If we decide to punish a child using CBT instructions based on animal training, we soon find that the road ahead is a bumpy one, since the leap from animals to humans is massive. For animals, once domesticated, are inclined to obey their master. For example, a dog or cat can be trained to resist their most pressing instinctual needs and desires, such as NOT to make noise, NOT to eat from their master’s table and wait patiently for toileting. Yet when a parent tells their child: “I said no more cookies!”, if the cookie jar is still close at hand, a warning, slap on the wrist or other punishment, no matter how consistently or persistently applied, often does NOT deter the unwanted behavior. Or if we say “I told you NOT to hit your brother”, we still cannot expect that to be the end of it. In the case of a human who opposes or is UNWILLING to learn our lesson, we only butt up against the person’s WILL, frustrating ourselves. A child’s next tendency is to resort to their Intellectual modality to somehow find a way around our commands and satisfy their own WILL. It means we can expect that they will simply divert their energy into finding more devious, perhaps more clandestine or clever, means of attaining their objective! So the conclusion must be that it is a mistake to expect human learning to occur on a prescribed schedule of our choice, regardless of how we adjust the time interval between the behavior and the punishment, which is the key to animal training.
Navigating between their limited understanding of our social demands and their indestructible WILL then, our misbehaving child must either obey our command NOT to invade the cookie jar or else suffer our punishment. Yet in practice we find that a child or adolescent, especially an immature one, often still follows their own WILL and Emotion-driven instincts by circumventing our instructions and trying to find ways to achieve their goal anyways!
DOLIF now alerts us that since children are acutely tuned in to the Emotional channel, they are constantly reading and responding to OUR Emotions as well as their own! Therefore, when we react to them with our surging ANGER, they receive and perceive OUR ANGER! But while they tune in to our fury, they do NOT tune in to our logical message. They readily sense how much their behavior infuriates us, but due to their state of mind, it makes no sense at all to them – rendering our words moot! When we tell them to stop yelling or running ahead, or threaten them with punishment, they do NOT respond, as we might believe and hope, to our threats, nor proceed on the basis of our behavior-leads-to-consequences paradigm, all remedies that are reality-based and Intellectually sourced. Instead, immersed in their Emotional world, they intuitively respond to our seething ANGER! So it is that when we concoct a plan to punish them they conclude, not entirely unjustifiably as we can see, that we must have negative feelings toward them, that we are acting this way because we don’t LIKE them, or that we probably even HATE them!
Now once we duly administer our punishment, the CBT-governed protocol tells us to explain the reasons for our actions to our unruly child. If we punish them and they are tearful, become Angry or put up a fuss, we are told to say: “I’m punishing you because I don’t LIKE what you’re doing – but I still LOVE you!” This is to convey that we are displeased with their behavior, but have NOT stopped LOVING them and are NOT rejecting them. We are instructed to make this declaration in order to help them NOT to take our actions personally, but somehow distance themselves from our harshness. We also hope, (by some stretch of the imagination), that they will actually understand and be sympathetic to our actions and will NOT stop LOVING US in return! However, the challenge here is that they must understand the difference between LIKE and LOVE, and it is surely a very slim one! We must concede it is a concept that is difficult even for adults to grasp! In fact many languages such as French, make no distinction between LIKE and LOVE, both feelings finding expression in a single word. So to expect a small, immature child to understand the subtlety between LIKE and LOVE, and especially try to apply it in a highly Emotionally charged situation when the child is feeling sad and upset and our Anger too is at a peak, is no less than absurd! It begs the question: Who is the greater fool – the child who refuses to obey, or the adult who is trying to excuse her/his own actions to the child, and may even be feeling hesitant and/or guilty about punishing the child in the first place?
DOLIF recognizes that the state of psychology is to blame as thus far no viable answers have been given to forlorn parents. They are sadly left to grope in the dark with only magazine quality “tips”, “techniques” and “strategies” to follow that often have no basis in research. DOLIF gives parents direction. It informs us that within the confines of the Mind of a Child, children DO NOT UNDERSTAND the idea that they muse earn our LOVE, or that it depends on whether they behave one way or another! The lack of logic in their mindset prohibits them from connecting the dots between their behavior and the consequent punishment we choose from our end!
Most importantly we need to understand that children do not know the difference between good and bad behavior, but first need to traverse the lengthy process of growth and learning about our social human world.
Since our human child or immature subject is only sensitive and responsive to our Emotions, they only detect LOVE, lack of LOVE, or ambivalence on our part. This they perceive through our voice, attitudes and actions, and are always at work trying to decipher whether LOVE seems implied or not! When we address them with our Anger, our brows furled and voices raised, they clearly sense that we are in the midst of a negative Emotional mood. And in fact, at the time of misbehavior and disciplining, we must admit that, for that moment alone at least, WE DO NOT LOVE or even LIKE our child! It would be fair to say that for that very instant at least, we do actually resent the person before us – be it our child, teenager or the adult who is defying and upsetting us. And it is this negative mood or message we convey – and only this mood – that the children feel and involuntarily respond to every time we reprimand them!
So to be determined to punish a child who misbehaves and pit one’s rational WILL against the irrational WILL of a child, who has no sense of how they should behave or why they should behave that way, and is being pushed in the opposite direction by their internal instincts, is a losing battle! We might as well try to restrain a wild horse! No wonder it ends in frustration for both sides because, as the situation escalates, each side digs in their heels and resolves to protect their own interests and unwavering belief that their own rights are being transgressed. Our lesson from here is that we should NEVER pit our WILL against the WILL of a child, since they have NO understanding of the message we are trying to convey to them, have no capacity to judge the situation rationally and no capability to alter their behavior without betraying their own WILL.
A final point of absurdity that is derived from animal training. While CBT grants parents the license to punish a child who defies them, there is no animal that is known to punish its offspring to achieve compliance! So it seems that selected aspects of animal behavior such as the reward-and-punishment paradigm are deemed appropriate for humans. However, ignored is the aspect of animal behavior wherein they do not punish their animal babies. In the animal kingdom the solution to misbehavior is simple: they are taken by the scruff of the neck and gently guided back to the roost by a loving parental figure.
