My guess was that one parents basically in the style of one's own stricter parent.
Unless, of course, one parents in conscious opposition to the style of one's own stricter parent.
I thought I was a really laid-back, non-disciplinarian parent, but it turns out Keegan's just one of those odd kids who sets his own limits and almost never even has to be spoken to sharply. The few times I have, that was all that was ever needed to stop whatever the behavior was. Noah, on the other hand, has me turning around and counting to ten A LOT. And if you speak sharply to him, he balls his fists by his sides and screams wordlessly at you to drown you out.
I never imagined my parenting style could vary so radically from child to child.
I honestly don't have a sense of how comparatively disciplinarianish I am. I bellow at the children reasonably frequently ("If you must try and injure each other, do it quietly!"), but on the other hand hanging out at friends' houses, I'm usually the last one to jump in and make the kids stop doing whatever it is they're doing. I also have no terribly strong sense of whether they're respectably well-behaved, except that people seem to like them.
Well, in Newt's case they like him and then blame everything broken or damaged for a half-mile radius on him. Which is usually unfair -- he doesn't actually break stuff all that much -- but he acts as if he did.
I never imagined my parenting style could vary so radically from child to child.
The lesson of first-time parenthood is the power of your child's inherent personality traits over petty social forces. The lesson of subsequent parenthood is the power of social forces over what you thought were your own inherent personality traits.
he balls his fists by his sides and screams wordlessly at you to drown you out
For a while I found this sort of thing hilarious, and used to laugh. Which I thought was better than yelling back, or getting angry. Then I was reliably informed by the child in question that I was hurting feelings by laughing. Man, you can't win.
Even up to the age of 12 or so, my sister would run upstairs to her room and slam her door five or six times when she was really mad. It was hilarious.
I think I'm pretty much in Apo's position, albeit with only one child. It's just never been all that hard to keep him from doing stuff he really shouldn't (getting him to do the stuff he really should, OTOH...).
and used to laugh
Yeah, you're not allowed to laugh. Which seldom stops me, but I'm at least aware that it doesn't help the situation.
8: I was prone to ridiculous tantrums myself.
I'm always surprised by how besotted I am with my kids -- like, I have a hard time talking about them without drifting into sounding like a teenager talking about a crush ("They're both so smart, and so good-looking, and so self-reliant, and and and"). It's a bitch trying not to overinflate their egos and annoy the hell out of everyone I talk to, while not overcorrecting into telling them they suck.
11, maybe you should go in for a religion. Then you'll have no trouble find things about the kids that disappoint you.
Oh, they aren't perfect; they're untidy (well, Sally is. Newt takes after his father) and they argue with each other, and they're awful about trying new foods.
I just get irrationally goofy about them.
7.---Apparently because all Unfogged women are intelligent but completely insane and I am a woman who comments on Unfogged...
Also, Julia Stiles totally bugs me.
they're untidy
I'm sure that comes from Buck's side of the family.
Sadly, no. The Buck family is catlike in its fastidiousness. The Breaths, less so.
I just get irrationally goofy about them.
I think that's the whole point of kids. It's also nature's way of stopping us from strangling them.
They crap in boxes and rake sand over it?
What sort of advice do you give your kids? I tell them the more you read, the more intelligent you are. It's really that simple.
Ogged: not planning to date Ethan Hawke.
7.---Apparently because all Unfogged women are intelligent but completely insane and I am a woman who comments on Unfogged...
Right. Seems obvious in retrospect.
I like Julia Stiles.
To be honest, I barely remember the movie, but I do remember thinking that it was the first Hamlet I'd seen where Hamlet seems to have an ethical dilemma, rather than a psychological one; I thought that was good.
18: We're working on that bit.
17: Yeah, loving them is one thing. Getting all dopey about how wonderful they are I wasn't expecting so much.
Ogged: not planning to date Ethan Hawke.
I read constantly as a kid. I loathe Bob Knight and I don't really and truly like this quote, but it does reliably crack me up. "We all learn to write by the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things."
22: not even law school can entirely destroy the instincts of the veldt.
And of course, they are exceptional in every way, so your dopeyness is justified.
Oh, it wasn't a bad movie, and the corporate environment seemed well chosen. I just didn't particularly like Hawke's portrayal of Hamlet.
6, 10: Why aren't you allowed to laugh? This was my parents' main way of dealing with situations where I was being ridiculous or about to throw a tantrum, and it seems like it worked out pretty well in the end. Though from the sounds of it, I was closer to the Keegan side in ease-of-parenting, and I know my teen years were especially smooth sailing compared to most.
Like watching The Wire!
See, you do understand, so I know that you're deliberately mean to me. Woe!
law school can entirely destroy the instincts of the veldt.
In fact, it often intensifies them. Partners are occasionally bemused when I come loping into their offices with a broken-necked antelope in my jaws, but I think they recognize that it forms part of my value to the firm.
JM: Also, Julia Stiles totally bugs me.
Damn, and Cala says that I look like her. (I don't like her much myself.) My google skills suck, but she said that I looked like a cross between Christina Ricci and Julia Stiles. It's the forehead (Ricci) and the smile (Stiles).
How can you not like Hamlet standing in the "action" section of a video store?
I have long wondered what the hell is wrong with Deborah Solomon. Can she really be as horrible as she seems?
Julia Stiles is quite beautiful, and Christina Ricci is also lovely. There's no point in feeling bad about looking like very attractive people!
You'll often hear people talk about how Shakespeare translates so well from era to era and has universal themes, but very often that's just not true. There are a lot of elements of his plays (and not just the comedies) that just can't be made to work well in a modern setting. I like Stiles, but she's annoying as Ophelia in part because the character of Ophelia is simply annoying to a modern mindset. I can't think of a production I've ever seen that found a really convincing take on her sudden drop into madness; it's a plot point native to a different worldview.
I thought the adaptation of Hamlet as a spoiled pseudo-artiste corporate scion was pretty brilliant. It made the character convincing (if not sympathetic) in a way that's otherwise hard to manage.
I can't think of a production I've ever seen that found a really convincing take on her sudden drop into madness; it's a plot point native to a different worldview.
I thought the Simpsons did a pretty good job with it.
I can't think of a production I've ever seen that found a really convincing take on her sudden drop into madness; it's a plot point native to a different worldview.
Would this be the "oh shit! I only get 5 acts to wrap this up!" worldview?
Every time I try to read a Deborah Solomon interview, I get distracted by my overwhelming suspicion that the questions as printed in the article are not just clean up but light-years removed from the actual questions in the interview. The answers are so reliably short and quippy that it reads like it was edited beyond recognition. I wonder if the interviewees even recognize themselves.
Come to think of it, this is not unlike my complaint about Modern Love.
I can't think of a production I've ever seen that found a really convincing take on her sudden drop into madness;
This is something I find entirely mysterious about English literature before about, say, 1860 or so. Before that point, it seems to be a commonplace that great emotional distress was fairly likely to induce what I'd call psychosis -- delusions, hallucinations, whatever. And it shows up in reasonably realistic writing, not just in stuff that's stylistically overblown.
But that really doesn't seem to happen -- people don't get driven mad, either in modern-day literature or in real life. Psychosis happens, but rarely in response to sudden emotional stress. Why is this a commonplace of early modern literature?
30: Julia Stiles and Ricci both have prominent foreheads. Possible cross between Stiles and Ricci?
In modern-day movies, emotional shock frequently makes people vomit. Not so, nearly so often, in real life.
I guess, but that seems like a smaller error.
I never noticed that the "Questions for..." article in the NYT Magazine was always by the same interviewer. Strange, since I had definitely noticed that the person being interviewed always seems really rude and dismissive in a way you don't often see in short interview-articles.
Yes, well, you live now, don't you!
38 -- I like to think that real people behaved that way back then because they never had orgasms.
38: I wish I was better-versed in the history of psychiatry as it pertains to art. I only have a vague sense of how convictions about madness shift and change from one era to another, but shift they do and I'm dead certain there are a lot of modern tropes that are going to seem similarly quaint down the road, if they don't already. (The ubiquity of multiple personalities, a la Psycho, is a big one.)
How's the Nimoyfication coming?
Why is this a commonplace of early modern literature?
That's a great question. I wonder how much of it has to do with artistic representation, and how much people who were under stress (particularly women, I imagine) were acculturated to behave in wacky ways when things got to be too much. Which is to say that maybe there really was a lot more swooning and acting crazy, not because people "were" crazy, but because that's how one expressed certain emotions and states of mind.
Never fear, BG: my peeve with Stiles has less to do with how she looks than with how she speaks. I also have...um...insider information about her inability to perform scansion acceptably.
Swooning is fairly comprehensible, given the tight lacing and poor diets. Losing one's mind completely seems a little more difficult to explain.
50: Yeah, I'd buy the swooning based on corsetry.
46: Multiple personalities is much better than emotional vomiting as a modern error that shows up in literature -- that one's all over the place. Probably not for much longer, though, I think the fact that it's generally recognized as bullshit has spread through the culture.
52.2--
we're not so sure about that.
What about "nymphomania"? I see that in movies of the 50s and 60s, and some noirs from earlier.
I think vomiting is an excellent example, so there. It really is common (much more common than multiple personality stuff, which is much clearer in its etiology, as well -- all traceable, pretty much, to Sybil) and I think it suggests some interesting parallel cultural investments in certain relationships between emotion, reason, and bodily functions.
No, his Hamlet was not good.
Christ, it was awful. The Gibson/Zefferelli Hamlet was so, so much better. Even if Mel went a little Lethal Weapon in places, his portrayal of Hamlet as A) an angry motherfucker and B) someone confronting a real ethical dilemma--and even angrier because of that--is superb. He's much more credible than Hawke's angsty trustafarian.
I'm not a purist--I liked My Own Private Idaho, but Hamlet 2000 didn't work at all for me.
Come to think of it, there's a whole mid-century genre of books and movies that have these bizarre plots based on assuming popular versions of Freud are accurate -- a lot of breaking through screen memories to recover and then resolve trauma in a "now it's all fixed!" kind of way. Lots of Hitchcock, but plenty of other writers as well.
Maybe the early modern stuff was relying on some similar genre of medical writing, rather than observation.
And don't get me started on crappy ventilation. When you think about how poisonous some of those chimneys must have been to residents...brrr. In something I came across recently, some skeptical scientist was claiming that a majority of ghost-hauntings were actually caused by carbon monoxide hallucinations. And then there's the 19th-c. smog, and what must have been just debilitating asthma attacks or allergies.
I'm also very curious about the actual prevalence of syphillis in European society. Tertiary syphillitic dementia seems so exotic an explanation for, say, the late careers of a Baudelaire or a Nietzsche, but that really is one fucking terrifying disease.
Of course, some of Freud's case studies seemed implausible to me at first. ("Oh, really, Dora? You actually couldn't speak for a year? I doubt it!") Then I met a bipolar Iranian woman who'd had psychotic episodes, including, she told me, a year or so when she couldn't use her legs.
55: I rejected it mostly because I hardly go to the movies, so I can't think of an example. If it's all over the place, then it works.
"Feinting Fainting" does not appear to have been used in an academic article or book title.
Then I met a bipolar Iranian woman who'd had psychotic episodes, including, she told me, a year or so when she couldn't use her legs.
Then she introduced you to one of her personalities and his blog.
Psychosis happens, but rarely in response to sudden emotional stress.
For most people emotional stress won't bring on psychosis, and for chronic schizophrenics, they probably do hear voices much of the time, but I don't think that this is true, LB. In those already vulnerable or with pre-existing conditions sudden emotional stress can bring on an acute episode.
I can't remember where I heard it or read it, but some where I came across a comment, in an academic context, to the effect of "have you ever noticed that so many historical figures in the 19th century or earlier seem to have had a relative who went mad at some point?" I also can't remember if this was linked to any research on the subject. I know people have written about "the Werther effect" which is probably relevant.
62: I do know that, and put it badly -- I meant to say that sudden emotional stress is unlikely to turn someone from being globally fine to being psychotic. I suppose if someone wrote up some case histories, or the seventeenth century equivalent, of schizophrenics whose intitial psychotic break was in response to an episode of acute emotional stress, those case histories could have supported the meme. But I don't think it's common enough for all those writers to be working from observation.
63: This gives me hope--except for the fact that I think that the slower speed of life then allowed people to be evaluated over a longer time frame. Lincoln could have a nervous breakdown and still get back on his feet. There seems to be much less tolerance for taking time out now than there was then. William James coudl never manage to make it through the tenure process at Harvard today.
Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet is the best one on film, sez I.
I'm told the historiography is shitty, but Madness and Civilization contains a lot about the appearances of madhouses in Europe and the Renaissance- and Reformation-era rise in the understanding of insanity as a condition.
I have to agree with Jackmormon here -I was fine with the corporate update, and had to appreciate the wandering endlessly in Blockbuster scene, but when Hamlet Sr.'s ghost appeared, Hawke seemed unsure whether this was a big enough deal to get off the couch. And neither Hamlet nor Laertes could kick ass with verse nor fight with swords, which is a problem if you're going to feature that in your movie.
My friend the forensic phsychiatrist assured me that during the ice storm a lot of otherwise normal people suffered psychic breaks (her term, don't know what she meant) and showed up at the hospital in a temporary state of psychosis. This was years ago in response to a question of mine about Ophelia.
There's a foreshadowing line of Laertes' about flowers blasted right at the time of their perfection that makes me wonder if Shakespeare knew a young schizophrenic, or someone who did lose her wits young. The same way I wonder what his relationship to death by drowning is; he seems to write it over and over again from different viewpoints.
I wonder if the character of Ophelia becomes annoying because of a tendency to bring in Victorian ideas of the pathetic creature rather than sticking with the intention of someone who is trying to get her father treated properly in death.
I think Ophelia's madness is necessary too as part of the running joke that everything Hamlet intends to do, someone else actually does, and does better.
Just a big please forgive spelling etc., I'm beat.
A History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany. I would imagine that the influence of Galen (newly translated!) and Paracelsus both had a significant effect on popular notions of how mental illness worked and where it came from. There was also a lively Christian tradition of losing your mind for religious reasons, as well as notions floating around in the culture of being "driven to distraction." Part of it, too, surely comes from the notion that various kinds of mental dis-order are all varieties of the same thing, and if being distraught makes you all distracted and miserable and out of your wits, is it not more clear and dramatic to render this distractedness as a more acute version of the same? Psychosis is to freaked out and depressed as puking is to feeling ill.
Tertiary syphillitic dementia seems so exotic an explanation for, say, the late careers of a Baudelaire or a Nietzsche, but that really is one fucking terrifying disease.
It also might not be a true explanation, at least in Nietzsche's case. I am hardly an expert and would be completely open to correction, but I think 'syphillis' was a bit of a catch-all for 'well, something wrong with you.'
I guess it's true that absolutely disgusting skin lesions could have a variety of causes. But by the late 19th c. at least, clinical science would have developed to the point of identifying late-stage syphillis from autopsies (when conducted, of course).
Madness:
A. literary convention.
B. No meds.
C. Quicker diagnosis of "hopelessly insane", fewer niches for mildly disfunctional people. Both my father and my ex-mother-in-law had cousins who disappeared and were locked up.
Last I heard Nietzsche's madness was the result of self-medication for insomnia and, I think, something like bipolar. One medication was chloral hydrate ("knockout drops").
Psychosis happens, but rarely in response to sudden emotional stress. Why is this a commonplace of early modern literature?
And brain fever. Whatever happened to brain fever?
There are arguments that many of the people known for their religious visions in early modern or medieval Europe also experience physical symptoms similar to those of epilepsy.
Sometimes brain fever was meningitis (or encephalitis). Sometimes it was a plot device based on the idea that if there was such a thing as brain fever, it could surely be brought on by fevered thoughts. Sometimes it was ambiguous, as in the case of Sara Crewe's father in A Little Princess -- he was supposedly in the tropics, and therefore much more likely to catch meningitis than your average Englishman, but also all freaked out about his diamond mines.
Yes, I was thinking of Captain Crewe, and also the daughter in The Copper Beaches, who had an attack of brain fever because her father kept pestering her to sign over her inheritance.
Then I met a bipolar Iranian woman who'd had psychotic episodes, including, she told me, a year or so when she couldn't use her legs.
Doesn't that sound like it could be a Paul Simon song lyric?
I think sudden psychotic breaks are well-attested in specific circumstances, but it's pretty tough to sell Ophelia as a character who would necessarily be prone to them; pre-madness she's really not that developed a character, no doubt because for Elizabethan audiences she just didn't need to be. The notion of the weaker sex was ready to hand and explanation enough. (In adapted form it's a Victorian notion too, of course, but it's hardly native to the Victorians.)
That link in 69 looks interesting; thanks rfts!
If my father were pestering me like that, I would sure jump at the chance to claim brain fever too, wouldn't you? OW MY INFLAMED BRAINS! No, I cannot talk to you now.
I have the impression that businessmen don't have strokes as often today as they did in the late 19th century (often referred to back then as some kind of paralysis.)
Ophelia is easier to understand if she's about 14 years old. And Hamlet ought to be 16 or so, not twenty-something.
Why aren't you allowed to laugh?
Because the tantrum is an expression of rage and powerlessness, and laughing at someone who is enraged by their powerlessness is cruel.
I suspect I'm a pretty lax parent in that PK seems by a number of people's lights to be fairly spoiled. OTOH, he has a hell of a temper on him (I can't imagine why) and a low tolerance for frustration, and yet when I use my "serious mama voice" he really does straighten right up. I don't do it often, though. And Mr. B., the poor man, lacks that power so he and PK often just get into yelling matches that drive me up a wall.
"Scarlet fever" was everywhere in the old novels I used to read. It seems to be a diagnosis that is still used today, but they usually refer to it as a strep infection.
And then there's the ol' phthisic (pronounced tizzik), basically used for what seemed to be consumption but was not as severe.
82: Yes, is apoplexy the same thing as a stroke?
45: I like to think that real people behaved that way back then because they never had orgasms.
Yes, this is a condition wholly foreign to those living in the modern age.
Perhaps 82 is just thanks to the advent of beta blockers and other antihypertensive drugs?
One medication was chloral hydrate...
I was reading Low Life again last night; Sante discusses the widespread use of knockout drops (sale of which was a profitable sideline for some gangsters) in the nineteenth century. People put all kinds of terrible things in drinks. The effects of some of them, like Greek fire, seem hard to replicate.
Because the tantrum is an expression of rage and powerlessness, and laughing at someone who is enraged by their powerlessness is cruel.
Oh god, I vividly remember what it feels like to have everyone laughing when you're enraged as the youngest child.
When I was totally at my wits end I'd run upstairs and stomp around, and they'd call me "Clancy The Stomping Cat" which was some children's book we had. It's way infuriating.
91.1: Me too. On the other hand, I shudder to think what I would've developed into if people hadn't occasionally been willing to laugh at my "respect my authoritah!" moments as a kid.
Because the tantrum is an expression of rage and powerlessness, and laughing at someone who is enraged by their powerlessness is cruel.
I dunno, realizing that I had no power was a pretty good thing. Once I accepted that I had no direct power and couldn't win a battle of wills, I quickly learned that negotiation and a measured reasonableness on both sides would make life a lot more pleasant.
If I ever wanted to talk with my parents about something, they'd be happy to take the time with me, but impotent rage on my part was just laughed at and shown for how useless it is.
Ophelia gets harder to take as a character the more you try to justify her eventual madness or come up with traits for her that just aren't in the writing. There's very little there, and it's for a good reason, not just for Elizabethan audiences but because it's not important, to know more would make the story naturalistic, and it isn't that kind of story, just like you don't need to know much about Juliet pre Romeo except her age and her class.
Hamlet's age moves around, time expands and contracts, it's better, I think, that she's a shadowy figure, but it isn't because Shakespeare lacked ability to flesh out his women characters.
Not to get all navel-gazy, but my tantrums weren't generally about wanting some priviledge, and more that I got relentlessly teased and every now and then would just break down in frustration that I couldn't get my point across without the conversation derailing, generally at my expense.
Poor me, I know! I know. How did I do it! What a champ.
87: I'm not sure. Looking it up, apoplexy seems to have been a broader term that could have included strokes depending on the symptoms.
The only alternative to laughing at a tantrum isn't giving in to it. It is possible to be kind about someone's frustration without letting them have their way.
How did I do it!
Apparently you learned to shoot back.
laughing at someone who is enraged by their powerlessness is cruel
Yeah, I suppose. But it's a good idea to give a kid a realistic model of how that behavior will be received everywhere else.
it's a good idea to give a kid a realistic model of how that behavior will be received everywhere else.
Oh, nonsense. Once they learn how to articulate their feelings, the tantrums are a lot less frequent, so that's not a lesson they need to learn. It's a developmental stage is all. Better to just ignore it and teach them that it doesn't work; after all, the people you love and trust most in the world do *not* need to be the ones that teach you realistically how everyone else in the world is going to react to you.
My youngest sister used to throw the funniest tantrums. I may have told this story here, of her as a young child, age two or three, going in the swimming pool for the very first time. My uncle held her up so she could 'swim' around the deep end, and her face turned a bright blotchy pink, and she started bellowing 'Put me down! Put me down!' Perplexed, he moved back towards the wall, thinking she was frightened, until she yelled 'I CAN DO IT BY MYSELF.'
There is not much to do but laugh at that point.
For no particular reason, except the mentions of Nietzsche and syphilis above:
Nietszche is a hero of this time, who declared that God was dead and imagined himself to be God, who preached the exuberance of man and ended at the mercy of women, who saw the necessity of war and was sick at the sight of it. He knew with sanity that you cannot be sane either with illusion or without it and so you go mad. And so he did. It was he who bought God's tickets for the Argentine; standing there on the station platform with his handkerchief round his head; then going back to take the rap for twenty or thirty years, knowing everything but not talking, pacing in his upstairs room and a mother and a sister listening below and all the worshippers taking down his footsteps. He saw that God had to die and that man would go mad if God died; but man had always been mad so what was the difference. At least God would be safe in the Argentine. So Nietzsche signed the confession and said that he had murdered God and the police took it all down and did not believe him. It is a habit of criminals after all to make false confessions.
that's not a lesson they need to learn
Oh nonsense, yourself. I've had adult coworkers who still hadn't gotten past that developmental stage and everybody, but everybody, wished someone had addressed it back before it became a permanent feature of their personalities.
Yeah, I'm with B in 102. Laughing invalidates the kid's emotions. That said, Cala's little sister sounds funny as hell.
I've had adult coworkers who still hadn't gotten past that developmental stage and everybody, but everybody, wished someone had addressed it back before it became a permanent feature of their personalities.
I think people who throw tantrums as adults believe deep down that no one is listening, and so they get more and more shouty. I think if anything, it's a result of not getting listened to when you were growing up.
(Like really never getting listened to. Not just at tantrum time.)
There were a couple of Shakespeare plays I never read, because I wanted to see what it was like to be in an audience and not know the plot at all.
In Two Noble Kinsmen (SPOILER) I had no clue that the gaoler's daughter, who's kind of hilarious in the first half, goes mad. It really comes out of the blue and is very moving when (because) you don't see it coming. Kind of hard to pull that off in Hamlet now, though.
Sorry, heebie. Were you saying something?
(I'm not channeling my angst here. I found ways to be listened to. I'm talking now about other sorry saps.)
Sorry, heebie. Were you saying something?
I was stomping, mostly.
I think people who act like that as adults do so because it worked when they were kids, not because people failed to laugh at them.
Depends a bit on the kid and the circumstances, though. Sometimes they need validation that they're being heard, but sometimes they're just tired and cranky and ridiculous and can be pretty much treated accordingly. There have been a few occasions when my kid couldn't even keep a straight face himself when I started giggling at something he was Outraged! about.
I'm with apo, personally. Some emotional responses should be invalidated. Laughing is actually one of the least cruel ways to do this.
94: I'm not sure naturalism vs. lack thereof really matters that much. The characters still have to be convincing internal to whatever kind of narrative is going on. I don't think Ophelia's "shadowiness" is a necessary feature of a story; I think she appealed as part of a story in which, as a type, she wasn't "shadowy" at all.
No slur intended on the Bard's other female characters, of course.
113: Right. Healthy moderation, I'll get behind that.
Look at me, talking out of my ass as though I have kids. But my cats, they need validation too, you know.
113: Sure, fair enough. If you can make something into a joke, by all means go for it, and if they're just tired and cranky, then put them to bed.
I'm probably a little overreactive on the laughing-at-tantrums thing because PK cannot ABIDE being laughed at.
Some emotional responses should be invalidated.
A-yup. B, I don't go out of my way to laugh at my child, but when he does something funny, it's funny.
Some emotional responses should be invalidated.
Like what? We're talking emotional responses here, not actual actions, right?
PK cannot ABIDE being laughed at
Oh, so someone might ax murder him first. You have to tell me this stuff before I make my predictions, B.
Some emotional responses should be invalidated. Laughing is actually one of the least cruel ways to do this.
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's SUPER-EGO!
119: The kid's six, for god's sake. He's great at playing games and laughing *with* people. But yeah, he's going to need to learn to go along with the joke when it's at his expense at some point.
And don't be mean to my kid, yo.
"Pick your battles" is another good lesson for both parents and kids to absorb early in the relationship.
122 gets it exactly right. Why say no if you're just going to back down eventually? Save it for the shit you really care about.
And don't be mean to my kid, yo.
This is why kids need at least one sibling. Someone to give them shit, teach them to hit back and such. If he can't take being laughed at, little Oggeds are going to give him hell.
122 gets it exactly right.
That's kind of my philosophy of commenting on Unfogged, too.
If he can't take being laughed at, little Oggeds are going to give him hell.
Dude, he's in a touchy-feely hippie school.
That said, yes, this will be a problem for him if he doesn't get past it. On the other hand, so far, he seems to do just fine joking and playing rough with other kids, surprisingly. He's not humorless, he just doesn't like being made fun of.
he's in a touchy-feely hippie school
So they won't make fun of him, they'll just steal his stuff.
I think I'm beginning to understand your kid, B.
127: Highly unlikely. He does not tend to be the whipping boy; he tends to be the practical joker.
113 & 114 have it right. When kids howl against their powerlessness, it's important to let them know that they're safe and loved and that you as a parent can contain their rage. Laughter can be effective; of course, it can also be hurtful and alienating, so YMMV.
119: Like what?
Petulance would be a pretty consistently bad one, for instance. Not that you won't feel it, of course, but it's nobody's duty to humour or validate you when you're expressing it.
120: Only the very super-est ego will do for yours truly.
Not that you won't feel it, of course
That's all I'm saying. Acknowledging that something's real doesn't mean you have to humor it.
Which isn't spelled with a "u" by the way.
Um, it comes right after the h, B.
Which isn't spelled with a "u" by the way.
Oh do go on.
133: Shut up, you! You're a bad parent! THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!!
114: Are you saying that as a character she's not very convincing, because she's drawn in a way that would have been understandable to Shakespeare's audience, but doesn't work as well for ours?
And that it doesn't work as well because we're less suceptible to the "weaker sex" as an idea?
Meanwhile, other parenting issues make the news.
I clicked the link in 137 and had to check the date. Didn't we have a story exactly like that a couple months ago?
136: Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Well, I'd be cautious about saying we're less susceptible to the weaker sex idea per se. More that that kind of idea has morphed in our age into something that makes Shakespeare's version look alien.
I guess I'll find out more about the causes of tantrums when I have a kid or kids of my own, but the ones that inspired laughter in my parents were almost all petulance. They were too damn reasonable to give me good reason to tantrum, so of course they'd laugh if I started throwing a hissy fit at them. But if something happened that had upset me, they'd always hear me out and explain what was going on. But that was when I was talking coherently. I don't see how you can hear a tantrum out, they're just sound and fury.
If anything, I think it helped that I didn't have any siblings, so my parents could give me some shit without worrying about any siblings taking it as tacit approval to go even further.
I don't think 137 really qualifies as a "parenting issue" per se.
Sure it does. It implies the existence of a class of parents willing to pimp their kids.
Yes, but only in a fairly indirect way. No such parents were actually involved in the situation at hand.
Kind of makes you wonder how often it had happened in the past that he was able to be caught in such a sting.
144: It's at least related to a parenting issue insofar as it serves to remind us that while today's at-least-halfway-decent parent is encouraged to agonize over her failure to expertly manage every last nuance of every possible facet of her child's psycho-sexual-social-emotional development ... there are some parents out there doing some really bad shit. So cut yourself a break and etc.
I can't quite figure out which one of my parents was the stricter. No question that my mother did more of the scolding, though. I'm still sometimes a little bit surprised to hear myself utter a line that comes straight from the maternal stock of phrases. The sensibility behind those phrases was so different, and so much at odds with today's parenting "philosophies." But I've long since learned to stop worrying about this. The fact is, 'Quit yer nonsense!', when delivered in just the right tone, really does work. That said, 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph, child, don't choke!' is no substitute for the Heimlich manoeuvre.
I just get irrationally goofy about them.
This always mystified me about parents, until I had my own children. Then I realized that the only reason they thought their kids were the best in the world is that they hadn't met mine yet.
I know this is veering a bit far from the actual subject, but I think you should always be careful ever casually invalidating what a child is saying, particularly if it is important to them. I don't mean that you should go in the other direction, but even when they are quite young, if they are frustrated and angry with you it might be because you screwed up.
This happened to me quite often at a young age -- and sure, I learned I was powerless in the situation, but also that there was a nearly complete refusal to engage with what I saw then as important problems (I was mostly right, but sometimes way off base).
All I learned from that is that people who have power over you can use it in arbitrary and indefensible ways (or at least, can refuse to justify or defend it). I didn't learn the lesson they hoped I would. To me the situation was both unacceptable, and one that left me powerless. The lesson I learned was that I had to change the situation.
So not many years later, I just left. Wasn't the best thing for any of us, but I preferred to have agency in a crappy situation than be constrained in a `better' one. If my parents had been willing to treat rational, carefully thought out questions and proposals with any sort of real engagement, it would have saved us all a lot of heartache.
I'm not saying that kids don't do all sorts of nonsense, of course, or that you should go along with it if they are acting up.
148: What were all the rational, carefully thought out proposals about? Are we talking serious issues in retrospect, or just seemingly serious at the time?
148: You know, a therapist once asked me what I thought the most important thing was to being a good parent and I said "respect." She made it clear that she thought this a radical idea. (In a good way, I think, but still not "normal.") By it, I meant pretty much what you seem to be saying. I probably developed that philosophy in response to an upbringing similar to what you describe, too. "Don't be so sensitive," is really one of those stock parenting phrases that ought to be retired.
On a similar note, I find I have a very hard time with the concept of mom and dad being required under all circumstances to put up a unified front with the kids, especially if one parent really is being unfair. My parents took that approach and it always just left me feeling no one was ever on my side. As a result, if Rory and her dad were disagreeing in any serious way (and oh their shouting matches!), I felt what side I took ought to be based on what I thought was right -- or even just trying to force them both to see each others side -- rather than just backing him to reinforce the power structure. I know plenty of people think this is totally the wrong approach, and apparently it didn't do much for the marriage.
Our youngest may not get quite laughed at, but certainly doesn't get taken seriously if she attempts a tantrum - mainly because I'm like, "C'mon, you've got 3 big siblings, you think I haven't seen better than this?" and also because her big sisters start cooing, "awww, you're so cute when you're angry!" She has a comedy pout and frown, poor kid, goodness knows how she'll grow up. She does have the best self-esteem of anyone I've ever met though, claiming to be the cleverest person she knows.
My #2 is the one I have difficulties with too. Threats don't work (she's far too masochistic), she's very nearly too big for me to pick up and move physically, and appeals to her better nature ("Just do it and make me happy for 5 minutes? I thought children were supposed to want to please their parents?") are deservedly sneered at. I have to rely on looking really fucking scarily angry, and that usually takes more energy than I can muster.
He's not humorless, he just doesn't like being made fun of
this is like saying "He's not short, he's just got short legs".
I think my wife is the stricter of us, except when she isn't. I get more "promise not to tell mom" than she gets of the reverse, I"m sure.
I'm not aware of having had a policy regarding tantrums. I know we've disagreed in front of the kids about how to deal with situations, when everybody was heated. Doesn't seem to have messed them up too much. My son is the more stubborn and the one more inclined to tantrums; I may have laughed occasionally, mostly in amazement and wonder. But I'm sure annoyed containment is the prevailing mood from me.
150: Yeah, I think the reason people often adopt the unified-front approach is that seeming unfair is a much lesser risk than letting your kid figure out how to play you off each other, as I have a feeling most kids surely will. Also it puts strains on the relationship between the parents, one of whom almost always winds up being cast in the role of the ogre and comes to resent it.
I'm still curious about the comment in 148. My sense is that if kids are going to leave home early it's usually over some fairly substantial form of dysfunction or abuse -- at least this is the case with the vast majority of people I've known who did so -- but what I understand us to be talking about here is fairly quotidian tantrums and teasing.
I feel like I'm a pretty good amalgamation of my folks, but I definitely have copped a bit of my dad's "bad cop in reserve" strategy, e.g., if I'm getting seriously involved in a disciplinary issue, it had better get resolved quick. There's almost two parts to how you parent: there's your own basically instinctive sense of how you want to do it, and then there's the conversations you have with your partner about parenting where you're trying to synchronize the message and present a united front.
My daughter is pretty self-regulating anyway, and besides, I kind of want her to be a bit feral in certain respects. We're getting drawn a bit into the soccer games n' stuff world, but we're going to have time where we're just sitting around playing video games or looking at bugs or whatever no matter what. I'm not getting on the "breed one of the Master Race" bus, period.
it's always very easy to be firm and resist tantrums when you're rested and happy, but then give in after a while if you're tired or distracted or just want an easy life. The difficult bit is to get the little boy to generalise this and understand the wider principle of only attacking people when they're vulnerable.
157: My ex-wife mastered that principle. Her parents taught her all too well.
If anyone sees JL around these parts, could you ask him to e-mail me? It's semi-urgent.
I actually do not believe that every feeling is sacred. Some feelings deserve to be ridiculed.
Adversity builds character -- l- ook how wonderfully Heebie turned out! My least-coddled, most abused brother has turned out to be the most successful and least troubled of us all (n=7).
Parents, abuse your kids! But abuse them with love!
154: DS, I'll try to remember to come back and address that tonight.
161--
i charge 'jimmy carter' with violating blog rules.
i'm pretty sure that the by-laws specify that presidential pseuds are only for deeply embarrassing revelations of a sexual nature.
he is going presidential without, so far, the least whiff of sex.
Psychosis happens, but rarely in response to sudden emotional stress. Why is this a commonplace of early modern literature?
I wonder how much of this had to do with exposure to toxic metals (arsenic, lead, mercury)? The phrase "mad as a hatter" supposedly comes from the psychosis suffered by hatmakers from the use of mercury compounds.
162: Too early to tell. I kind of hope he's violating blog rules...
I think the blog EULA specifies a cure period, whereby the offender can retroactively justify inappropriate use of presidentential pseudonymity by divulging a shocking and/or embarassing secret of an explicitly sexual nature.
165--
damn it, it's a violation of posting rules to discuss the eula without using any handle at all.
165: If Jimmy doesn't remedy the situation, I have a few stories I can divulge about the things he's done "in his hear."
In her hear??? It's only technically an orifice!
DS, kb: presidential, because at the end of the day my parents had a difficult child to deal with in me and made some mistakes in how they tried, but they are essentially good people.
DS: some of it was stupid kid stuff, and some of it really wasn't. I put the caveat (that I knew it wasn't really the same thing) in because I'm not talking about basic tantrums and teasing. I only said something because I'm sensitive about this. I can remember at a very young age real rage, rage with purpose and focus, at a parent having arbitrarily dictated something or other and refused to engage with me about it when I called them on it. The rage came from casual dismissal of my stake in whatever it was. From laughing, as it were, at the idea of my own agency. When I got a bit older, I'd never rage, because it was impotent. I didn't like being lied to, I didn't like being manipulated, but these things you learn to live with in people. What I really couldn't abide with was refusing to engage with the person I was instead of an abstract idea of what I should be --- there was no clear connection between my actions and their model of who or what I was.
As for leaving: there was a bit of other craziness in my life outside of family, that definitely contributed to my leaving (14ish). My leaving was really a matter of calling my father on a bluff but ended up teaching both of us I could manage. I came back after a while, left again, we lost contact for a while. We were dysfunctional, obviously. Not abusive for all that we had our moments. Retrospectively I have a lot of sympathy for them, but I can't say they made the best of it. I was much quicker and more willful than they, which must have been difficult, but the response was to try and force me into a channel of their choosing, a tactic that backfired early but not one they every gave up on or had the imagination to vary.
addendum to 170: I must have been a real little shit to deal with, but I was pretty often right.
Yeah, if there's some other substantial craziness going on that's contributing, that's obviously a different ball of wax. If what's at stake is something in the league "my parents won't listen to me when I'm trying to tell them a bully threatened my life at knifepoint" or "my parents won't listen to me when I'm trying to get their advice about a friend who's strung out on heroin," and other such, well, totally not laughing matters, and considerably more sympathetic than "my parents won't listen to me about why we shouldn't eat meatloaf on Fridays."
OTOH I'd be willing to argue that a certain amount of parental arbitrariness and unfairness, aside from being basically inevitable what with everyone having foibles, is a feature rather than a defect. (One of the most important lessons for kids to learn, especially smart kids who're good at thinking in the abstract, is that they're going to run into situations where the airtightness of their argument doesn't matter and the most important thing is not that they be listened to.) But if it's an absolute constant then sure, that's a bad thing.
they're going to run into situations where the airtightness of their argument doesn't matter and the most important thing is not that they be listened to
And yes, I'll admit that there's a certain irony in my saying this. Okay, so the kids won't necessarily learn the lesson particularly well...
