Dr. Spock Meets the Buddha
By Julia Van Develder
Nov17
If I had the whole parenting thing to do over again, I would do at least one thing differently: I wouldn’t praise my children.
Parenting styles and ideologies come and go, and every new generation of parents finds ways to improve on the job their parents did. My mother’s generation bottle-fed their babies because that was the modern, “scientific” way to parent. My generation went back to breastfeeding because by then the science had shown that breast milk is the ideal food for human infants.
People in my generation put their babies to sleep on their stomachs to prevent them from choking to death on their own spit-up; today’s parents put them to sleep on their backs to prevent Sudden Infant Death syndrome.
Bottle or breast, cloth or paper, crib or cradle or family bed--prevailing views on issues like these seem to do a 180 every generation or so. But there’s one parenting tenet that has become so entrenched that no one, at least in our culture, seems to question it, and that’s the belief in positive reinforcement as the best practice for encouraging appropriate behavior and self esteem in our children. This dogma, rooted in B.F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning, was popularized and spread by America’s all-time favorite parenting guru, Dr. Benjamin Spock.
At this point, we have lots of evidence that positive reinforcement doesn’t create self-esteem. We’ve all known parents who bent over backwards to recognize and praise their children for anything and everything from learning to tie their shoes to sharing their toys. “Wow! You shared! That’s so great! I’m proud of you!” Yet many of those children have grown up to become adults who are just as plagued by self-doubt and self-loathing as previous generations who were raised under the “spare-the-rod, spoil-the-child” paradigm.
Some critics of modern child-rearing practices argue that the failure to produce the intended result is because praise is meted out too easily, without children having had to really earn it. The children know it’s bogus, but they still come to expect it as their due. Then when they get to the real world, the rug gets rolled up with them inside of it.
I’m sure there’s some truth to that, and I’m also sure that Dr. Spock would wince at some of the misapplications of the principle of positive reinforcement. But I think the problem with the positive reinforcement model is more a matter of structure than application. It has a fatal flaw, which is that it inevitably sets up its opposite--criticism. Even if you’re getting more praise than criticism, even if you’re getting only praise, your sense of self-worth becomes a conditional commodity. You learn to feel good about yourself only insofar as your behavior generates praise rather than criticism.
When I was growing up, my older brother was constantly in trouble. I remember sitting on the basement steps in our little brick house in the suburbs, listening to him get yelled at upstairs in the kitchen because he stole my allowance money to buy a kite. My parents were church people. My father was a seminarian, preparing for his ordination. Stealing was one of the Big Ten no-nos.
The unconscious decision I made was not to be like him---not to be bad, not to ever do anything that would cast me out of the warm circle of parental approval. I dedicated myself to being good, worked overtime to avoid criticism. I was a good student. I was obedient. I was helpful and considerate. And my dear sweet parents praised me for it. (And praise does work, by the way—according to controlled experiments, verbal praise is actually much more effective than tangible rewards in shaping behavior.)
That made me an easy child. But it also set me up for some not-so-great relationships as an adult. I was easily controlled by my fear of disapproval and rejection. When you’re a praise junkie, one critical comment or even a disapproving glance can send you spiraling down into a pit of despair, and you will do just about anything to claw your way back to emotional safety. Prostrate yourself, humiliate yourself, abuse yourself—whatever it takes to earn forgiveness and be reinstated in the “Good” category.
Why would an otherwise sane adult be paralyzed by fear of criticism?
One persuasive explanation is offered by Paul MacLean (now deceased, former head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the National Institute of Mental Health) who developed an evolutionary (and controversial) theory known as the triune brain theory. (See The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences and Frontiers, 2002.) One of the principal complaints among neuroscientists is that his model is too simplistic, and I am about to add insult to injury by providing a ridiculously simplified version of it. Basically, MacLean’s theory is that the brain comprises three parts:
The R-complex, also known as the “reptilian brain,” includes the brain stem and the cerebellum and controls the muscles, balance, and autonomic functions, such as respiration.
The limbic system, also known as the “mammalian brain,” includes the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the hippocampus, and is the source of emotions (responses to pleasure and pain) and instincts.
The neocortex, also known as the “cerebral cortex,” is found in the brains of higher mammals and is the source of higher-order cognitive skills, like reasoning.
These three components are connected and function as one, but not always smoothly. Take the limbic system, for example, where pain and pleasure and their attendant emotions are recorded. When you experience pain, the limbic system doesn’t automatically refer this experience to the neocortex for analysis.
In mammals that do not have a highly developed neocortex, what happens in the limbic system, stays in the limbic system. Let’s say, for example, that a puppy is mistreated—a child kicks the puppy or pulls its ears. The puppy feels pain and fear. If that experience is repeated enough times, you’ll eventually have a dog that “isn’t good with children.”
The dog can’t differentiate temporally or spatially. It can’t say to itself, “Hey, that was a different kid, and it was a long time ago, when I was a helpless little puppy. Now I’m a big strong dog. I don’t need to be afraid of kids.” No—the dog’s brain says, “Kids--BAD.”
The ability to differentiate is the province of the neocortex, the reasoning brain. But the neocortex and the limbic system are not very well integrated, so in human beings, just as in dogs or other mammals , the painful or pleasurable experiences recorded in the limbic system continue to trigger the same emotional response unless the neocortex intervenes. How many Americans, for example, say, “Muslims—TERRORISTS,” and fail to use their capacity to reason to differentiate between 19 hijackers and a world population of one billion Muslims? How many veterans have a fight-or-flight reaction to the sound of gunshots during hunting season, or to fireworks on the Fourth of July?
The good news is that the neocortex can intervene. In this respect, human beings seem to be a unique species. The bad news is that most human beings don’t have access to this important information and remain trapped in the reactive cycles generated by their limbic systems. You might be fifty years old and still not realize that the person calling the shots is the scared five-year-old inside you.
So what does all this have to do with parenting techniques? The problem with positive reinforcement (and punishment as well) is that it conditions behavior via the limbic system without bringing the neocortex in on the deal. Kid does something “good,” parents praise kid, praise triggers feelings of happiness and security. It’s no different, really, from a dog learning to sit in order to get a milkbone.
What happens if praise isn’t forthcoming? If praise is withheld? In this system, the absence of praise isn’t neutral. It’s a negative reinforcement in the sense that it will push the child to double his/her efforts to regain the pleasurable feelings.
By the time the kid becomes an adult, s/he presumably will have the cognitive skills to understand why certain behaviors are or aren’t conducive to social well being. But this more mature understanding doesn’t automatically undo the damage at the limbic level. Whenever you find yourself overreacting to something or someone, the likelihood is that your limbic system is in charge.
But if we don’t use positive reinforcement, how do we raise children to do the right thing and also feel good about themselves?
A possible answer, I think, comes from the East.
There’s a famous story about the Dalai Lama and the concept of self esteem. Here is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s version of the story (Wherever You Go, There You Are, pp. 162-3):
“In conversations with the Dalai Lama during a meeting in Dharamasala in 1990, he did a double take when a Western psychologist spoke of low self-esteem. The phrase had to be translated several times for him into Tibetan, although his English is quite good. He just couldn’t grasp the notion of low self-esteem, and when he finally understood what was being said, he was visibly saddened to hear that so many people in America carry deep feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy.
Such feelings are virtually unheard of among the Tibetans. They have all the severe problems of refugees from oppression living in the Third World, but low self-esteem is not one of them.”
How is it that Buddhists don’t suffer from low self-esteem? This is an interesting, complicated question that I won’t presume to answer. But I recently watched a film that offers some clues--The Cave of the Yellow Dog, written and directed by Mongolian filmmaker Byambasuren Davaa.
Davaa wanted to record a way of life that is disappearing—the nomadic life of sheep herders in Mongolia. She used a real family, a Buddhist family, in The Cave of the Yellow Dog to tell the story of a little girl, Nansal, who finds a dog and wants to keep it, despite her father’s insistence that she take it back to the cave where she found it.
This isn’t a documentary about Buddhism or about childrearing practices in Mongolia, but it nevertheless opens a window onto a way of approaching parenting that is subtly and profoundly different from our way in the West.
Example: At the beginning of the movie, Nansal, the oldest daughter—seven or eight years old?--is coming back to her family after months of being away at boarding school. That evening, hanging around in the yurt, she asks her father if he would like to see her school work. He says yes. She shows him her workbook and points out a gold star she got on one assignment (the very icon of our system of positive reinforcement!). The father runs his fingers over the star and then points to the next page, which also has a star, and says, “And another one.” He doesn’t jump up and down praising her. Neither does he minimize her accomplishment. He’s just with her.
The family has three children--two girls and a boy who’s around two years old—and there are many moments in the film where we see the parents parent. There are dramatic moments (such as when Nansal is lost in a storm) and moments of conflict (such as when her father tells her to take the dog back to the cave) and moments of obvious love and affection between the members of this family. But there isn’t a single instance of praise or criticism, reward or punishment—even when Nansal disobeys her father.
Here in the West, the praise-criticize habit is so entrenched and so pervasive that it’s extraordinarily challenging to stop doing it. And then that becomes another thing we use to criticize ourselves---“OMG, I praised my kid…I’m such a bad parent!” But it is possible to relate to people, including our own children, without making them good or bad. And you don’t have to become a Buddhist to try loving people, including yourself, just because we exist and not because of anything we do or don’t do.