In my experience (with my own 5 children), children are always doing their best, putting everything they have into each pursuit and expression. They don’t hold anything back for later or on reserve for something else. They are driven. Unless they have been squashed, but mine are free-thinkers, and I don’t have most of the communication problems others have expressed to me when they wonder why I don’t have to punish my children- ever.
They are also very rational, apparently unlike some of the descriptions of others here, which admittedly surprised me. I question whether or not the descriptor ‘irrational’ is misplaced, because one of the most difficult aspects of mothering my children has been their strict adherence to rationality. It is difficult because their grasp of cause and effect is near perfect. I bet that seems absurd, but in order to be rational, one need and indeed can only act according to the given or observed information or facts. Children do so with gusto: the challenges, for me at least, have been centred in providing them with adequate facts to make more wholistically rational choices.
What I mean is that (in my experience), my children act rationally according to what they know, what they have themselves observed and understood according to the context within which they made their observations. This leaves them with enormous deficits of knowledge due to their as yet very short lives, and therein I find myself clambouring to catch them up on whatever they are missing in order to act rationally, not in trying to get them to act in a way that for me, who is in more full possession of the facts would, because if they act as I would but without the whole set of facts, for them, their behaviour would be irrational.
An (admittedly incomplete) example: My six year old son came running in to ask me to give to him my 7 yr old’s bow and arrow. I said that I would prefer that he not use it at that time because daddy was at work, and I would feel safer having another adult around while he uses it. He told me then that it wasn’t for him, but that his brother had asked him to bring it to him for target practice. I reiterated my concern and my decision that he would have to wait until the next day, when daddy was home. He proceeded to essentially freak out- crying, wailing, stomping, etc… I asked him why he was so upset that his brother wouldn’t be using the bow and arrow, and then he told me that he was upset because his brother had asked him to get the bow and arrow for him, and he was waiting and expecting it, and now he wasn’t bringing it. So, I confirmed with him that he felt responsible to the task of bringing the objects to his brother and I was preventing him from accomplishing his mission, with which he emphatically agreed and calmed down completely. Then he sat at the table with me and we discussed risk and risk analysis within the context of physical activities and he agreed without my insistence that it would be better to wait until daddy was home since I was the only adult for several kilometers in every direction and *if* something happened with the bow and arrow, it could be serious and piling all of us into the van to meet the medics half-way would be more difficult than to do so when daddy was home.
He just turned six and his brother just turned seven.
When he freaked out, some people would assume it was irrational (and give him a smack for freaking out and I said “no” right?), but he was not in full possession of the facts and neither was I when his behaviour turned into an outburst of emotions.
Children can be very, VERY emotional (as can adults) and mine are not in any way properly understood to be ‘compliant’; they are self-assured and not irrational. If anything, it’s their insistence on rationality that wears on me because I must spend so much time teasing out what they know from what they need to know in order *for me* to have rational discourse with them, which I do. The discussion I described above is in kind with the discussions I have with my two year old as well (he’s very articulate). I act according to the evidence they give me from birth that they are reasoning and aware and that they need only be guided, shown, let into the real workings of life and not some pretend child-alternate-universe that is so common for children today (check out any mass schooling curriculum for young children, any daycare, any preschool or nursery with a few exceptions; they are scary- completely disconnected from reality).
As for ‘spanking’ them, I agree that in order that the hitting could be thought to be effective, we’d be relying on the same capacity for rational thought that I do when I talk to my children. Besides that, I have so many more relational and beneficial ways of communicating with my children than hitting, that even if it were the last item on my list of acceptable responses to my children, I’d never even get there: I’d have long, long earlier resolved the issue, as I have and do so presently.
Also, the idea that hitting is okay when they are old enough to ‘know better’ but young enough to be overpowered is an impossibility for me for even more than philosophical reasons. My just-turned seven-year-old is 4’3", 64lbs, and his just-turned six yr old brother is two inches and two pounds smaller. I honestly cannot overpower them except in controlled settings like arm-wrestling. I am not weak either, but one is long limbed too, and the other is built like a tank. I feed them very well, and they have benefitted! By the time they would fit the common (not crazy baby-training a la Ezzo) criteria for ‘spanking’, I’d have to garner their agreement to do it to them, but all of us would rather discuss than hit or be hit. And I’ve raised them to esteem themselves higher than to submit to being hit…
So, we reason together- and I am a walking encyclopaedia, facilitator, adoring mother, and human resource in the most practical sense. And it’s exhausting.