One of the things that makes parenting difficult is that it brings together humans who are at very different stages of a long developmental journey.

Children are infuriating to parents, just as parents are infuriating to children. And much of this comes from the fact that the two relate to the world in dramatically different ways.

Naturally, much of how children relate to the world is inherited from their parents. Parents are a major source of the language, attitudes, and perspectives which children adopt as they grow.

Even so, the world of the adult is not completely accessible to a child from the outset of their life. As a child develops, it progressively assimilates the constant stream of experience data–including words and interactions with parents and other adults–into a set of interconnected models and concepts. The adult world attains coverage within these models only in stages. At any given moment, there will be tremendous gaps between the way that the child and the adult understands the world, and these gaps will inevitably surface in myriad arguments, confrontations, and dramatic standoffs.

While this is more or less obvious and to be expected, many of these situations will be misdiagnosed by the involved adults as stemming not from a difference in developmental maturity and a divergence at the level of understanding, but rather as the result of an intransigent attitude on the part of the child: Naturally, children do not self-identify as having a lapse of understanding. Naturally, they use the same language to talk about what is going on. It can take a discerning and attuned adult to identify the possibility of some developmental boundary which is causing the issue at hand to appear so very differently to both sides.

Another reason that parents have a difficult time identifying when a tantrum is the result of a developmental-boundary-trancending situation is that, in fact, many tantrums do actually stem from a stubborn, intransigent attitude. But many times these situations also transcend a boundary–though not one that I’m not sure what to call. And that’s what this post is about.

Children are raw. Parents are “socialized”–which is a way of saying that they have had the rawness conditioned (beaten?) out of them.

Adults are used to disappointment. They have dreams they’ve given up on. They have parts of themselves which are constantly being suppressed, throttled, or gaslit. And so on.

Naturally, this state of an adult is the result of adaptations which the adult has made in order to deal with environmental threats and dangers. These adaptations enable adults to live in society in a way that does not result in screaming altercations three times per hour. It is impossible to live in connected community in a completely raw form.

Notwithstanding this, there are two important types of awareness which it is important for parents to bring to situations involving a divide in degrees of adaptation or “socialization”:

1. Awareness that the divide exists
2. Awareness of the nature of the adult’s own adaptations

When your child is in the middle of shrieking fit because they did not receive some trivial thing which they wanted, the appropriate question to ask is not “Why are they so terrible?” but in fact “Why did I not have a screaming fit about that thing that I deeply wanted but couldn’t have last month?” (and maybe even “SHOULD I have had a screaming fit about it?”) The point here is that likely more work is required to explain your behavior than that of your child.

Moreover, unless you have good clarity about why it is that you did not have a screaming fit last month, you will more than likely resort to some manner of ad hoc approach in order to snuff out the unsocial behavior from your child. This will inevitably result in a type of adaptation, but perhaps not the desired one.

There are many possible adaptations that might temper your response to a disappointment as an adult:

• You might have decided you aren’t worthy of something
• You might have internalized a moral or religious framework by which you incorporate the disappointment into some broader narrative that restores a positive meaning
• You might have learned to interpret disappointments as just a natural part of life that must be embraced
• This can go on and on.

While all of these adaptations have the outcome of allowing you to respond to a situation in a manner that avoids certain very negative social outcomes, beyond this they are not at all equal.

When a socialized adult butts up against a raw chid, often the adult will find themself having to manage the effects of that mismatch—the tantrum, argument, or impasse stemming from a socialized ask landing on a raw recipient. But while managing these symptoms is the explicit goal, the biggest outcome is that the child learns their own set of adaptations—becomes socialized in their own particular way.

What is at stake when a socialized parent butts up against their raw child could be whether the child learns that they aren’t good enough to have what they want or whether they learn to want… a broadly encompassing harmony with all sentient beings.

…

I wrote this post, up to the last sentence above, on an evening a few weeks ago, without having time to complete it. If memory serves me correctly, that very evening I went on to have several strained interactions with my children and exploded several times in response to theor raw, unsocialized, and simply infuriating behavior (as well as, in a couple cases, some maladaptive behaviors). This continued over the remaining, very stressful first week of school.

I don’t remember what else I had planned to say at the time, but for now, I’d like to capture a few intentions:

• Get better at recognizing when there is some developmental boundary that is moderating how my child and I respond to the situation.
• Try to respond to the situation in a way that reckons my child’s developmental and psychological frame.
• Be aware of my own frame and emotional baggage relative to the situation. What is the basis of my expectation that my child behaves in a particular way? Is it a basis that I consider valid? Will by instinctive response and emotional energy, as rooted in this basis, drive my child in a productive direction?
• Aspire to have a vision for how I want my children to develop emotionally and intellectually in a way that serves broader harmony. Try to make use of messaging which serves this development in moments that might otherwise become heated.