What Behavourism Doesn’t Get
The trouble with the behaviourist approach is that it lacks an understanding of three key areas in the development of a child: attachment, developmental awareness, and consciousness. Each is crucial to understanding why a child behaves the way they do. Parenting right from the start includes creating a solid foundation for your child that grows from these three concepts. Let’s explore how each of them can infuse your parenting with the most up-to-date principles in child development science.
Attachment
Attachment-centred parenting emphasizes the importance of relationship and connection. As a basic rule of the human condition, our most significant emotional and psychological events, both positive and negative, will occur during our first six years of life. This is because (a) we form our deepest attachments with our most significant caregivers during this formative time, and (b) this is when a child’s brain is wiring up at the rate of approximately one million new neural connections per second.13 You grow as you go.
Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a noted psychologist, has explored in detail how we move through the process of “becoming attached” in the first six years of life.14 During this process we are danced into our sense of self, into who we are and how we will be in this life. Naturally, there will be other formative influences and experiences in the years to come, but the most influential foundation is laid in those first six years. The takeaway? During those first six years of a child’s life, parents have the most powerful opportunity to reach into that growing brain and wire it up in the best possible way.
Since love and human connection are essential to healthy growth and development, the human child is born programmed and wired to seek out this connection constantly. There is no rest and no growth for the human child in the absence of this connection. All of the child’s energy goes to ensuring the connection is maintained, which leaves little to direct to the task of growing up. And knowing that children are wired to pursue that connection at all costs, it comes as no surprise to learn that children understandably become eager to restore it, should it be interrupted. Often, though, disconnection is mistakenly co-opted in the name of “discipline.” This happens when parents purposely interrupt the connection to alarm the child into seeking reconnection by halting whatever behaviour they are engaged in. Timeouts offer one example of how disconnection can be used to get a child to behave. Others include consequences, the removal of privileges, reward systems, and any other parenting “strategy” that has at its core the spirit of disconnection. Even a tactic like orchestrating a fake “leaving behind” scenario to persuade an uncooperative child to follow plays on a disconnected approach.
If you are in the midst of sourcing parenting “strategies,” you’ve probably uncovered a mountain of disconnection-based approaches (and virtually nothing that would have you leading your child along the trajectory of their optimal growth and development). Any parenting expert who suggests that they have the art of parenting distilled down to a three-step strategy or has attempted to script you through a one-size-fits-all, tightly regimented routine of discipline will rely on disconnection-based approaches, almost without fail, to manipulate the behaviour of children. Child development specifically, and the human condition generally, does not lend itself to regimented, scripted, concocted tricks and strategies. These approaches are mere temptations, luring parents with a purportedly quick fix because they appear easier, tidier, and more convenient than the alternative. But the long view shows us that children need connection. Full stop. They do not need tricks, strategies, and manipulation.
These disconnection scenarios are problematic because they are sacrificial plays of the worst kind. They manipulate the child, putting their greatest need on the line in the name of desirable behaviour. As these scenarios play out over the course of days, weeks, months, and even years—in ways both big and small—the effects can add up. This is particularly troublesome when we consider that neuroimaging studies have shown that, at the brain level, the experience of relational disconnection is akin to that of physical pain.15 But it’s just as important to understand that you cannot permanently wreck your kid with a few minor transgressions (more on this later). Keep in mind and take to heart that there is always a way to repair through a heightened focus on connection and the championing of healthy, normal development.
You cannot, however, give to your child what you did not get in your own childhood—unless you are willing to acknowledge those gaps and work to fill them in. If you were parented from a place of disconnection, as many parents reading this book will have been, this may be the driving force of your own parental impulses. Even if you experienced a primarily positive childhood, it’s still possible to suffer from the smaller and larger misses of that experience. If you experienced significant wounding as a child, it could be that the blueprint for how to be a parent may be missing altogether. And if that wounding was subtler in the context of an otherwise healthy parent-child relationship, it’s possible that there are some nuanced pieces missing from your parenting code. What does this look in real life? Here are a couple of dramatic examples.
One father I know lost his father early on in life, and then he lost his mother to her grief (though she did not die, she was not able to see and hear her son because of her grief). Sadly, his mother lost her next partner to a horrific death a few years later. This meant that in addition to having lost two fathers, this man also twice lost his mother to grief. Yet through his journey he awakened and is an incredibly conscious, attuned, and present dad for his lucky children. Another father I know journeyed along a similar path, but he lost his battle with addiction, lost his children’s mother to her addiction, and ultimately lost his children when they were placed in foster care. He was unable to awaken. He could not give his children what they needed. If these children were lucky enough to have an adult with a sparkle in their eye and big love in their heart step into their lives somewhere along the way, they would have a chance to develop resilience and heal from all of these losses and ruptures. This is the extraordinary power of attachment.
On the other end of this wounding spectrum are myriad softer scenarios. Many of you had parents who were present and available, but perhaps you were punished with loss of privileges or activities if you didn’t do well at school. A common enough approach, but one that taught you that acceptance is contingent on performance. Believe it or not, that lesson has stayed with you—and until you work through that equation of self-worth with goal achievement, you will be held hostage by the fear of failure. And you will likely pass this same belief on to your children.
Whether the wounds are deep cuts or small nicks, it’s essential for every parent to understand that we must make sense of them in order to avoid unintentionally handing them down to a new generation. But as you explore and work through these wounds, don’t get stuck on the idea of being “wounded.” Simply think of wounding as a normal part of being human. And over-identification with what went wrong in your childhood will not serve you or your child. Instead, accept that there is work to do, and that all of it is within your grasp. Parenthood shines a light on the necessity of this work, which will give both you and your child an amazing chance to grow up healthily.
Developmental Awareness
How many times have you sat in a restaurant and watched a child under the age of six receive a scolding for not sitting still during a meal? Or heard a three- or four-year-old admonished for not sharing? Or observed an eight-year-old punished for having a meltdown when asked to take out the garbage? Or witnessed a fourteen-year-old get grounded for freaking out when told they couldn’t hang with friends on a Friday evening?
The parental response of punishment and consequence for such actions is not an uncommon occurrence in our world. Yet each one of those examples represents a child with an underdeveloped brain responding exactly as they should according to their stage of development. Many