Kevin Baldeosingh
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Recently, every day for about two weeks, my daughter Jinaki would tell me. "I love you, Daddy." And, if I didn't answer, she would command, "Say 'I love you too, sweetie'."
Now I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. It's good if it indicates that she's coming to a more conscious and complex understanding of the nature of love and, by verbalising it, exploring the profound contentment and tranquillity that comes from loving and being loved in return. But it's not good if she's making these frequent expressions of love because she's feeling insecure about her Daddy's affection for her.
In his book Unconditional Parenting, scholar Alfie Kohn asserts: "Children need to be loved as they are, and for who they are. When that happens, they can accept themselves as fundamentally good people, even when they screw up or fall short. And with this basic need met, they're also freer to accept (and help) other people."
Most parents in T&T, I suspect, will disagree with this. To them, loving a child unconditionally is the same as "spoiling" the child. But unconditional love doesn't exclude ensuring that a child learns to be disciplined–it is only that the teaching occurs through affection and reasoning rather than by withdrawal of love and punishment.
Again, however, the majority of parents believe that failure to punish a child means that the child will take such failure as licence to repeat the undesirable behaviour and to do even worse.
That may or may not be so.
Psychologist Thomas Gordon in Teaching Children Self-Discipline notes that "For punishment to work, it must be severe...if it is mild, can actually be rewarding to children sometimes..." Since this is the case, punishment is always counter-productive.
You might also want to note that, in the vast majority of cases where children have been beaten to death in T&T, they were being punished for some supposed infraction, like peeing down themselves. Gordon also points out that parents eventually lose the ability to punish, as the child becomes a teenager, at which point the parents complain that their child used to be so well-behaved but is now so wayward. "What they mean is they have no more POWER to control her. And because they have never learned to INFLUENCE their children, they now feel impotent," he writes.
You might argue that research from the developed nations doesn't apply to T&T. Maybe so. What we say with certainty, however, is that the parenting approach generally practised in our society has failed to produce people who are self-disciplined or empathic.
Kohn writes: "The value judgment is, very simply, that child shouldn't have to earn our approval. We ought to love them, as my friend Deborah says, 'for no good reason'.
Furthermore, what counts is not just that we believe we love them unconditionally, but that they FEEL loved that way."
This is what I want my daughter and my son Kyle to feel.
Because, if they know that from small, then they will know it when they are teenagers too.