OK, we knew it was going to happen some time. We knew that at some point, the innocent helpfulness of our daughter was going to eventually result in an attempt on his life. Well, it happened last night. While my wife and I were eating, and my 4-month-old son was in his bouncer, my daughter (21 months) assumed that her brother was hungry too and should be eating. So while my wife and I were talking about this and that, she proceeded to grab a bowl of little cheerio-sized Elmo snacks and, and happily walked over and began stuffing them in his mouth. I looked over and didn’t see anything except a strange look on my son’s face.
“Honey – did DJ just spit up? He looks like he’s got something on his chin.” “OH LORD – SHE’S FEEDING HIM COOKIES!!!!”
We arrived just in time to grab him, turn him upside down and heimlich/back bash a number of smiley-faced cookies out of his oxygen-starved body, and (amazingly) he was smiling again within about 10 seconds. My wife’s motherly dragon’s breath almost turned on my poor daughter, but she luckily instead just took him in the other room to settle down while I had a little talk with my daughter to explain to her things like “babies don’t have teeth” and things like that.
Luckily we decided to go rational with her rather than yell at her, as it’s just not worth it to punish kids into submission. The quote I was actually thinking of after this incident happened says a lot:
“Therefore you will find some of your worst cases, in Child Dianetics, those children whose self-determinism has initially been undermined because by lack of skill and parental intolerance they have at the age of two or three broken things or cried a little loudly, and been punished. The child goes into revolt, the Gestapo up there at the top doesn’t like to be revolted against.
“This is actually a totalitarian regime. There’s no court, there’s no justice for a child. He has no recourse to law. He goes against totalitarianism and he gets slapped flat. So he revolts again and he gets slapped flat. And he revolts again and he gets slapped flatter. By the time this is kept up–this Tone Scale I was drawing on the board last night–he finally gets broken down.
“Well, when he’s sufficiently broken down so he’s about the most dangerous character you could look at, down inside, why, then they say he has now been given social graces.”
L. RON HUBBARD
from lecture Processing Children in Research & Discovery Volume 3
15 July 1950
We really would much rather our daughter continue to have a genuine love for her brother, and not do bad things because she understands why they’re bad. Oh-so-much better than her not doing things because she knows she’ll get smacked.
Day 123 | Mackenzie making sure DJ stays hydrated, originally uploaded by tadnkat.