atoms into suns

Since my oldest child got to the age where discipline was necessary and limits were constantly being tested, I've been trying to figure out just how to do it. How do you convince a child that climbing up the bookshelf isn't cool? Kids don't care that you're worried they'll fall off and crack their head open; they just know that you're taking away their fun. We want our kids to have adventurous spirits, of course. We want them to climb mountains and travel to strange places and test their limits, but at the same time, we're parents who don't want our kids to get hurt. I'm still trying to find the balance between being overprotective and not protecting enough. I know that will last for as long as I live, and I'm sure all parents go through the same thing.

So, how do we discipline? We don't hit, period. I really try not to yell, but when you have to pull the kid off the shelf for the fifth time in an hour, it's tough to control the frustration. I try to put it in perspective, walk off and take some deep breaths, and then come back to explain why I'm so insistent and upset about this. But sometimes it's hard to reason with preschoolers.

Don't get me wrong; I have absolutely wonderful kids. I marvel at how great they are, how sweet and considerate and radiant and kind. I try to put it in perspective -- if the biggest complaints I have are about climbing shelves, making messes, and making noise when the baby's sleeping, we're doing pretty well. Nevertheless, there are times when discipline is necessary.

I've been thinking about this issue a lot lately. Then last weekend I went to a workshop on "Domestic Violence and the Baha'i Community", which covered the whole range of domestic violence, including violence toward children. One of the things that struck me most is that the definition of domestic violence is far more broad by Baha'i standards than by current legal, if not societal, standards. The list goes on for nearly two full pages and includes everything from physical and verbal abuse to economic abuse, neglect, corrupting, coercion, isolation, even "creating dirt, disorder and filth in the living environment" and breaking and throwing things. Belittling and yelling at children are, of course, on the list.

A couple of the quotes from the materials:

It is not, however, permissible to strike a child, or vilify him, for the child's character will be totally perverted if he be subjected to blows or verbal abuse.

--'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Baha, pg. 125

[The principle of the oneness of mankind] calls for a fundamental change in the manner in which people relate to each other, and the eradication of those age-old practices which deny the intrinsic human right of every individual to be treated with consideration and respect.

--Letter written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice on the subject of domestic violence, January 24, 1993

I think it's common to treat children as less deserving of our consideration and respect. It's easy to forget that discipline and guidance must be done respectfully and with loving-kindness rather than with frustration or even disdain or vengefulness.

I guess, after writing this out and letting it roll around my brain a bit, that discipline simply needs to be done with detachment -- the recognition that the child is testing limits rather than acting out of disrespect -- and loving guidance. Seems so simple. The detachment, I need to work on.

See also...

When your preschooler asks you to go to a certain fast-food restaurant known for its marketing to children, it's time to cancel the cable.

Especially when we've never taken our kids to the place. And we only watch a few hours of TV a week, on supposedly educational channels.

The conversation with the cable customer service lady, as recounted by Bill:

The woman asked why we were getting rid of it, and I said "It's corrupting my children."
There was a pause, and she answered timidly, "I'm sorry".

Then I laughed to ease the tension.

Then, a few days after it was disconnected, someone from the cable company came to the door doing a survey on how we liked our service, so I got to overhear Bill telling him again that it was corrupting our children. This time, the reply was a too-confident laugh, followed by, "Corrupting your children! What do you mean, corrupting your children?"

I love making cable representatives nervous. Too bad it doesn't work for TV executives.

There's an article in the LA Times about the town of Monowi, Nebraska, population 1, and its library. (Found on boing boing.)

Presumably this little town is so interesting because it's just so incomprehensible to those writing about it. (I have good evidence that anything between the Arizona line and the Hudson River is inscrutible to most LA residents, but that's another story.) But reading the article gave me all sorts of warm little feelings of home.

I grew up in a town of 1500 or so in North Dakota -- a metropolis, really -- but there are little towns not much bigger than Monowi all over ND. Just up the road is a little town that consists of a few houses, a grain elevator, store, and bar. My great uncle and aunt owned the store and bar, which are right next to each other. Just outside were gas pumps that haven't been used in decades. In addition to being the store proprietor and bartender, my great uncle was the constable, postmaster, and probably a zillion other things, too. The store is smaller than most modern convenience stores. The post office is a roughly 3x3 foot room in the corner of the store, complete with Wanted posters on the wall. I remember staring at all those posters as a kid, wondering what Interstate Flight was and checking out the fingerprints.

Living in a small town, you get used to the idea of extended family. Only a couple generations ago it was common to have 10 kids in a family, which makes for lots of cousins down the line. Seemed like each time I met someone new my mom would explain to me how we were related. "Your great-grandpa's brother Billy had a son named Jack, who married Helen, and they had six kids. Two of them died of scarlet fever when they were pretty little, and then Helen died and Jack married Martha and they had five more kids. Jack and Helen's included Frank, who married Frances, and they had..." You get the picture. Before I got married I asked my mom several times -- partly in jest, partly seriously -- if she was absolutely sure Bill and I weren't related somehow. (No, we're not.)

Whenever we'd get everyone together for a family reunion or wedding or somesuch, we'd often all naturally congregate in the bar. Everyone could have their drinks and socialize, there was plenty of room for everyone, you could stay as long as you wanted, and the kids could be right there, playing with all their cousins.

Between the two towns were my grandparents' farm and the farms of all those great-uncles and great-great-uncles -- another part of the family history to remember. Each time we'd drive down a gravel road we'd get the story of which of our ancestors used to live there, who lived there now, and more bits of family history. Not far from the farm was the one-room schoolhouse my dad went to and the church where a lot of family events took place. I think we spent as much time in the basement of that church as we did in our own. We had lots of great times racing around between gravestones and church pews with cousins, too.

The article's description of the library itself, though, reminds me of my grade school library.

The radio station bit was spot on, too. There were only a few radio stations around, none of them geared toward the high-schooler demographic. We listened to KFYR a lot. I got a wakeup call -- broadcast to five states and two Canadian provinces -- from the KFYR morning guys on my birthday during my freshman year of college. (That was before the station was bought by Clear Channel and turned into a right-wing talk-radio unbearable spewfest.)

I'm not really that old, but reminiscing like this makes me feel like I belong more to my grandparents' generation than my own. My peers in other parts of the country went to high schools like those in John Hughes movies. I went to a grade school with probably just over 100 students in the whole place and played kick the bucket and cowboys and Indians with neighborhood kids. In another bar in another tiny town, I remember watching Zorro on TV while my parents socialized. What time warp was I living in?

I'm still getting used to this whole parenthood thing. It really wasn't all that long ago that I was a kid, thinking that my parents were so old and that they knew everything. Now that I'm a parent myself, I know better, but I'm also very aware that my kids rely on me (us) for everything and expect me (us) to know exactly what to do.

I'm also the type of person who only goes to the doctor when she's near death -- or pregnant, but that's something else altogether -- so it didn't really occur to me that if we've been sick for nearly three weeks we might want to get checked out. Fortunately, I talked to my mom late last week and she convinced me to call the doctor's office and at least ask them if we should go in. So it happened that on Friday we found out that our oldest has a mild case of pneumonia.

Thankfully, it can be taken care of with antibiotics and won't require a hospital stay, but this is another one of those experiences that just drives home how little I know about parenting.

(I fared a lot better -- nothing worse than an impressive post-nasal drip.)

When I was taking a programming class in high school, I'd always save that homework for last. The downside of that was that I'd always wake up trying to figure out how to program my alarm clock -- in Turbo Pascal -- to stop ringing.

There's no keyboard! Maybe these buttons will let me type, if only I can figure out how. And there's no screen, so I won't be able to see what I'm typing. Confusion! Distress!

Eventually I'd type with the snooze bar, and then the whole thing would start over nine minutes later. Every morning.

This reminds me a lot of that. The idea of little binary-random-number-generating boxes predicting global catastrophes addles my brain in the same way. It's like Beautiful Mind meets Reverend Maynard when he discovers that the carrots have a consciousness. (Confused? Exactly.)

I'm making far less sense even than usual. I'm going to bed before the walls start talking.

(There's a lively discussion and much talk about debunking -- or not -- on Slashdot.)