From the Miami Herald, via discourse.net:
“The dishes, garbage and dirty laundry would pile up for days when Cat and Harlan Barnard’s two teenage children refused to do their chores. So the parents decided to take a picket line to the picket fences of suburbia.
Earlier this week, the Barnards went on strike. They moved out of their house and into a tent set up in their front driveway. The parents won’t cook, clean or drive their children — Benjamin, 17, and Kit, 12 — until they shape up.
”We’ve tried reverse psychology, upside-down psychology, spiral psychology and nothing has motivated them for any length of time,” Cat Barnard, 45, said Wednesday as she in her driveway sat in a lawn chair at an umbrella-covered table decorated with Christmas lights.
The strike took Benjamin and Kit by surprise. They came home from school Monday to find their mother outside with handwritten signs that read ”Parents on Strike” and “Seeking Cooperation and Respect!”
Cat Barnard and her 56-year-old husband, a government social services worker, decided their children needed to learn to be responsible.
The Barnards unsuccessfully tried smiley-face charts and withholding allowances. They even sought help from a psychologist. The breaking point may have been when Benjamin didn’t offer to help his mother work on the lawn Sunday, even though she should have been resting after recovering from oral surgery.
”I had already made the decision to it then, but I had absolutely no motherly guilt after that,” said Cat Bernard.
The Barnards have slept on air mattresses in the tent during their strike and have barbecued while their children fended for themselves with TV dinners inside the house. The parents only go inside to shower and use the bathroom.
(…)
Cat Barnard said she and her husband will keep up the strike until they see some changes.
”If we have to stick it out here until Christmas, then ho, ho, ho, we’re out here,” she said.”
It would be nice to know some more of the history that led to this. I also wonder whether the parents stocked up on food for the kids before they went on strike, or took any other steps to prevent their absence from being inconvenient to their offspring.
Any thoughts?
Parental strike? Interesting tactic. My father would have just kicked our smart little asses up to our shoulders ’til we straightened out. One thing’s certain. mum & daddy would NOT (and I can’t emphasize this NOT too strongly) would NOT have been the ones on the lawn in a tent. Ah, how the times do change.
Parental strike? Interesting tactic. My father would have just kicked our smart little asses up to our shoulders ’til we straightened out. One thing’s certain. mum & daddy would NOT (and I can’t emphasize this NOT too strongly) would NOT have been the ones on the lawn in a tent. Ah, how the times do change.
Child abuse. Not this particular event, but the obviously irresponsible and incompetent 17 years preceding it.
My dad used to write poems about his children refusing to do their chores. I am not kidding. It was a gentle and remarkably effective form of nagging. I personally feel this only stepped over the line into child abuse when he had those poems PUBLISHED and suddenly half the people I knew knew exactly what household work we’d forget to do.
Still. I’m amazed that the parents are living in the tent. Me, I’d move the kids out into the tent.
Would that dad had been a poet!
Would that dad had been a poet!
Could someone take pity on this technically challenged (retarded) ObWi fan and explain why the “post” key doubles my entries? Surely they’re not that noteworthy. Thanks in advance.
very Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.
I recall reading a book on Adlerian parenting that reported a similar story (without the dramatic “parents on strike” stuff) — kids not doing their chores, parents moved out for a while to let the kids experience what happens when people don’t do their jobs. The general philosophy is to let kids experience the logical or natural consequences of their actions rather than nagging or yelling; a less controversial example is, instead of continually nagging a kid to bring his/her coat to school, say nothing and let him/her see what happens when the coat is forgotten.
Of course, this approach requires parents to (a) be willing to see their kids suffer a little bit; and (b) be prepared for the possibility that the kids don’t mind the consequences (e.g. my son decided that he’d rather be cold in the morning than drag his coat around all day).
I too come from a family where the children would be the ones out in the tent. Of course all my father had to do to make us shake silently in our shoes and obey like robots was stare. Something about that seems right to me, so long as it’s coupled with genuine affection and love, which for us it was.
Easy for me, without kids, to say though.
The funniest thing about the xanax request is that his request didn’t double post.
Why is it happening? I don’t know. Are you refreshing at some point while it is still sending out your posts?
I believe that the key to all parenting is not to make empty threats to your kids (it worked on me). If you say, “if you don’t stop fighting we’re not going to the movie,” but go anyway after the continued fight, the kids won’t take you seriously. This must be done early and always followed through. In order to make us wear seatbelts, my mother would refuse to start the car until we had them on. To this day I can’t sit in a car without a seatbelt on.
Sebastian asked:
Are you at some point refreshing…?
According to my wife, no. At no point.
I agree. The biggest thing with disciplining kids is to be consistent, so that when you say ‘Do X or Y happens’, Y always happens if they don’t do X. And never, ever give in to whining.
And I must confess I think the poem-writing is pretty cool.
Jes, would you be willing to post (or email me) one of those poems, if you have any at hand? The subject strikes me as challenging, but if it’s effective, perhaps I’ll give it a shot when I’m a father, and an example is (almost) always useful.
Second rilkefan’s request. Mine are 4 & 2 and already take merciless advantage. A bit of poem/armor might be just the thing.
Rilke, it was many years ago (I left home 18 years ago last September) and while the book of my dad’s poems is somewhere about the place (yes, I made sure to get a copy: I am a glutton for punishment) I can’t remember exactly where it is.
However, if I find it, I’ll certainly post a sample.
Tied into this is a post >/a> on Wampum blog about dealing with autistic children. Reading it gave me a little perspective on my definitions.
Oh dear, another pair of desperate parents. I could be wrong, but I would guess that those children have enough familiarity with a microwave and plent of Game Cube/Gameboy/Playstation stuff to make this a long strike.
This kind of bored refusal to take any responsibility in the home seems pretty comon. I blame a good bit of it on poor parenting (The kids should be in the tent.) but that isn’t always the whole story.
It seems that parents and society at large go to great lengths to remove and shelter children from any real meaningful contributions to the society around them. They’re kept in school and often after-school care groups, driven to adult-organized sports and recreation activities, not encouraged to hang out in neighborhoods or organize things themselves, and certainly not ever allowed to contribute to the household economy by WORKING with a parent.
Then at about age 16 or so, we start yelling about them being irresponsible. I feel really bad for kids living through this. I see it with my own kids’ friends.
What do I do, now being a suburbanite? Fortunately I grew up on a farm, and I send my children back to the farm every summer and make sure Grandpa doesn’t go too easy on them. They love it, mainly because they have real jobs–to get the hay in they’ve learned how to drive; they’ve also vaccinated cattle and actually used math to get the feed rations right, among many other sundry things.
At home they have small jobs. Once they are 12 they babysit the younger ones when necessary and they are never, ever put in a sport or activity unless they express a desire to do it. Even then we discuss what their responsibility is (washing uniforms, biking to practice, etc.) in order to be involved. By 12, they need to figure out how to make their money for Christmas gifts, friends’ birthdays, and ridiculously priced shirts that I won’t buy–that kind of stuff: They mow grass. They rake leaves. They petsit and babysit and water plants for neighbors on vacation.
I’m afraid that our household sounds like a throw-back to an earlier age. Maybe so. But then again, I have no worries about having to live in a tent in my yard.
I have to say that that is the stupidest, most inauthentic newspaper article that I have ever read. It reads like a parody of people living in suburbia. Are you sure you didn’t get that from the Onion?
waiting: check the link and see for yourself.
My dad’s poetry would have been something like
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Clean up your damn room.
Just having gotten off the phone to the son, whom I was instructing about the lengths the vegetables need to be cut to to fit inside the chickens I’m roasting for dinner, I too would have to say that the shirking children would be sitting out in the rain, and to hell with the tent.
Why in my day, grumble mutter grumble…
People have this unshakeable faith that coitus confers moral clarity and personal responsibility, at least if one of those sperm makes it to the fallopian tube at the right time, and then the fertilized ovum successfully implants and isn’t rejected in the next seven-eight months.
Guess what, most species lose their first couple of litters/clutches/calvings, due to parental incompetence. Sometimes they even eat them due to stress.
We’re not any different.
I have reared more children than most biological parents will ever raise, and all of them survived, but at seventeen I wasn’t the best parent, but fact is, I wasn’t the one getting drunk and breaking things and slamming out of the house and screeching down the driveway, or threatening suicide. That would be our perfect model Big Catholic Family parents for whom I covered both to my siblings and to strangers.
Some of them still talk to me, even. But my harshness on my own failings as caregiver have been tempered by the realization that a) my parents demanded me to be a better parent than they were at half their age and poorly trained myself, and b) yes, there were worse parents out there, they never killed any of us and so on, but still, that isn’t an excuse. Nor is the fact that their parents were withholding or drunks or violent-tempered or absent, any more than the fact that “that was then” is an excuse for anything from slavery to covering up clerical molestation.
Bad parents, in animal husbandry, pass on their bad behavior traits to their foals and calves and pups. Not every animal is suited to be a parent, and not every animal is well socialized, interspecies or in relation to its own kind, and parents whose children are so far out of control that they have to take such drastic action are, as bob mcmanus has said, utter failures. The fact that Cat and Harlan didn’t actually eat their childrens’ bodies doesn’t mean that they haven’t maimed and crippled them by their selfishness and incompetence.
Children are like puppies: it makes as much sense to blame an out-of-control 14 year old for his/her own problems, as it makes to blame your 8 month old puppy, for whom you have had sole training responsiblity since being weaned, for his/her lack of training and poor behavior.
Children are like puppies: it makes as much sense to blame an out-of-control 14 year old for his/her own problems
Disagree. If children are given responsibility (and you can do that as soon as they understand what you are saying, (around 3 and even 2 years old)), when they are 14 they should be basically responsible for their actions. Unfortunately, a lot of parents have a hard time ceding authority to kids.
Liberal, I think that’s the point, isn’t it? A fourteen-year-old child is very much the product of how that child was treated by his/her parents. So I think you are more or less in agreement with what Bellatrys is saying.
it makes as much sense to blame an out-of-control 14 year old for his/her own problems, as it makes to blame your 8 month old puppy, for whom you have had sole training responsiblity since being weaned, for his/her lack of training and poor behavior.
Couldn’t you say the same for a 40-year-old? We’re all the product of our genes and our environment, none of us are self-made. However, it’s generally useful to treat people as if they were, because it tends to encourage better behavior.
Parenting strategy is the sort of thing that’s obvious and simple until you actually have to do it. What people often forget is that raising a child is not like owning a VCR — it’s a dynamic relationship, and you’re being challenged with new situations almost every day, and the child’s energy meter for combat is usually much higher than the parents’.
Guess what, most species lose their first couple of litters/clutches/calvings, due to parental incompetence. Sometimes they even eat them due to stress.
Absolutely. And they go especially well with fava beans and a nice Chianti.
kenB: trust me, you do not want to get me started on the topic of free will and moral responsibility 🙂 (I wrote a book on it. I think it has its engaging moments, but then I would, wouldn’t I.)
I can’t imagine anything like this happening when I grew up. We were of course naughty and so forth — I, in particular, probably took years off my parents’ lives — but more in a ‘hey, let’s make explosives in the basement’ kind of way. We always had chores, and the thought of not pitching in never really arose. Besides, my parents managed to convey to us not just that certain ways of acting were not just wrong, but something one should be embarrassed to own up to; and I think the idea of letting our parents do all the work would have seemed like one of them, had we had it. I certainly knew kids who let their parents do lots of things for them, and I could never figure out why they weren’t embarrassed by their lack of self-sufficiency. (I tended more to the opposite extreme: it was, for some reason, very important to me, when I was six or seven, that if (as I very much hoped) I were ever marooned on a desert island, I should be able to flourish on my own, even if everything I owned went down with the ship I had, in this fantasy, been on.)
I think I had the best parents ever, and I look back on my childhood with a certain amount of amazement.
Nice post hilzoy!
As for parents and children (played both roles), respect is earned by consistency. Children are usually more happy when they absolutely know where the lines are drawn, which requires a lot more work by parents and the use of no, who, when, where and with whom, all with a smile of course.
It is absolutely amazing, when away at school not a worry, when at home they still have to wake me when they come in.
trust me, you do not want to get me started on the topic of free will and moral responsibility
Bring it on! I dig that stuff. I’d welcome the opportunity to leaven my amateur noodling with the well-researched conclusions of a professional.
Careful, kenB. You’re in the deep end.
Liberal, I think that’s the point, isn’t it? A fourteen-year-old child is very much the product of how that child was treated by his/her parents.
I certainly hope that we are agreeing fundamentally here, cause I think it is an important point. I had a childhood that sounds a lot like hilzoy’s, though there was a rough patch during high school (when I was finishing up university, my mom said to me ‘you know, I really didn’t like you when you were in high school’) And my parents gave me a lot more rope to hang myself with then all of my peers. And my oldest is just about to turn 6, so she could still turn into a monster in the next 10 or so years, but I’m amazed when other parents are amazed at the extent of choices we allow her. I don’t want to extrapolate to all parents, and parents here might be quite different from those in the states, but my impression is that people in general have a hard time letting go. On the other hand, my wife and I agonized (and continue to do so) over how much to push her. It takes on a bit more of an edge here, because I really don’t want her to go to high school in Japan (and that goes double for university, though this should defintely not be taken as a recommendation for non-Japanese unis) but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
Liberal, I think the point Bellatrys is making (okay, let me turn this into a point I’m making, since I don’t want to speak for Bellatrys) is that if (as parents in the abstract) you never let your child do anything useful around the house because s/he will make a mess and it’s so much easier to do it yourself (which, most of the time, it is), never give your child any responsibility, never allow your child out of the house alone, never let the child just play, never sit down and have a conversation with the child as if his/her ideas matter – then, if at 14 the child is lazy, irresponsible, restless, bored, and indecipherable, you have only yourself to blame: that’s what you cooked up.
I lived at home till I was 19. From when I was 14, I (and my brother, a year older than me) had the job of cooking dinner one night a week. I was a pretty good cook and mostly enjoyed it. By the time I left home, I knew how to cook, plan, and shop for five. Friends of my parents who had children of their own used to say admiringly to our parents “You’re so lucky, your children are such good cooks! Ours never do anything like this.” Now, maybe, part of it was natural talent – but as my parents used to say once their friends had gone, a lot of it was simply that they’d both been prepared to encourage and to put up with their children messing around in the kitchen from the age of 7 or so, learning how to cook. Luck had nothing to do with it, my mother used to say rather mordantly: they’d just brought us up right, and were benefiting by it.
I don’t have kids of my own, but I’ve been aunt (both genetic and adopted) to several. IME, what matters (apart from love and praise and affection, which matter more than anything else) is that if you say something definite, you have to stick to it or give a damn good reason why: that applies to a promise as much as a rule. And the other is, that if the kid can come up with a damn good reason why, you have to let them.
I’ve no sympathy at all for a child who thinks “I want” = “I get”, but considerable latitude for a child who can present a good logical argument. (“I don’t want to go to bed now!” – “Tough.” vs. “Please can I stay up till ten because I really want to see the end of Shrek!” – “Yeah, okay. You have to go to bed right after, no argument.”)
I once read something in a dog training book, which struck me at the time as very wise, and as applicable to kids. It was in response to someone whose dog strained so hard at the leash that she was afraid the dog might actually choke to death if she didn’t go in the direction the dog wanted to go, and thus had a hard time trying to train the dog not to be forever pulling at its leash. And the writer of the book said: look. Tie your dog to a tree, go inside where the dog doesn’t know you’re watching, and see what happens. Does the dog pull so hard that it chokes to death? No. Does it even approach that point? No. What accounts for the difference between the dog’s behavior when tied to the tree and its behavior when tied to you? Clearly, the dog, not being stupid, has figured out that it cannot make the tree move, but it can make you move. Disabuse it of that idea, and your problem will be solved.
Yes, I thought, but there’s another thing. You can’t get into a power struggle with a tree. You can try, but it’s pointless, and since neither dogs nor kids are stupid, they will realize this as well. The tree does not rail at the dog, it does not get mad or hurt or whatever if the dog tries to pull it up from its roots; it just sits there, meaning no harm, not trying to show the dog who’s boss or anything, just not moving. And this is crucial, both with dogs and with kids.
And this is key not just because it’s a large part of why being treelike, in my experience, works, but also because it makes it clear that you can be treelike about certain things and also completely and totally devoted to your kids. Trees don’t not love dogs, and it’s not as though if they loved them more, they would move. They just don’t move, and that’s a fact of life, and as soon as it’s clear, everyone can move on. So when I deal with kids (and I have none of my own, but have spent more time than the average single academic doing childcare), I try to be like a tree who is completely devoted to the kids, when it comes to rules.
Hey Jes,
Again, I hope we are all in agreement because this is an important point. When Bellatrys says that children are like puppies, it reminds me of a thing I used to say before I had kids, which was that babies were like intelligent pets. At the time, it was a claim that it wasn’t too tough to raise kids. Boy, was that ever wrong, but there was a deeper truth. The fact is that kids live in a completely different world (shades of cultural relativism!) and you have to see what they want. The job of parents is having them convert their world to an adult world of responsibilities.
It’s more heartening than striking to see everyone here basically agreeing on something that is genuinely important. (And in agreement with me!)
My daughter, a college freshman, is still a teenager, but only for a while longer. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of raising a teenaged daughter, all I can say is that there will be times that you envy that tree in Hilzoy’s front yard.
I saw an interview with the parents on the Today Show and I couldn’t figure out why they were living in the tent. I can’t even conceive of my parents letting me get away with the kind of things they apparently let their children get away with. They obviously let things get way out of hand and fixing it required drastic measures.
But then again things just baffle me about kids nowadays. I always walked to school. The only time I got a ride was when it was raining really hard. Now, if you don’t live across the street from the school, it seems like everybody gets a ride to school. Are people so afraid of kidnapping? After living in the suburbs most of my adult life I am back in an urban neighborhood and kids actually play on the street and walk to school. What a relief. Why are people less paranoid in urban areas than cities?
It may just be me, but it seems to me that there are a lot of people on this thread doing the functional equivalent of seeing someone on the side of the road with a flat tire and stopping so that they can say “You really should have taken better care of that tire, or at least changed it before it went flat.”
I agree that there are ways to encourage children to not get to the point indicated in the article. As the father of a four-year-old, I do my best to engage him in things that need to be done around the house (when he is, in fact, around the house; 75% of the time he lives with his mother, the full width of a continent away), and to make sure that he understands the consequences of his actions (he’s going to have to clean up any toys he takes out of the toybox, for example). I have yet, however, to see anyone offer a better solution to the parents’ current problem – other than “why are the parents the ones in the tent?”, which misses the point of the exercise entirely – rather than merely condemning their previous methods.
If the parents chose to live in the tent – I don’t want to see the interior of that house.
Chris: I have yet, however, to see anyone offer a better solution to the parents’ current problem
Is there one?
As Hilzoy says upthread, the parents seem to have opted for a Mrs Piggly-Wiggly solution (though Mrs March had a similar one for the March girls in Little Women, as I recall). It might work: presumably they know their own children.
My solution, when I was looking after four kids, was to strike a very mercenary deal with them: we agreed on a set of chores they’d do, no grumbling and no complaints, and in return I’d buy them flapjacks on Sundays. The chores weren’t especially onerous and they liked the flapjacks. I didn’t break my half of the deal, they didn’t break theirs.
I tried to write a response asserting that this was the one place where one shouldn’t invoke Occam’s Razor, though it may seem that the most logical conclusion is that the parents are responsible. It assumes that parents have ultimate power to mold children to be good or bad. They don’t, they just have front row seats at the play. If they are lucky, they can just sit and applaud at the proper moments, but if they are unlucky, they may have to express their opinion, even if the rest of the audience would prefer to watch the one man show go up in flames. If they are really unlucky, they may have to jump up on stage and stop the show.
Related to that is this link that may be of interest.
People differ from each other in personality from the day they are born. Some people are just naturally much more difficult than others. Also, what works on one person may be totally counter-productive for another. Anybody who has had to manage people in the workplace knows this – why can’t we see its also true for children?
Without denying that there are good and bad parents, I think we should always bear that in mind before we all tell ourselves that we would do far better than this poor couple – especially as you don’t know for sure that they have left the kids with Playstations, etc. Try walking a mile in their shoes before you criticise.
I have three little boys who are totally different in character – and were so from the day they were born. I remember that with number one we thought we had the perfect way to handle the ‘food problem’. Our child ate anything, ate well, liked his veggies: all due to our carefull strategies in upbringing of course. Till number two arrived, and turned out to be one of those children who doesn’t like most kind of foods, only eats what is bad for him if he has a chance, etc.
They come with a character of their own, and you can only steer. Some will be neat, others will be chaotic. Some will be eager to please, others will be very independent. I think as a parent one of the major challenges is to help kids feel good about who they are, whilst giving them the tools to handle their flaws appropriately – since accepting them does not mean that you cannot change the accompagnying behavior.
What strikes me in this story is that the parents are the ones leaving the comfortable environment that *they* keep and pay for. I would be more inclined to limit the childrens acces to the facilities if they did not want to take their responsibilities. But I’d still live in my livingroom (and wouldn’t allow them in if they did not want to help with the ‘maintenance’, i.e. cleaning), I’d still cook, wash, etc. for me and my spouse (and vice versa), and I would most definately sleep in my own bedroom.