I have small children who sometimes misbehave. When this happens, I need to lay down the law. They gradually learn that they won't get away with bad behavior. The problem never quite goes away. They have to learn the same lesson over and over again sometimes. But they gradually get the point and misbehave less often than they would if I never punished them.
My middle son is particularly strong-willed. I remember one recent instance when he was playing in the back yard. He was pulling on some leaves at the end of a tree limb. He had gripped the outermost twigs and leaves on that particular branch and was pulling so hard it bent the entire branch back. I said, "Let go of that, buddy." He didn't respond and kept pulling. I reiterated in a sterner tone, "Let go of that!" He ignored me. Sort of. What he actually did was, almost imperceptibly, looked toward me. I don't quite remember if he turned his head toward me or if just his eye darted to me, then back to what he was doing. But for a brief second he was looking right at me. He heard me alright and he understood what I was telling him to do. He decided to ignore me and pulled until he'd torn the end of the branch off. As punishment, I sent him inside. I explained to him that he had deliberately chosen to ignore me and that the consequences were the loss of a privilege (playing outside). This is a three-year-old I'm talking about. I have to treat him as if he's morally responsible for his behavior. If I fail to do so, he'll be a nasty little shit-head who tries to get away with everything (er...more so). The lesson was more about compliance than about the trivial damage to the tree, which I didn't actually care about. Learn to listen to dad and comply right away, because the next time I might be warning you about some kind of imminent danger. I don't think that's possible unless he has some concept of "culpability."
That is one extreme. In a sense we have to hold even small children morally accountable for their behavior as soon as they can grasp the concept of "consequences."
On the other hand, I'm thinking of someone I knew in college. He went for two years, then dropped out to live with his mother in a small rural town. Ten years of that, and he still wasn't doing anything with his life. Someone could have tried to explain to him that this was the destiny he chose for himself. Someone might have scolded him for being a "bum", or explained to him that he had so much more potential. Someone might have described the many other options available to him and pointed out that he'd decided to turn these down in favor of the "live with mom" option. It likely would have done no good at all. This concept of moral responsibility is kind of empty if it has almost no chance of affecting someone's behavior. Like I said in my previous post, why whip and curse a mule that is never going to move anyway?
These are the two extremes. One is that even small children should be held morally responsible for their actions. The other is that even a grown-ass adult isn't morally responsible in any meaningful sense. I feel like I'm capable of entertaining both concepts, though I lean toward the first. Maybe both are useful.
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