So it is written, so it shall be done.

 

Can you read this?  Even if you can't, do you know--more or less--what it says?  Do you know what it is that the guy in the picture is holding? Have you ever wondered why an omnipotent god needed to write them down like 10 crib notes for a marginally dishonest weak student on the sweaty palms of his disobedient chosen people?

The item pictured is the Declaration of Independence, which formed the United States in 1776. The history of the United States as a country certainly begins with independence from its colonial power. I don’t think most people would argue that independence is important for a sovereign state. Philadelphia is about 3500 miles (5700 km) from London. Surely most people in the colonies (at least those affected by this document) could go about their business without interference from London and frequently did. So why did they need to write it down?  I suspect that there was already some independence.  The real power of the document is in the word Declaration.

Even today, most governments don’t appreciate it when their citizens decide they no longer want to cooperate with the existing management structure. There would be consequences. So why would they sign their names? Even in the pre-internet era, avatars were often used. Voltaire, for example. Lewis Carroll was another. As it turns out, there were indeed serious consequences. Several of the signers of the declaration were sought by the British, treated harshly, then killed or otherwise punished. So why didn’t Benjamin Franklin use a name like Silence Dogood, Anthony Afterwit, or Richard Saunders (the poor Richard of Poor Richard’s Almanack)?

The document says that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident....’ If they are truths, why did they need to write them down? If they are self-evident, why waste the effort writing down the obvious?
A group of well-educated wealthy guys getting together at the pub and agreeing that ‘there ought to be a law’ is not the same as writing it down. And then signing it.


This is a picture of one of the most precious things I own. A girl named Tara spent at least 20 minutes meticulously writing it for me. I asked her what it meant, and she said, ‘I love you.’ (I loved her, too.)

Tara, the Continental Congress...it must be obvious where I’m going with this, right?

Why did Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and Button Gwinnett for that matter feel that they had to make a written list of self-evident truths? Maybe because they weren’t so clearly evident to everybody. Maybe to eliminate ambiguity about what exactly those truths were. Maybe to make it really clear how they look at things and what they perceive as self-evident. Maybe because they already knew that not everyone agreed with the truths and evident-ness of the list they made.

How do you teach manners? Do you explain why some things are regarded as impolite at the dinner table or do you say, ‘Don’t put your elbows on the table!’ One is education, the other is a command. What do you want your children to be, automata following your whims and instructions or polite young people? Do you want to be proud of them for their manners or for the unhesitant way they follow your orders? Think hard about the answer. Either way, they won’t put their elbows on the table. Either way, you will beam with accomplishment when company is over and they all say what polite children you have and what a wonderful job you did raising them.

It’s reasonably easy to raise the obedient child. There’s lots of punishment involved, lots of arbitrary instructions that reinforce your dominance both physically and emotionally. Feel free to find a website that helps with this.

Most of my readers and pretty much all of my patients don’t identify with this kind of parenting. The difference between this drill-sergeant parent and an empathic parent sometimes, simply enough, is writing it down.

Even Tara, a sweet foster child with several kinds of developmental delays and just 3 years old, understood how much it meant to write it down. She understood that long after that visit was over, that day was over, I could have this paper and touch it and hear her voice and remember her. It couldn’t be changed. King George III, whatever his issues, was experienced at politics. He had plenty of opponents, foreign and domestic. But once it was on paper, there was no going back. He had to understand that the undersigned did indeed risk their property, their fortunes, and their lives.

What are you willing to write down? What are you willing to punish your child for? Let me put it another way. Are you willing to punish your child for something you aren’t willing to write down? Is it ever OK to put elbows on a table? Or is it just when the Bishop is over for dinner?

This post is yet another comment on discipline, and I don’t want to make it difficult to apply. Here’s one rule that's pretty easy for me: No Hitting. This is an easy one, because it’s unambiguous, applies pretty much all the time and everywhere and with everyone, and is a specific action that the child can correct or control. Thus, it does not violate Dr. Wolffe’s Rule #16, the Action Rule.  Write the rule down on your list of house rules. If your child hits somebody, there should be a warning and if it continues, a consequence. It’s not negotiable, ever. It’s a rule.

This is just how concrete thinkers understand rules, and we should take advantage of it. We squander this opportunity by saying to the hitting child again and again, ‘Stop doing that, please’ or ‘if you keep hitting there will be no TV on Sunday.’ When the unmentioned consequence comes, the child doesn’t remember the infraction, so nothing is learned except how arbitrarily mean the parent can be. You perceive this feeling, and since you don’t want your kid to think of you that way, you let the child negotiate down to a promise they won’t do it again. But this, too, is inconsistent with concrete thinking and isn’t worth the paper it’s not written on.

Ideally, you and your child should sit down with all household members and come up with a reasonably short list of rules. 30 is way too many, and 3 is not enough (because they probably aren’t specific enough). Rules like ‘Be Good’ or ‘Don’t have a Bad Attitude at the Dinner Table’ are foolish and violate Dr. Wolffe’s Rule #15, the Definition Rule. Keep it simple and enjoy the results. No Hitting. No Biting. No Swiping other people’s stuff. And then—this is the tricky part—write them down. Make a copy. Keep the copy, tape the other copy to a wall where everyone can see it.


Dr. Wolffe’s Rule #17:  The Writing Rule.  Write it down.  Children are not surprised by consequences for violating written rules.  Even if they can’t read, the writing process helps them to know what’s expected.  The fact that it’s posted on the wall tells them that you will stick to these rules, too.  And they apply equally to all the siblings, and are not enforced as you see fit.

And remember Dr. Wolffe’s Rule #2, which violates everything said above. Be Kind.

Bad Attitude

 

I don’t remember the first time I was told I had a bad attitude. I asked around, and it turns out that everyone I asked had been told at some point in their lives that they, too, had a bad attitude. This suggests an epidemiological question. Is a bad attitude like a common childhood disease, which everybody has had at some point in their lives, or is this a case of ‘selection bias’ in which I happen to choose to be surrounded by those who either have or have had a bad attitude? I guess if there were some sort of test for it, perhaps there might be an answer to that question. I don’t think I was ever fired from a job for having a bad attitude, but certainly being told this in a declarative way, as if it were a clinical observation made with the wisdom of specialized training and experience, didn’t help me feel closer to my manager or employer. Now self-employed (I guess that answers the question if I ended up staying in that job those jobs.) 

What is a bad attitude? I suspect it is often an expression used as a surrogate for questioning the authority of somebody who thinks that they have authority over you. Does it mean that you are subversive, fomenting revolution? Does it mean that you simply don’t follow directions? I think I have an idea.

Many of the children that I see note that they have been disciplined, kicked out of school, put into detention, or brought to me with the intention of a parent that they be medicated in some way, because of their bad attitude.

I searched Yahoo for “bad attitude.” It returned 7,360,000 results. I liked that it came up with dozens and dozens of t-shirts. Some said simply, ‘bad attitude.’ Apparently, this self-identification is meant for those who would like others to use this trait as a means of identifying them. As in my epidemiological problem stated above, it’s unclear if they mean for others to simply stay away or if they would like to help like-minded folks seek them out. One said that ‘A bad attitude was a terrible thing to waste.’ This implies that it is valuable. ‘A little bad attitude makes for a lot of great hockey.’ Not much of a sports fan, I found this deeply insightful. There were also a lot of posters and coffee mugs. I can’t help but draw some inferences by the preponderance of cats pictured on so many product offerings with a ‘bad attitude’ caption. I have always associated indifference with cats, but essentially they are, after all, predators.

In April of 2009, I published an essay about a disease called pinkeye. I have a 2000-page pediatric textbook in which the index at the back is several hundred pages long. Pinkeye does not appear in the index or in the book. Though accepted as common knowledge, pinkeye is not a disease as understood by medical science. It is a symptom, literally a pink eye, which has attached to it whatever definition a school official feels certain about. It isn’t treatable by me without the crucial diagnostic information to establish a medical cause of this single symptom.

It is a deep truth that no one in the history of attitude ever believes that their own attitude is bad and somehow in need of adjustment. The person making the claim that someone has a bad attitude is assigning a label. Do you like being labeled? We all like the good ones, but the bad ones don’t come off. So permanent are these labels that people remember them their whole lives. I bet you can think of adults you know who have said that they were told they had a great talent...when they were 6.

On my very first day of residency, I was scheduled to attend a welcome meeting in the Pediatric Conference Room. No room number was given, just the time. I was nervous and arrived an hour early. I asked the person at the entrance desk to the hospital where this conference room was. I sat in the empty room and waited. No one ever showed up, so I eventually called the residency office and they told me it was in the other building, where there was a different room with the same name. I ran over there, and arrived sweating and breathless. Without missing a beat, the leader of this meeting said, “You’re expected to show up on time. Lateness is irresponsible and won’t be tolerated.” Luckily, I had the real-life experience to keep my mouth shut and just sit down. (Did he have a bad attitude? Oh my yes. There’s something about doctors with Porsches that says so much.)

What I’m getting at is the label that we can’t wash off. How many hundreds of times can I be early before he decides that I don’t have a problem with lateness? In 3 years I was late to that one meeting. Three years of being early to everything was not enough.

How many times can a bullied child do anything to remove the names that he has been called? Several times a year I have to recommend to a parent to take their child out of school and send the child elsewhere. It’s the only way to wash that child of the names that hurt them so deeply. What happens when the names are assigned by a teacher? That doesn’t go away by switching classes. Sometimes not even switching schools. I have had children go to private school, boarding school, or home school because a single teacher at a single school decided that the child had a bad attitude. They told the other teachers, they told the principal.
If you hear that your child has a bad attitude, the person saying it is a bully. If you are saying it, say it really slowly. Your child with not ever forget any syllable of that label. Go ahead, seal the deal. Call them lazy, ugly, ditzy.

How about stupid?

You didn’t see that dark turn coming? Rather than looking back in amusement, think hard about how you felt when you were told you had a bad attitude. Angry. Maybe defiant, distrustful, vengeful. Or maybe you were depressed, hopeless. Labeling somebody is mean work. When it is done to a child, it is bullying.

When a parent does it to a child, there is no more self-fulfilling an act. The child feels bad that you don’t like something about them. They don’t know what, exactly, because you haven’t told them. You don’t like something they can’t change. How would you—how did you—react? You would be angry, defiant, vengeful, depressed and hopeless. Would this statement of definition about who your parent thought you were make you somehow change for the better? Would you suddenly become optimistic, cooperative, trying twice as hard?

I do indeed see children who are oppositional, defiant, antisocial, and constant conduct problems. They don’t have bad attitudes. They do bad things.

There are 2 distinct lessons here, and these will come up again and again as I discuss discipline in detail.
First, being disciplined for being the way you are is just the same as discrimination. If your child is disorganized and forgetful, for example, no amount of any kind of discipline is going to help. I wrote a series about Claire, who was always called ‘ditzy’ or ‘spacey.’ She believed it about herself. Once her anxiety was diagnosed and treated, she wasn’t that way anymore. Only time will tell if she will overcome the label. Negative labels of any kind are mean. Don’t use them ever, or the throw-away line you said once that your child perceives as your true feelings will crush you when they move—or run—away.

Dr. Wolffe’s Rule 15: The Action Rule. Only discipline a child for actions they are able to correct. Would you discipline your child for having trouble reading or speaking? What if they couldn’t walk? You will lose them just as surely if you discipline them for not liking olives or Aunt Harriet’s meatloaf.

Second, disciplining a child for something you cannot specifically define is abuse. The child perceives it as abuse. Let me be more specific. Picture a parent, just home from an unpleasant day. Tired, angry at the boss who said they had a bad attitude, that parent says something mean to the innocent child at home, maybe to the spouse, too. (Substitute ‘does something’ for ‘says something’ if you need to.) The expression of negative feelings in ways that hurt others is simply abusive. The abused see this as arbitrary and unpredictable. As a result, there’s no good way to protect against it. That leads to very bad and long-lasting feelings.

Dr. Wolffe’s Rule 16: The Definition Rule. Never discipline a child for something you cannot define explicitly. Never for an attitude, a way of walking, a tone of voice. Never for being angry with you. If you want your kid to control her emotions, show her how you control yours.

I saw one of those nanny shows on TV in which the parents were encouraged to give a child a ‘time-out’ because of a bad attitude. I nearly threw up. How can the child fix that? How can the child know what they did wrong? The kid will remember the punishment, but how can he wash the label off?

Here’s what actually happened on video: the parent asked the child to help, the child said, ‘No!’, then the parent asked again, nicely, and the child said something along the lines of ‘I’m not going to and you can’t make me!’ The child received a warning, ‘Because you have a bad attitude.’ Then, time-out. I don’t have a problem with the consequence, and I don’t think that was an appropriate way for a kindergartener to speak to his mom. But the consequence must be attached unambiguously with a specific correctable action in order for the child to learn from it. In this case, all the child learned was that punishment comes when mom is angry. That’s pretty darn close to abuse.

Remember Dr. Wolffe’s Rule #2: Be Kind.