No Bad Kids
Excerpt from pp. 35-36 of The Soul of Discipline: The Simplicity Parenting Approach to Warm, Firm, and Calm Guidance - From Toddlers to Teens by Kim John Payne
STAGE ONE: THE YOUNG CHILD
The first phase [of inner speech development] begins when a toddler starts to speak. We notice that, though most of her speech is directed toward other people, the little child may babble away and occasionally say something like “I need to put Molly Dolly in her space suit now.” What she is doing is guiding herself by talking things through out loud. How does this relate to behavior? At this stage, children don’t yet have the capacity for inner speech, which is so vital for self-regulation. So they try to figure things out aloud. Keep in mind that a child between the ages of two and four can understand rules and even recite them for you verbatim, then turn right around and ignore or break them. “It’s hard to realize that children are not yet able to regulate their own minds,” says Dr. Dee Joy Coulter. “The brain cells which regulate inner speech also regulate motor impulses. Until the child is about four and has developed strong language skills, the speech powers of those cells just aren’t capable of overriding the motor urges of those same cells.”
Picture a pond teeming with large red fish and tiny blue fish. The wriggly red fish represent bursts of impulsive behavior. The calm blue fish help a child regulate and reflect on his or her behavior. Young children are equipped with a loosely woven neural net that can hold only big red fish. They may occasionally catch some of the little blue fish, but those tend to slip through and fall back into the water.
The key here is to realize that your young kids are not deliberately defiant. They are not consciously disobeying when they repeatedly drop food on the floor after being told not to. You may be certain they know the rules because you have told them again and again. But knowing them and being able to act on them are not the same thing. If you become frustrated and forceful and shout at a child who dumps his or her food on the floor repeatedly, your yelling doesn’t increase the child’s ability to self-regulate— to stop dropping the food. In fact, our antics can have very much the opposite effect. Scaring and shocking a child by yelling can delay the development of his or her inner speech. And it interferes with the bonding and attachment that is developing between you and your son or daughter. ...
