Watson’s work influenced renowned American psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose theories came to dominate child psychology in the mid-twentieth century. Skinner’s approach was to keep children famished for their parents’ love, affection, and approval. Many twentieth-century parents wouldn’t have thought to question this approach, which amounted to withholding love and affection in order to control a child’s behaviour. Behaviourism has ruled the day for decades in Western society, likely in part due to the outward appearance of quick results. What parents and even scientists failed to realize, however, was that these so-called results were achieved through a devastating sacrificial play. The parent’s relationship with the child was wielded as conditional, and it was in rendering conditional a bond we now understand to be essential that a well-behaved child was produced.
One of the earliest societal steps away from behaviourism and toward attachment-focused parenting came with the publication of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. Published in 1946 amid behaviourist fervour, this wildly popular parenting book espoused a more child-centred approach in which parents were encouraged to let their love for their children flow freely, to embrace flexibility over rigidity, to treat children as human beings, and to trust their own intuition as the only true expert on their child. Mothers flocked to buy his book and devoured its contents with relief, making it the second bestselling book of all time (behind the Bible). But Dr. Spock faced a long campaign of public scrutiny and a backlash that blamed him for encouraging mollycoddling, laziness, and a host of social ills. He may have encouraged a step toward attachment, but Dr. Spock was not successful in overriding the popular notions of behaviourism that were deeply entrenched in Western parenting culture.
Unfortunately, of all the psychological theories that influence the pop culture of child-raising, behaviourism is the most dominant, even to this day. You will continue to run into parents (and non-parents!) who are quick to offer advice that feeds off the finger-wagging admonitions of the behaviourists, such as when they advise you to “train” your children using consequences and other disconnection-based antics. Don’t fall for it! (I’ll explain why not throughout this book, and have written extensively on this in Discipline Without Damage.) The bottom line is that the generation of parents influenced by the allure of behaviourism (and who among us has not secretly wished for well-behaved children at one point or another?) would have been hard-pressed to escape trying out some of its tenets on their children—and that includes you.
Above, you learned that you can understand much of your own programming by identifying what was missing from the parenting that was practised on you. As you seek this understanding, you may need a safe place to vent years of anger and sadness. Many of us have tried to explain away our childhood, shut down our feelings, or numb them out. But what we don’t express, we repress, and often it will depress. Once you let it out, you may find it easier to call on compassion and remember that your parents were not bad people or terrible parents; they were simply raising you according to the norms of their day, as well as grappling with their own challenges. The science of child development has added more information to the knowledge bank since then, and this includes understanding the negative impact of behaviourism.
What Behavourism Doesn’t Get
The trouble with the behaviourist approach is that it lacks an understanding of three key areas in the development of a child: attachment, developmental awareness, and consciousness. Each is crucial to understanding why a child behaves the way they do. Parenting right from the start includes creating a solid foundation for your child that grows from these three concepts. Let’s explore how each of them can infuse your parenting with the most up-to-date principles in child development science.
Attachment
Attachment-centred parenting emphasizes the importance of relationship and connection. As a basic rule of the human condition, our most significant emotional and psychological events, both positive and negative, will occur during our first six years of life. This is because (a) we form our deepest attachments with our most significant caregivers during this formative time, and (b) this is when a child’s brain is wiring up at the rate of approximately one million new neural connections per second.13 You grow as you go.
Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a noted psychologist, has explored in detail how we move through the process of “becoming attached” in the first six years of life.14 During this process we are danced into our sense of self, into who we are and how we will be in this life. Naturally, there will be other formative influences and experiences in the years to come, but the most influential foundation is laid in those first six years. The takeaway? During those first six years of a child’s life, parents have the most powerful opportunity to reach into that growing brain and wire it up in the best possible way.
Since love and human connection are essential to healthy growth and development, the human child is born programmed and wired to seek out this connection constantly. There is no rest and no growth for the human child in the absence of this connection. All of the child’s energy goes to ensuring the connection is maintained, which leaves little to direct to the task of growing up. And knowing that children are wired to pursue that connection at all costs, it comes as no surprise to learn that children understandably become eager to restore it, should it be interrupted. Often, though, disconnection is mistakenly co-opted in the name of “discipline.” This happens when parents purposely interrupt the connection to alarm the child into seeking reconnection by halting whatever behaviour they are engaged in. Timeouts offer one example of how disconnection can be used to get a child to behave. Others include consequences, the removal of privileges, reward systems, and any other parenting “strategy” that has at its core the spirit of disconnection. Even a tactic like orchestrating a fake “leaving behind” scenario to persuade an uncooperative child to follow plays on a disconnected approach.
If you are in the midst of sourcing parenting “strategies,” you’ve probably uncovered a mountain of disconnection-based approaches (and virtually nothing that would have you leading your child along the trajectory of their optimal growth and development). Any parenting expert who suggests that they have the art of parenting distilled down to a three-step strategy or has attempted to script you through a one-size-fits-all, tightly regimented routine of discipline will rely on disconnection-based approaches, almost without fail, to manipulate the behaviour of children. Child development specifically, and the human condition generally, does not lend itself to regimented, scripted, concocted tricks and strategies. These approaches are mere temptations, luring parents with a purportedly quick fix because they appear easier, tidier, and more convenient than the alternative. But the long view shows us that children need connection. Full stop. They do not need tricks, strategies, and manipulation.
These disconnection scenarios are problematic because they are sacrificial plays of the worst kind. They manipulate the child, putting their greatest need on the line in the name of desirable behaviour. As these scenarios play out over the course of days, weeks, months, and even years—in ways both big and small—the effects can add up. This is particularly troublesome when we consider that neuroimaging studies have shown that, at the brain level, the experience of relational disconnection is akin to that of physical pain.15 But it’s just as important to understand that you cannot permanently wreck your kid with a few minor transgressions (more on this later). Keep in mind and take to heart that there is always a way to repair through a heightened focus on connection and the championing of healthy, normal development.
You cannot, however, give to your child what you did not get in your own childhood—unless you are willing to acknowledge those gaps and work to fill them in. If you were parented from a place of disconnection, as many parents reading this book will have been, this may be the driving force of your own parental impulses. Even if you experienced a primarily positive childhood, it’s still possible to suffer from the smaller and larger misses of that experience. If you experienced significant wounding as a child, it could be that the blueprint for how to be
