superficial changes in a child's behavior, but in the long run they turn out to be counterproductive. When people who know what really motivates misbehavior and who can give parents a dependable way to achieving parental success and peace in the family, that success will be rewarding to the parents. It will also be one small step in changing a culture of strongly coercive control.

When I taught in a so-called ghetto junior high school,I once had a boy about fifteen years old who was continually disrupting my attempts to teach. I complained to a psychologist friend of mine, who was not sympathetic. He told me the problem was my own fault. How so? The child had a dependency need, as does every child, for attention. Infants left in cribs without being given any attention will die as a result. Older children survive but make countless attempts to get their need for attention satisfied. The child in my class was not having his dependency need for attention satisfied. He threw a spit ball or did something else of that sort, and I paid attention to him in the process of scolding him. He got his dependency need met. He probably would have continued to manipulate me for attention even if I had spanked him. My friend told me to pay attention to him when he wasn't doing anything bad. The problem was completely gone in two weeks.

I think any parent would feel as gratified as I had felt if they were enabled to control a similar problem.

That is just one example.

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