in praise of childhood consequence

and the end of "child as customer"

i just had a little piece of faith in humanity restored:

yesterday, i was eating breakfast in a restaurant. the table next to me had an (i’m guessing) 3-year-old boy who started to have a melt down. i was bracing for a long, miserable dining experience as “my kid is expressing his inner air raid siren, you all need to deal with it!” certainly seems to have become the core parenting praxis of late.

“jaden is such an expressive child! i love how he is not afraid to share how he is feeling!”

instead, the father simply stood up, collected his son, then took him outside. this alone was lovely and comment-worthy (a sad statement about the current state of affairs), but the rest just kept getting better.

the dad came back.

alone.

mom (who was with the other boy child) said, "where's billy?" (i'm making up this name)

dad: "in the car."

mom: oh, ok. other son (perhaps 5) nodded sagely as if he too had once learned this lesson.

it was all i could do not to go high five the guy.

all i could think was “we are so back.”

any gen X remembers this. you act up in a restaurant? no one is negotiating with terrorists. car. right now. no questions. no reprieve. get it together or go sit by yourself until you can.

i remember my parents saying "this is a restaurant. no one wants to hear you carrying on. you cannot be here if you want to do that."

the rules were explained with admirable brevity and clarity and enforced with cheetah swiftness and death and taxes certainty.

you wanna go cry in the car, have at it.

banishment to backseat boredom was always on the menu.

and it worked.

you needed that once or twice in your life.

and you learned.

file photo “1977 chevy guantanamo”

the dad went and got the kid 10 mins later. kid was quiet, settled, ate his breakfast in peace, as did we all.

it still works.

turns out nothing has changed except parental will to be parents instead of “appeasing buddies” and society’s will to let them.

"child as customer" does no one any favors, least of all the children. it sets them up to be whiners and screamers convinced that the world owes them accommodation. they fail to become self-governing or self-possessed. they fail to develop impulse control. and the world is not kind to people who cry much and demand more. not for long anyhow…

polite, high function society is a dance with many parts in which each of a multitude of dancers must know their steps. one who is out of line affects a profusion of others, one screamer, one boombox player, one litterbug or thief or speakerphone talker immiserates the many.

perhaps this is just me getting old and crotchety and wanting to yell at those dad-gummed kids today, but it does seem like the overall conception of “being respectful of common space” has been on substantial wane.

this aggravating new trend of “double-parking at supermarkets” where people pull their car right up to the curb and just leave it, sometimes even running, while they run inside “to just grab a couple things” is really something. it’s just astonishing “me-topian” failure to self-image. “it’s just me, no problem. just be a minute.” the inconvenience to others never seems to occur as what ought be a 2 lane 2 direction transit now forces people to take turns “going around.”

once manifest, it’s sort of an intractable issue. you really have no good options to deal with it. apart from “instant towing” which is fun, but difficult to implement, it’s really a problem that needed to be nipped in the bud upstream.

i suspect such behaviors and expectations are ingrained early because “child as customer” means that a generation was raised to expect service and that the world is arranged to cater to them. when you cry, there is a negotiation about what you want and need and making sure you feel “heard.”

sorry, but this is nonsense that teaches rapacity and anti-social behavior.

i remember my parents laying it out very simply: “how would you like it if these people came over on saturday and all talked loudly while you were trying to watch cartoons?”

it’s really as simple as that. provide a frame to understand the parallel, and most kids rapidly get it.

if they cannot grasp the frame, at least be sure they grasp the consequences.

car-catraz, population: you.

since the dawn of time this is, quite literally, where the idea of “society” comes from.

marcus purrelius

it’s as simple as it is non-negotiable.

learning early on that if we're going to have nice places and nice things, it requires certain forms of behavior and self-limitation is the difference between barbarism and civilization.

sometimes, many times, this requires lessons and actions.

robbed of all tutelage and consequence, people grow up deranged.

let’s take an example that illustrates a number of these concepts. watch this video. ask these questions: where is the fault? who is in the wrong here and why?

many will recoil from this and say “no teacher should ever punch a student.” but is this really so? the kid just hit him with a desk then slapped him. imagine either the total lack of self-control or iron bar belief in total lack of consequence that would lead a student to not only think that this was OK but to actually do it.

no one wants to see a teacher hit a kid, but the simple fact is no teacher should ever be put in the position this one was. once that has happened, all good choices are gone. personally, i think this teacher made the best of a bad business and acted proportionately to teach the best possible lesson. what would have been better? calling the cops? is that really better for anyone? handle it and get back to life. the kid should be expelled.

but “handling it” has basically been outlawed. when i was a kid, parents smacked you. not with intent to injure, but with intent to jar you out of whatever stupid crap you were doing and get you back to sense. my third grade teacher was famous for flicking you on the head with her ring. this was not abuse. we respected her for it. tough but fair really works for kids, and i cannot think of an example of her doing this unfairly. it didn’t really even hurt, it was just humiliating enough to snap you back into focus.

the important part is that it happened WAY upstream of issues like “a student just hit a teacher with a desk.” issues like that were unthinkable when i was a kid. it was not even an idea that could enter your head and in the vertiginous seeming case that you went mad and it did, you’d have been expelled. just like that. gone. bye-bye. and then you’d go home to your parents and your real worries would start.

there was absolutely zero doubt about what would happen if you pulled that lever.

and that matters.

outcomes like that were inconceivable because you had internalized both the idea that you were not the triple-special super secret center of the world and had rock solid faith in instant-on reliable as gravity consequences that would accrue.

you learned this through a long string of experience in low stakes matters that saved from ever winding up at the high stakes “fuck around and find out” table where you might not be able to cover your losses.

this whole “it’s just a little thing, let the kid act like a jerktopian” is exactly wrong. the little things with small ball proportionate “finding outs” are precisely the place to sort these life lessons out. that’s where you want the game played, the place you can learn without the price tag being too high. everyone has to learn sometime and the student, like the teacher, is all out of good options. you’re now able to make big bets whose odds you never learned to understand and whose losses can really change your life.

a couple trips to the car when you’re little might wind up saving you a punch in the face, expulsion, or jail time. doesn’t seem so horrible now, does it?

it is not the responsibility of the teachers and managers and the world at large to accommodate these issues. lessons need to be taught and accountability imposed.

self-governance around reasonable behavior is a learned skill honed with practice and understanding. it is not an exotic ask; it’s civilizational table stakes.

and it’s not just the parents or the kids. we the society need to stop being such wussies and fainting violets over this and come back together in support of civilizational standards rather than getting the vapors any time some child encounters a little consequence from “learn by screwing around.”

if parents are going to parent, they need our help.

i was genuinely worried about the dad in the restaurant and that some karen was going to see his son alone in the car and call the cops. when i was a kid, that idea would have seemed absurd. the cops would have likely glowered at me in the car (falsely, but supporting my parents) and made some comment about special cell blocks for kids who throw food in mcdonalds.

there was a whole set of norms around this, calibrated reasonable and nesting well.

you learned young not to be a little jerk. when you acted like one, you got corrected by peers or adults and everyone looked on with a certain tolerance toward such correction, cognizant of both necessity and proportionality and remembering having learned such lessons oneself and why. but if you grow up having never learned this, your behavior just keeps getting worse and your entitlement waxes with it.

no matter what, these lessons will come. they can be undergone when stakes are small or once they are large and so too are consequences.

that serves no one, not parents, society, or children.

so kids got sent to the car or smacked in public instead of being allowed to run amok without fear of consequence. they were unpleasant lessons to learn, but they got learned, and no real damage was done.

today, no one is allowed to act.

parents run terrible risks to send you to the car.

restaurants get lit up on fakebook by some karen raging that “little sebastian was not allowed to climb up on the counter and sing and bang pot lids together and now he’ll never be on broadway so horribly did this philistine assault on his creativity scar him!” as social mores have dissolved in the civilizational alkahest of over-entitled empathy and safety obsessive desire to prevent any special little customer from hearing a hard word or learning that nobody likes jerks.

consider this situation.

what’s the play?

what should the pianist do? the manager? where even are the parents?

(this video seems problematic in terms of loading, if it’s wonky, original is HERE)

this is just a stupid outcome. you have a child running amok and no one feels any ability to do anything about it.

the adults have not only abrogated “being in charge” but seek to prevent others from being in charge either.

this is the mind wiping power of overclocked empathy and “child as customer” thinking with zero ability to rotate shapes.

oh, yes, a public piano performance is the perfect place to demand music lessons and you’re racist if you don’t provide them.

just another speaker who got taught the “magic word” of wokedom to excuse all misbehavior and impugn any criticism of it. “mrs kahndi” is exactly what this little girl grows up into if no one ever provides any useful lessons about center of universe entitlement. it’s the whole evolution of the me-topian pokemon in one tidy object lesson.

obviously, it takes a large number of issues to get you here. the child has not learned how to behave in public. the parents are nowhere to be seen. the pianist should not be in this position, but is pretty well unable to respond. this child is operating in an untouchability bubble.

what ought to happen is the pianist should stand up, take the girl by the arm, and loudly ask: “whose child is this and could you please come collect her she’s disrupting the performance.”

in a reasonable time among reasonable people, that would have seemed un-commentworthy, a petty nuisance calmly handled, parents hopefully embarrassed and child chastened and educated.

had this been me, my parents would have apologized to the pianist, made me apologize, and likely removed me from the room and to the car or home or hotel room/cruise cabin whatever.

had a parent shirked on this duty, a manager would have thrown the whole family out.

those were the standards and standard expectations.

and that seems like far from an expected outcome today.

we broke all that.

now you likely get a fight or threats of lawsuits.

the child will be the victim and the customer and everyone else will kowtow and invite the next outrage.

we can call it “empathy” but this is as shortsighted as it is stupid. this benefits no one.

bending civilization to twisted ends such as "no parent may do this" or "this is child abuse" is just plain wrong.

sure, there are bad examples of everything and now and then some unusually stupid parent or unusually stupid kid manages to achieve some sort of unusually stupid outcome where some child cannot figure out how to step out of a hot car, but people die crossing the street every day; this is hardly a reason to ban it and demand official escorts for every trip.

it just means we need a little proportionality. leaving a 5-year-old in a car for 30 minutes on a crisp autumn day is different than leaving a baby in a car seat for 8 hours in vegas in august.

but in the end, it’s the same (highly effective) system as “broken windows” policing. you either handle emergent trouble while it’s small and lessons stick while long-term consequences do not, or you wait into it spirals across the line into felony. the average murderer in america has been arrested 7 times before being arrested for murder. that’s an awful lot of bites at the apple to head the killing off and the “catch and release” strategies on charging and incarceration have had ill effects on the murder rate.

why would children be different?

how many prior scholastic disciplinary run-ins does the typical student have before they hit a teacher with a desk? i’m guessing it’s a lot.

how many prior restaurants has the child currently screaming like they have a jellyfish for a diaper screamed within while parents sought to appease and mollify? also guessing it’s a lot. because the lesson there is “scream and we play the ‘guess what kiddo wants and give it to him’ game” and kids learn lessons rapidly. 1–2 games of “go sit in the car” tend to resolve these issues. 100 rounds of “if you behave i’ll buy you ice cream” just invite more tonsil sprain level melt-down.

we had a high function system. people understood it and liked it. it worked.

it got fed to the safety and empathy karens and their child-rearing books about “only positive reinforcement.” that has not worked.

it does no one any favors.

if you want a good society and good public places, you need good kids who become good people. that takes good parenting and good parenting requires the support and requirement to impose some discipline.

none of this is difficult, we just need to remove our collective crania from our posteriors and do one simple thing: