Here I will over time gather some thoughts on matters relating to adults and children. A parallel page on poor teacher behavior covers some similar ground, as does at least one Wordpress text on how adults say the darndest things. (And many other texts have some connection to these issues and/or to overlapping issues, like school and education.)
In many other texts, I use an informal, approximate, and inconsistent division of humans into children–teens–adults. Here, I do not, because so much applies over so large age brackets and it would be inexpedient to attempt such a division over just a children–adults one. In the case of parents, the status as child in the offspring sense might be more relevant than age, even well into the adulthood of the children. (Depending on developments, I might include more specifically parental issues, and/or issues dealing with “adult offspring”, here or put them on a separate page.)
As a disclaimer, most of the below is written somewhat generically and it might be that individual circumstances (notably, age) reduce applicability. For instance, when it comes to coaxing vs. informed choice below, a child too young to understand language (at all or beyond some rudimentary level) might need very different treatment from the same child two years later.
Using the convention of Parents, Adults, and Children and the associated communication lines, communication between parents and children tends to be Parent–Child, with the same often applying to non-parent adults (in particular, older relatives and teachers).
This is not necessarily a problem: unlike with communication between adults, it is not a given that Adult–Adult is the best default mode. However, Adult–Adult is often worth a try, both because an adult can underestimate a child considerably (especially, in the teen years) and because this can make the children feel that they are taken more seriously. (I will likely expand on the benefits of taking children seriously and their perception of this at a later time. Chances are also that this and/or Adult–Adult communication will be a recurring implicit theme.)
A common problem is that children are coaxed into doing something, or that an unsuccessful attempt to coax them is made, when it would be better to allow them an informed choice and for the adult to “take no for an answer” if the answer happens to be “no”. To boot, similar issues, with descending similarity/likelihood, often apply when children are manipulated, tricked, or outright forced. (But I will stick to coaxing below.)
For instance, on quite a few occasions, my parents tried to coax me into trying some type of food that I did not want to try. (For instance, shrimp, which do not only look disgusting but played in with an aversion to fish and, by prejudiced extension, sea-food that I developed at some point. For instance, various types of vegetables. I use “food” in a wide sense, including e.g. condiments and snacks.) This with claims like “you will like it, if you try it”, “it’s delicious”, and, of course, when applicable, “it is good for you”.
This included cases where the food was something that I had tried in the past and had not liked then or something that children usually do not like. (With a predictable effect that I did not like it this time either and grew less “coaxable” for the future.) Here we can see a potential explanation for coaxing, namely that the adult has a short-sighted goal of making the child try the food (or perform some other action) with too little regard for concerns like making the child enjoy the food, keeping a good personal relationship between adult and child, increasing the willingness of the child to try other foods in the future, whatnot.
On a detail level, we have to consider e.g. that the more time has passed from an unsuccessful attempt, the greater the chance that the child’s taste has changed, which implies that a premature second attempt now is less likely to be successful than a future attempt. This while a failure today can reduce the future willingness of the child to try again. (And when it comes to aspects like what foods are how healthy or unhealthy, taste might be very secondary to factors that correlate strongly with age, like level of maturity and priorities in life.) It might then be for the best to let the child try or not try as and when he sees fit, based on informed choice and not coaxing.
Here we also see the importance of separating means and goals: If a goal like “make Jack eat broccoli” is worthwhile, it does not follow that any given means of doings so is a good idea. Conversely, the rejection of a particular means does not imply rejection of the goal.
In many cases (especially, with new foods) it would have been better to give some factual assessment/description/whatnot and then to leave the decision to me. What exact approach to use will depend on both the food and the child, but consider horse radish as a particularly ill-advised “you will like it, if you try it” from my father: If he instead had said something along the lines of “horse radish has a very sharp taste and might be a bit of a food-for-adults, but it is delicious once you get used to it—you might want to give it a try”, I likely very voluntarily would have tried it and I would have held no hard feelings if I did not like it—after all, I had been given fair warning. As is, while I did try it, I did so very reluctantly, reacted very negatively to the taste, and became less willing to trust my father on topics relating to food.
A claim that something is mostly for adults is not only (when applicable) honest and in the spirit of informed choice, but can also be very effective with children, because they often have a curiosity about things adult and/or have a wish to emulate the adults in their lives. (The former over a very large pre-adult age range; the latter until at least the early school years or thereabouts, when adults and/or parents often turn from objects of admiration to causes of annoyance or embarrassment.)
Something that adults often miss with children is that children appear to have a stronger sense of taste and/or smell, which implies that many foods will taste more strongly to a child, and, in a second step, that what might be “strong” (“sharp”, “bitter”, whatnot) to an adult can very legitimately be “too strong” to a child. Likewise, that what an adult sees as “a bit above average” might be “strong” to a child, etc.
On top of that, we have complications like children having had less time and opportunity to acquire “acquired tastes” and that there might be evolutionary reasons for a child to be more cautious about what it eats, because a child cannot tell what foods are safe based on experience and naturally tends to rely on taste. (While a bit odd in today’s world, this might have been extremely relevant during long stretches of human, let alone pre-human, evolution.) To boot, it is not a given that the child’s digestive system and whatnot works sufficiently similarly to an adults to assume that various foods have the exact same effects.
The question of how to handle specifically unwanted-by-the-child vegetables is tricky, but I suspect that too strong attempts to overcome resistance do more harm than good and that it is often better to settle for whatever vegetables the child does voluntarily eat over trying to coax or coerce him into eating others. Likewise, there is often a dependency on preparation, and choosing the right preparation can help. (For instance, I have never enjoyed whole-and-raw carrots, but both cut-and-boiled carrots and grated(?)-and-raw carrots work much better.) I also have the personal suspicion that it matters less for a child’s health that he eat great amounts of “good” food than that the amounts of “bad” foods are kept down. (By implication, a stricter parental approach might be warranted when it comes to keeping consumption of potato chips down than to keeping consumption of broccoli up.)
The above example deals with something optional. In other situations, there might be something mandatory involved, e.g. because a child must go to school lest the parents be fined or that he must accompany the rest of the family on a trip because he is too young to be left alone for several days. Here, too, trying to explain the “why” to the kid is likely a good idea, even if he is not allowed a choice, because a “we must do X, because Y” is better than e.g. “because I said so”. However, coaxing of some form might still be a better option than “because I said so”, physical dragging from point A to point B, bribery, whatnot.
An interesting special family of examples that involve coaxing are those where something is done more for the benefit of the parents than for the children—as might be the case with frequent sending of kids to “camp” during the summer holidays, where a true purpose of getting the kids out of the house so that the adults can have some peace and quiet often seems plausible. In such cases, a truly strong intervention can be outright unethical. (The more so, when the something at hand is contrary to the plans of the children, the best of the children, whatnot. Being shipped off to camp, e.g., can certainly get in the way of enjoying the long awaited summer holidays. While I never went to camp myself, fiction seems to point to a great many children who truly do not enjoy it once there, as with many, many cases from “Peanuts”.)
Informed choice also has the benefit that there might be aspects of an issue that the child has not considered that might sway him if he is told. While this is the more likely to work the older he grows, even a failure can have a positive long-term effect in that a seed of awareness of some new aspect has been planted and can grow important down the line. A notable own example is how my mother tried to push, maybe, 6 y.o. me into more interactions with other kids—but never gave an explanation of why and my natural reluctance (TV, comics, books and the like are so much more interesting) won out. However, if she had mentioned something concrete about the pragmatical benefits of having a social circle or a “network” later in life, this could have made a positive difference to me. It would likely have had very little effect on me when I was 6, but it might very well have affected my thinking and approach to others at 16, maybe, even 11, had the seeds been sown at 6.
Here, I have to make some reservations for my mother’s (unknown to me) motivations. It is very possible that she had no specific thoughts in this direction, and that she was instead motivated by some general feeling that “kids are supposed to have friends” or something else that would have had as little effect on me at 16 as it did at 6.
To be more specific, this was at a time when we had recently moved from one town to another (old friends gone) and before school began (no contacts at school), while the new neighborhood had fewer kids (more effort needed to make friends), which resulted in a worrying-to-my-mother reduction in social contacts.
While my memories of the exact interactions on the topic are extremely vague, I do recall how she once complained to me that I should make friends and how it was a bad thing that I had no friends—and how I promptly protested that I did have friends, mentioning several kids from the old town. Here my mother failed to state what she actually thought was the problem, namely, that I spent too little time with other children. This, however, is something different from having or not having friends and a formulation in terms of e.g. “lekkamrat[er]” (“playmate[s]”, but without connotations of women dressed as bunnies) would have been better than the “vän[ner]” (“friend[s]”) actually used. While the distinction is likely of little value with kids that young, and while I likely never saw any of those old friends again, similar distinctions are important with adults (e.g. in a colleague–friend contrast)—and my own youthful take on the matter was likely colored by how some of my mother’s dearest friends lived far away and only met her once in a blue moon, without the friendship being diminished through the rarity of meetings.
An obvious benefit for the parents, when comparing informed choice with coaxing, is that the risk of reactance is much smaller. (Even more so, when informed choice is contrasted with force or “because I said so”.) When given a choice, there will rarely be a trigger for reactance—on the contrary, as noted above, factors like curiosity or a wish to engage in adult behaviors can create an “anti-reactance”. Coaxing, on the other hand, can certainly cause reactance: From a child’s point of view, we often have a situation of “I don’t want to. I said that I don’t want to. Old geezer still pesters me. Now, I really, really don’t want to.”, which is not good. The risk is increased when the coaxing is prolonged and/or very Parent–Child. (With the additional caution that the risk can depend on both the child and the current age of the child, as well as previous experiences of the child with the adult at hand.)
A very telling own example, if one dealing less with coaxing and more with an attempt to be helpful:
I was almost done with some activity or project when my mother told me that a TV program that I used to watch was coming up. I acknowledged this and continued with the activity, in order to complete it before moving to the TV. (Note that I could still easily hear the TV, which reduced the loss from not seeing the TV.) Mother soon pointed out that the program was now beginning and I told her that I would be there in two minutes. Within those two minutes, the same exchange took place another three (?) times—at which point I was so annoyed at (what I perceived as) nagging that I decided to not watch the program at all.
(Where “two minutes” are more metaphorical than an exact statement of time. What the activity was, I do not remember.)
Here we have a situation where I originally wanted to do something, but parental intervention killed the wish. Moreover, I took most or all of the damage from not watching. My mother might or might not have missed my company in front of the TV, but she certainly could still watch it—and her interest in the show was likely smaller than mine to begin with.
A secondary type of problem with coaxing (let alone bribery) is that it can create bad habits of fake resistance, because the child might enjoy the coaxing or otherwise gain some benefit from it (let alone wish for the bribe). Here, no personal example occurs to me, but I can at least imagine cases like a small child who wants to eat but insists on being feed “by airplane” or a somewhat older child (girl, in particular?) who wants to increase the amount of attention from or time spent with a parent. In a variation, there might be some children who would be willing even without coaxing but who enjoy seeing an adult jump through hoops or do not wish to comply before, somehow, signalling that it is their own choice by not immediately agreeing. If coaxing is abandoned in favor of informed choice, the risk of such bad habits is much reduced.
The aforementioned ideas about Parents, Adults, and Children go back to Eric Berne, who is otherwise best known for ideas around “Games People Play”. Bad habits like the above could be seen as examples or near-examples of this (if with a child-centric take; what I remember from his writings dealt with adults).
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