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friendly, achieving children, (1) show children more love and genuine
concern than hate, give more praise than criticism, give more
rewards than punishment (see chapters 4 & 11). Spend time with
them. (2) Share your feelings and reasons with your children (see
"I" statements in chapter 13). Value their ideas; encourage verbal give
and take. Touch them lovingly. (3) Be fair, listen empathicly and
give respect, resolve differences by talking about problems as equals
(see Gordon's, 1975, no-lose method in chapter 13). (4) Distinguish
between the person and his/her actions (Ginott, 1969, 1971), rather
than "you are a lazy punk" say "I feel furious when I see your filthy
room." Dislike the behavior; love the person. (5) Children need to
be guided, corrected, and given high goals, values,
responsibilities, and self-assigned chores, depending on the child's
abilities and needs (Weiten, Lloyd & Lashley, 1990). They need help in
becoming thoughtful of others. Encourage physical toughness and
emotional strength; discourage dependency and demands for
attention. (6) Lastly, I want to add a personal belief: every child
deserves well trained parents, a child care specialist, and at
least 2-4 hours a day away from parents. During this time away,
the child should be with a skilled, experienced child care professional
or teacher who also loves the child and collaborates or consults weekly
with the parents. Raising a good human being should not be left to
chance nor to untrained parents; child rearing takes more than a few
minutes a day; it should be our highest priority. We need research.
How else are we going to produce a much better world?
If you think we humans just naturally love our children and have a
"nurturing instinct," you are sadly misinformed. Read some history
(McCoy, 1981)! Loving children is a new development! Remember,
only 100 years ago, 20% of women were killed by childbirth (or some
related complication) and 20% to 50% of infants died during the first
year of life. Life expectancy was only 45 in 1850. Until the 19th
century (only 4 to 7 generations ago) children were often considered
worthless possessions --"just another mouth to feed" or "unimportant
and uninteresting parasites." Children were often unwanted (no birth
control), treated coldly (no cuddling and bonding), swaddled, and even
beaten regularly and terrorized (some religious folks thought they had
to drive out Satan and "the stains of original sin"). Of course, there
were always loving families. But, even if you were born into wealth,
you would have been sent to a wet nurse's house to live, perhaps, for
the first two years. Parents rarely visited. At age 5 or 6, most children
started working in the fields with their parents. By 9 or 10, they were
often sent to apprentice with a craftsman or to a sweat shop to work.
What about schools? The idea of public schools was only incubating
during the 1800's. Even by 1900, one third of our states did not
require students to attend school. Kain (1990) documents that there
have always been lots of single-parent families (caused by death);
women have always worked outside the home (as servants and in the
fields). Thus, the species has survived in spite of this wide-spread
neglect, abuse, and lack of education, but the pathology and ignorance
from the neglected earlier generations still may be seeping to the
surface. There is great hope, however: the family and the schools have
changed remarkably in just 100 years, so maybe the whole species
