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Punishment
I May Be a Jackass, But I Can Be Taught to Care
You can lead a kid to water, but can you make him drink?
Posted July 23, 2015
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
This is a time honored adage, to be sure. For years, I’ve heard variants of it from parents and educators alike. I can give Miranda books, but I can't make her care about them. I can require Tom to clean his room, but I can't make him want to have a clean room. You can make students come to class, but you can’t make them care about their learning.
This reminds me a bit of what George Kelly—a prominent personality theorist—who proposed his "jackass" theory of human motivation:
"Motivational theories can be divided into two types, push theories and pull theories. Under push theories we find such terms as drive, motive, or even stimulus. Pull theories use such constructions as purpose, value, or need. In terms of a well-known metaphor, these are the pitchfork theories on the one hand and the carrot theories on the other. But our theory is neither of these. Since we prefer to look to the nature of the animal himself, ours is probably best called a jackass theory." (Kelly, 1958, p. 50)
Why is that? Well, people can be stubborn. We don't like to be told what to do. We don't want to do things that we, well, don't want to do. And this is true for kids as well. Simply telling them what to do is not going to work. So, is it true that you can lead a kid to water, but you can't make her drink?
No, You Can't Make 'em Drink—But You Can Induce Them to Care
As parents, we are in the business of teaching our children to care about things. That's what we do. Plato said it best: "Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.” I think in our hearts we know this to be true. But many parents and educators might feel that it is wrong to try to "teach children to care." They may feel that children have to make their own choices about what to care about. Ultimately, that's true—we want our children once they have grown up to make their own choices. But they have to learn to make responsible choices. If our kids are going to "learn to care about the right things", they are going to need some guidance.
What type of guidance?
Literally hundreds of studies in developmental psychology show that children who engage in the highest levels of pro-social behavior and rule-following behavior are those who have internalized the basic rules, values and beliefs of their parents and of the larger community. In his classic work on parenting, Martin Hoffman studied the effect of punishment, threats of love withdrawal and induction on the development of children’s rule-following behavior. He found that neither punishment (e.g., sending a child to her room) nor the threat of withdrawing love (e.g., “I won’t like you if you do that”) promoted high levels of rule following. However, parents who explained the basis of their family rules to their children had children who engaged in the highest levels of responsble rule following.
What does this mean? It means that children who are taught to understand the reasons for a given rule are more likely to internalize those rules and thereupon make those rules their own. In other words, parents who explain the basis of their values to children have children who are more likely to internalize those values and then act upon them. Hoffman called this process—explaining the basis of rules and values—induction. When a parent explains the reasons for her values, beliefs and rules, she is more likely to induce her child to accept her values.
Teaching Kids to Care
Imagine that you were visiting a friend’s home for some coffee and dessert. As your friend invites you in, you see an assortment of cookies on the dining room table. Imagine that your friend, about to leave the room, says, “Don’t eat any of the cookies.” What would you think? How would you feel? What would you do?
You would certainly find this odd! Here she is, inviting me for dessert, and she asks me not to touch the cookies! You’d try to figure out the reason why she doesn’t want you to eat the cookies. Perhaps you would respect her wishes and simply not eat any cookies. Or, perhaps, you might think—there are so many cookies! If I snatch just one, she won’t notice.
The situation would be very different, if, when your friend was about to leave the room, said to you: “Those cookies are for my daughter’s book group that is going to meet in a few minutes. There is one cookie for each person in the group, so we can’t eat those. We’ll be having chocolate velvet cheesecake in the other room.”
What happened here? Your friend has explained the reason behind her request. The real reason—not some made up reason that you think will work. Knowing the reason, you are entirely willing to comply! You don't feel manipulated, or deceived or ordered around. Once we know the reasons – and assuming that the reasons are, well, reasonable, we tend to want to honor the other person's request. We care.
Of course, it’s the same for children!
- The statement, “Never open the china cabinet!” does not have the same capacity to induce care for a rule than: This china cabinet was my grandmother’s. It is old and precious to me. If you open it, it can break the hinges—see, right here! If you want to touch something inside, tell me and we’ll look at it together.”
- The statement, “Don’t jump on the couch” does not have the same force as saying, “When you jump on the couch, it gets dirty and messy and then I have to clean it.”
- The statement, “Never hit your sister” does not have the same force as “Never hit your sister! Hitting hurts! How would you feel if she were to hit you? When you hit, that is not going to make someone like you or want to play with you.”
We all know, of course, that explanation alone—without enforcement—is often (but by no means always) insufficient to bring about rule compliance in the short term. The point here is that over the long term, explanation induces us to care. When we explain the basis of our rules, values and beliefs, we teach our children to care. That's the primary business of our work as parents.
