Do as I purr, squeal, chirp, and chatter, not as I do
Some folk wisdom about parents and their influence on children
As I write this, the news media is covering a mass shooting at a high school in Winder, Georgia. Colt Gray, a boy of 14, shot and killed two students and two teachers. The boy was taken into custody at the scene and will be tried as an adult for murder. The father of the boy, Colin Gray, was also arrested and charged.
I have my reservations about the state punishing a parent because their child has committed a crime. My reservations are not grounded in the legality of it, but in its morality. I just don't think it's right. Earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley from Michigan were each sentenced to a minimum 10 years in prison because of their failure to secure their weapons and recognize their son's mental health issues. The Crumbley’s son killed four students in 2021.
Even though I don't think parents should be subject to legal action because of something their children did, it doesn’t mean I don’t think parents matter. On the contrary, I’m learning just how impactful parents can be.
Coocoo for Cocoa Puffs
Occasionally I venture out away from my home or office and find myself around Homo sapiens. When I do, my position is analogous to that of the zoologist studying meerkats in their natural habitat. I’m curious as to what these organisms are doing. How do they get on with things? And so, I position myself at a distance so as to not interfere with their natural behaviors, and then I observe.
Turns out “do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t quite work for parents.
I’ve had the pleasure of watching my niece grow from a newborn to toddler to a four-year-old preschooler taking courses in a Montessori school. It is the first time that I as a mature, somewhat wizened, adult have had this experience. I am repeatedly struck by how often this bright, innocent little girl uses language in instrumental ways. Once she learned how to speak, she began using this ability to influence her world in her favor.
Here is a recent example.
Me, my mother, sister, and my sister’s two pre-school children (including the aforementioned niece) all piled into my sister’s car for a trip downtown. My sister sat in the back between her two charges buckled up in car seats. Her youngest, a five-month-old son, tends to cry in the car. That left me to drive the four us around town, with our mother sitting on the passenger’s side. Later that night, after the trip was over, my niece came up to me and asked if I could drive her mother’s car again tomorrow. She repeated her request the following day.
Why was she so interested in me driving? Or interested in me at all?
Well, she wasn’t.
The meanings and connotations that would be associated with an adult saying these things are just not there. There is no subtext of “oh, she is saying she likes my driving” or, “she’s implying she wants to see all her family members together and happy.”
No, not at all.
She was actually interested in having her mother in the backseat with her. It was naked, egocentric, self-interest. She wanted her mother close to her. And I don’t blame her! If I was four years old, I’d much rather sit with the person who is my whole world, then riding in the backseat by myself. So, she determined that a way to reach that goal was to tell me to drive. In her mind, the presence of me in the driver’s seat would mean the presence of her mom in the backseat. Simple as that.
I believe that most communication from young child to parent is of this instrumental variety, where language is used for the express purpose of getting an adult to perform some action. The meanings of the words don’t really matter. If saying “coocoo for Cocoa Puffs” meant I’d hop behind the wheel of my sister’s SUV, so be it.
So much for the words coming from the toddler. Well, what about the words from the parent or caregiver? Is there shared meaning in that exchange? Do kids understand what their parents are telling them?
We all know that toddlers are in the early stages of developing their comprehension skills. Parents know their kids are still developing and modulate their language accordingly with simple words and sentences (curiously, I’ve noticed in myself and others, a tendency to talk louder when talking to infants who are just learning language. I am not sure why - maybe it is because we believe that by talking louder, we are enunciating more clearly?). I suspect toddlers respond more to the emotions and facial expressions of their caregivers (Dad’s face is wrinkling up, I need to change my behavior) and less to their words.
So there I was, observing Homo sapiens utter noises at one another, but it was unclear to me how much meaning was being communicated. So the question became for me, how do Homo sapiens teach their young how to live in the world when language is not that effective?
Meerkat models
I brought up meerkats earlier. It wasn’t at random.
They’re cool animals! They have a cool name. Meerkat. They are described in cool ways. A colony of meerkats is called a mob. The way they stand, in that cool way, is called the sentinel position. Their young, called pups, can also be called meerkittens! Why hasn’t Disney gotten on this Meerkat train? The marketing possibilities are endless.
But I digress. The reason why I have meerkat on my mind is because I am remembering how they teach their young how to survive. Like all mammals, meerkat parents do and their young imitate. The algorithm seems to be - imitate mom or dad, evaluate the results for positive or negative outcomes, repeat or modify. Mom goes to this embankment to search for fruit, so will I. Dad uses this gesture to catch a cricket, I’ll try it to. For meerkats, it makes no sense to say do as I purr, squeal, chirp, and chatter, not as I do.
This is what the youngest of Homo sapiens do. They imitate. It doesn’t matter what is coming out a parent’s mouth. The mental algorithm at this stage of their development is (1) imitate the adults who take care of me, (2) evaluate the results for positive or negative outcomes, (3) repeat or modify.
Should parents spank themselves?
I don’t want the analogies to meerkats to get in the way of the main point:
toddlers are not as influenced by words as we might think, and they learn their behaviors through imitation.
There are, obviously, well-developed theories in the social sciences that explore how human beings develop cognitively and how they learn (see social learning theory as an example). I hope my back-of-the-napkin conclusions do not diverge greatly from established scientific thought. My purpose here is to generate a little folk wisdom for myself so that I can make sense of the world around me. Here goes:
It seems more effective to model behavior beforehand than telling a child what they should do in the moment or admonishing them for what they should have done in the past. For instance, if a toddler sees their parents constantly sharing, then the child will be more likely to share not because their parents say it is a good thing to do but simply because she is imitating her parents sharing.
Punishing a young child for bad behavior is to some degree attempting to correct for the behavior of their parents. I’m not implying that there should be no repercussions for bad behavior, only that the cause of the behavior one wants to correct for cannot be reduced to a series of conscious decisions by the child to misbehave. Instead, it is in great part influenced by the behaviors the child has imitated in his parents. I say “some degree” here because a child is not their parents, and they have different dispositions and personalities from their parents. But given that children at that age mimic what they see, much of their bad behavior is a result of this mimicking.
When parents decide to spank their toddlers for getting out of line, they should spank themselves as well because they deserve some of the blame.
There are better and worse parents. I tend to believe that parents by and large love their children and do not want to harm them. Despite that love, their actions can prepare them to a greater or lesser degree to succeed in society. I begrudgingly, regrettably settled on this point.
The influence of parents on their children cannot be overestimated. Think of a parent who had to explain through language all the steps in say, brushing teeth. Depending upon how OCD you were, it is possible to spend several typewritten pages (with diagrams) explaining all the materials involved (toothpaste, brush, floss, mouthwash, sink, water), the logistics (when to brush, how long, how often, who should do it with you), and the process of moving from plaque covered teeth to clean pearly whites. But almost all of this is picked up by simply watching. Eventually, there will be many why questions from the child. But by that time, they are brushing with the appropriate materials, logistics, and process. Now repeat this for every single activity and social interaction.
I started this piece by talking about the recent mass shooting in Winder, Georgia. I said that it was immoral for parents to face criminal charges for the behaviors of their children. And then I proceeded to talk about how much parents matter for young children.
What gives?
There are mitigating factors. First, kids charged with crimes are not toddlers who haven’t developed an understanding of language. They are teenagers (adolescents) capable of abstract thought. They know right from wrong. My little folk wisdom detailed here is limited to toddlers who couldn’t even make sense of the word abstract must less think that way. Second. adolescents are equally or more influenced by their peers as they are their parents. And so, while the 14-year-old learned how to brush his teeth from his parents, he might learn a new way from Tucker the captain of the football team. In this regard, animal documentaries are instructive. It turns out adolescent social mammals also learn from their peers through play. Third, how prepared are we as a society to embrace agents of socialization as causes for what people do (parents are one agent, schools are another, media is another)? As a biologist turned sociologist, I personally see very little room in human behavior for free will - behavior is nothing more than our genetic endowment and our social circumstances, neither of which we created. But I recognize the need for societal stability to hold people accountable for their actions. If we start allowing people to offload responsibility to genetic and social precedents, then it becomes that much harder to justify meting out penalties for bad behavior.
These mitigating factors are why I find it unacceptable that the father of Colt Gray is facing legal action but feel as if parents of toddlers should spank themselves when their children misbehave.