Parent’s childrearing techniques misfire in funny ways.
August 31, 2011
My mom is brilliant. And even in her mid-twenties, she was brilliant. She read books on child-psychology and was always very aware and thoughtful about how she raised me and how she taught me.
I was a quiet kid. My mom has told me a million times how I could sit and amuse myself for hours, (“HOURS!” she says) just playing with blocks and stuff like that. I was rarely naughty. However, there were times when my behavior was negative, of course. In comparing notes with others, and from my own observations, I found that the way my mom handled negative behavior was a little different and new for the time.
When I was good, she reinforced this behavior by constant comments, interest, encouragement, praise and love. Perhaps overly-so. She had me believing – at a pretty young age – that I was an exceptional person.
When I was not good her response was to not respond. She would ignore me completely. She would act like she couldn’t hear me or see me. In effect, if I was misbehaving, I ceased to exist.
It is interesting to me that one of the 2 or 3 “re-occurring dreams” I have had all my life is a situation where I have to tell my mom something that is extremely urgent, and in some cases she is in danger. No matter how I try to tell her the message, she can’t hear me or see me. I’m invisible. Out of these dreams I often wake myself up from saying her name out loud. I haven’t quite made sense of this yet.
At any rate, compared to what I have heard and seen and read about how other people discipline their kids, often paying attention fully to their children only through responses to negative behavior, and not giving enough acknowledgement or attention for good behavior, I think mom’s way is pretty cool. However I have noticed an interesting effect it has had on me as an adult.
If someone in my life ignores me, often by being unresponsive to my efforts to communicate with them through the various technologies we all use these days, I freak out. I freak out more than I should. More than anyone else I know. There is nothing worse to me than being ignored. It does not take long before I have worked myself into a state of absolute crisis; fretting and wondering what I have done wrong, how I have so displeased my friend that I have caused them to act as if I do not exist in their world. It’s traumatizing.
And yet when I look back on nearly every experience of this, I normally see that it was, indeed, an enormous waste of time, emotions and energy. There are often completely legitimate reasons for my friends’ actions, there is nothing personal, there has been no transgression committed by myself or my friend. It’s just normal life.
But what it boils down to - to over-simplify, really – is me in a state of panic, in my childhood state of mind, thinking, “I am an awesome person…how could you possibly ignore me?!”
