

Guilt Your Children Well? The importance of guilt in child rearing - cwan
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/guilt-your-children-well/

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frossie
Unfortunately, the primary source material is behind a paywall, so I can't
reference it directly.

Personally, I have a negative gut reaction to guilting kids into doing what
you want. I think it is a technique that is manipulative and not in a good
way. Let me use the litmus test of parenting techniques: would you let someone
else use that technique on your child? I would be uncomfortable if someone
guilted my child into doing something against her better instincts.

I can't help noting that guilt is used here to set up a negative association
with a past misdeed. It is possible to do that with a variety of other
unpleasant-to-the-child techniques, such as time outs, confiscating privileges
etc.

Also, their longtitudinal survey went up to about 5 years of age. This is a
time where kids still haven't completely internalised the reasons for good
behaviour (eg. social harmony) hence the need for more Pavlovian techniques.
It's not clear to me that this scales to, for example, teenagers.

Finally, there could be some giant selection effect here: kids who feel guilt
are probably more socially sensitive than other kids, and so are more likely
to behave in a way that does not cause waves.

Difficult to say without reference to the primary material. Man, journal
paywalls suck.

~~~
w1ntermute
_journal paywalls suck_

I have never understood why research funded by taxpayers' money is not
available to the general public free of charge. Does anybody know why this
system still exists?

Edit: is
[http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=27...](http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2726045)
the article? It says it's a "draft" (lacks the publisher's final edits)
version, but it should provide you with the information you need.

Edit 2: PDF: <http://omploader.org/vMjd0OQ/nihms129980.pdf>

~~~
frossie
Huge thanks for digging that up. Not surprisingly, it doesn't say what one
might think after reading the OP, with its mention of Catholic guilt.

First, the term guilt is used here to describe _any_ kind of emotional
discomfort (eg. anxiety) that is associated with transgressions.

Secondly, the authors accept that effortful control (elsewhere called self-
regulation - what you or I might think of as internalising the rules) has a
large positive effect on children's behaviour.

What they set out to do is to see how they play out in different children.

I am now going to _grossly_ paraphrase the rest because I doubt anybody is
still reading this:

If the kid is a nervous wreck, it doesn't matter how self-regulated they are
because they are going to behave anyway.

If the kid is tough as nails, you had better hope they have internalised the
rules or else you have a troublemaker on your hands.

------
Ixiaus
A silly convention in my opinion. Children only need to be _reared_ because
the parents often times do not live by their own principles and ethics (nobody
is perfect, I do understand this, I mean it in the majority of life
experiences).

Children learn by example - punishment, guilt, anything on the end of the
stick that trains the child into feeling bad and _conforming_ to someone
else's wishes is archaic and stagnates social evolution.

On that same note though, free will is free will - I just focus on my beliefs,
principles, and do my best to live by them no matter what in the hopes that I
either meet someone that is living theirs more than mine, or I inspire someone
to live by theirs. Whether that be an adult or child doesn't particularly
matter.

~~~
shpxnvz
I've spent the last 15 months watching what and how my baby girl learns, and I
can definitively say that she does not learn _only_ by example, which means
that some other form of guidance in necessary. It's certainly true that
children mimic many things we do which become ingrained behaviors in time, but
it is not the only way they learn.

Case in point; my daughter has never seen a person touch a hot stove, run into
a table at full speed, spit food across the room, pee on the carpet, bite
someone's toe, chew a crayon, or any of a thousand other things she'll attempt
to do until we teach her otherwise. Let's face it, at this stage she's a
chemically fueled entropy machine. Her instinct is to try everything she can
think of just to see what happens.

In activities where she does behave by mimicking, for instance eating, we've
adopted the behavior we'd like her to learn - we eat almost exclusively what
she should, but this won't stop her from attempting innumerable dangerous or
socially unacceptable behaviors before she can reason for herself, and in
those case there is more needed than just leading by example.

Of course, the children in this research are a little bit older, and I am very
curious to see how her behavior changes in the next few years.

------
zargon
From comment #7 (R.K.) "Guilt naturally morphs into resentment... What works?
Parents in therapy. This will help a lot."

