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Old June 7th 04, 10:44 PM
Carlson LaVonne
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Default Parent-Child Negotiations

Nathan,

On the other hand, a two-year-old has few bargaining tools. He or she
is physically tiny, compared to his/her parents. This little child is
just beginning to understand case/effect, and only in immediate
situations. When this little child begins to understand cause/effect,
the spanked child learns to hit. The non spanked child learns other
ways to handle anger.

LaVonne

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

I'd like to expand a little on the issue of parents and children trying to
negotiate mutually satisfactory solutions to problems. For truly fair
negotiations to take place, three things must be true. First, both parties
must be able to negotiate from positions of reasonable strength. Second, it
must be accepted that there are some absolutes that are not part of the
negotiation process. And third, the parties negotiating must not use
extraneous issues to threaten each other.

In regard to the first point, the nature of the parent-child relationship is
such that the parents get to decide how much negotiating power their
children will have. At one extreme, if parents say, "Do this or else," they
give their children no negotiating power. At the other extreme, if parents
refuse to put their foot down at all, they keep no real negotiating power
for themselves. So the trick is for parents to find a place in between that
gives their children enough negotiating power but not too much.

In my view, the best types of negotiations are aimed at dealing with the
issues the parents consider truly important while providing as much
flexibility for the children as possible within that context. For example,
suppose a little girl keeps running late because she can't decide what to
wear to school and Mom, who is busy getting ready for work herself, keeps
having to take time out of her own preparations to deal with the issue. The
important thing for Mom is that the problem of running late be solved, not
exactly how the problem is solved. Further, the solution doesn't
necessarily have to be 100% foolproof. If Mom has to get involved and hurry
her daughter up every now and then, it's probably not the end of the world.

From that understanding of the problem, the mother and daughter could get
together and try to find a way to solve the problem. It doesn't matter
which of them proposes the solution that they ultimately decide together
would work best. What matters is that the problem be solved. And if Mom
has misgivings about her daughter's preferred solution, she might accept it
on only a provisional basis, with the understanding that if it doesn't work,
they'll have to change to something else. With a little luck that will give
the daughter some extra incentive to make her preferred solution work.

Regarding the second issue, it would be highly improper for a child who is
caught shoplifting to be able to demand something from his or her parents in
negotiations in exchange for not shoplifting anymore. When something is
wrong, you don't do it, and you don't expect to get any special reward or
compensation for not doing it. The lesson that some things in life are
non-negotiable is a vital one for children to learn.

On the other hand, if parents want to label something non-negotiable, they
need to be able to defend why they view it in non-negotiable in ways that
have as little as possible to do with "because I said so." And if they use
reasons rooted in their religion, they would be wise to also provide the
strongest reasons they can that are not rooted in their religion as
additional reinforcement. If children understand why their parents hold a
particular belief, and if the parents' behavior is consistent with what they
say, children can respect their parents for standing up for what they
believe is right even if the children disagree. (That is especially true
when the parents and children have a strong relationship in general.) But
if parents just say, "That's non-negotiable," without providing any real
explanation, the risk of anger and resentment is vastly greater.

Finally, if either side brings extraneous matters into a negotiation as a
way of threatening the other, that upsets the balance in the negotiations.
Such behavior is a way of trying to bully the other side into accepting a
win-lose solution, and thus violates the spirit of trying to find a solution
that both sides truly consider acceptable. That also means parents who are
looking for win-win solutions need to try to avoid invoking their parental
authority any more than they feel like they have to.

Now, what does this have to do with the issue of punishment in general and
of spanking in particular? If win-win solutions can be found within the
context of these types of negotiations, it is often possible to avoid the
need for threats and punishment entirely. That is especially true for
children whose sense of honor is strong enough that just reminding them of
what they agreed to is enough for them to comply with their part of an
agreement.

On the other hand, not all children will necessarily comply with an
agreement just because they agreed to it. In those cases, the possibility
of punishment may be needed as an enforcement provision in agreements,
especially if a child wants to be allowed to push to the outermost limits of
what the parents feel like they can accept. (For example, parents might
feel safe allowing a child to stretch a 9:00 bedtime a great deal, but be
unwilling to accept a 9:30 bedtime unless it will be enforced pretty
strictly.) If all goes well, the child's knowledge that deliberately
violating the agreement will result in the punishment coupled with parental
understanding toward accidental violations could still make actual
punishment unnecessary. But for the possibility of punishment to mean
something, parents have to be willing to punish if a child pushes too far.

Note that if a child has made an agreement and agreed to what the punishment
will be if the agreement is violated, it is much harder for the child to
resent being punished for violating the agreement as "unfair" and
"arbitrary" than if the rule and punishment were imposed unilaterally by a
parent, or especially if the child were punished without really
understanding what the rule was (especially in practice) before the
punishment took place. Those kinds of distinctions are extremely important
in understanding how punishment affects children.

Also, consider situations where negotiations fail, either because no common
ground acceptable to both the parents and the child exists or because the
common ground cannot be found in the amount of time available to look for
it. If parents refuse to allow the child to proceed with a solution the
parents view as unacceptable, the need for threats and punishment might
still be averted if the child is willing to defer to the parents and live
with a solution that the child does not really consider acceptable. But if
the child refuses to defer to the parents' authority and judgment out of
respect, the threat of punishment (and, if necessary, the actuality of
punishment) are all the parents have left to prevent the child from doing
something they cannot accept in good conscience. Punishment might not
provide a long-term solution, but it at least has a chance of solving the
problem in the short term. And in the longer term, parents can hope that as
the child gets older, he or she will come to recognize that the parents were
right after all, at least enough to make a solution that both sides can
agree on possible. (Or, in some cases, the problem might solve itself as
the child becomes mature enough to be allowed to do things the parents did
not consider it safe to allow earlier.) Such situations are not ideal, but
considering that we live on Earth, not in Heaven, always having ideal
solutions available would be a bit much to hope for.

As one last interesting point regarding negotiated solutions, consider the
possibility of negotiating what form of punishment should be used in
situations where punishment is required. From a parent's perspective, the
punishment needs to be serious enough to achieve the parent's goals (which
are often short-term in nature, or "serially short-term" - that is, solvable
over an extended period of time through a series of short-term solutions).
In some cases, parents consider it desirable to disrupt the child's
activities (for example, to keep the child away from "the wrong crowd"), but
often, such disruption is considered undesirable. Parents may also feel a
need to consider how punishing one child might impact others. For example,
how do you ground one child from watching television without having an
impact on the lives of the child's siblings? After all, the siblings might
very well want to play with the child who is being punished and watch
television at the same time.

From a child's perspective, the important points are how unpleasant the
punishment will be and how much the punishment will interfere with the
child's doing things he or she enjoys. Some children may view physical pain
as radically worse than other forms of unpleasantness, but many do not.
Children may also consider how different forms of punishment would affect
their friends, and the possible embarrassment if their friends find out
about their having gotten in trouble.

Of all forms of punishment, corporal punishment can concentrate a given
amount of unpleasantness into the shortest amount of time. That's probably
one of the reasons why some people object to it so strongly: the pain of a
child crying from a spanking is a lot easier to see than the same total
amount of unpleasantness spread over a week or two of being grounded. We
can empathize with the pain of the spanking, but it is much harder to
capture the sense of time needed to empathize with the grounding -
especially for people who haven't actually experienced being grounded for an
extended period of time.

Yet ironically, depending on the personalities and the situation involved,
the same concentration of unpleasantness into a short period of time that
makes spanking so objectionable to some outside parties can sometimes make
it a preferred form of punishment for both parents and children. It's over
with quickly, and they can get on with their lives.

Which raises an interesting problem for those who support win-win solutions
but oppose spanking. If parents are going to punish a child, and the child
would rather be spanked than punished in some other way, does that not make
spanking the child a win-win solution to the problem of how to punish the
child (or at least the closest thing to a win-win solution available)?

Nathan